Blonde or Brunette

Knights-Errant Steer Clear in Damsels in Distress

It would be easy to compare Whit Stillman’s latest feature, Damsels in distress, to other flicks about the dangers of female friendship: It’s Heathers without high school, or mean Girls at college. after all, the movie begins with young, brunette ingénue Lily (Analeigh Tipton) during her first day at seven Oaks College, being swooped in on by a pack of three severely affected juniors who immediately offer her friendship. Greta Gerwig is the blonde queen bee, Violet, and her two cohorts include the British Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and the ditzy Heather (Carrie MacLemore). These three are seemingly on a mission of good: they run the school’s suicide-prevention center and spend most of their time “helping” the brothers of D.U., one of the school’s Roman (not Greek) fraternity houses.

 but, much in the style of Mr. Stillman’s other films (this most recent endeavor bearing the strongest resemblance to his maiden motion picture, Metropolitan), the magniloquent style of these young women is more sound and fury than actual substance. Violet, in particular, seems to be the worst of the bunch: her interest in the D.U. boys, particularly an oaf named Frank (Ryan Metcalf), seems to serve only her selfish purpose of proving that she is indeed smarter and more cultured than those she’s ostensibly trying to help. As she tells Lily, “The tendency, very widespread, to always seek someone ‘cooler’ than yourself is always a stretch … often a big stretch. Why not instead find someone who’s frankly inferior?” this would make for an interesting film all by itself, with Violet as a villain of pedigree who needs to be brought down a peg or two. but Mr. Stillman doesn’t paint his characters in such broad caricatures: early on, we see that Violet is open to critiques from the new girl, actually thanking her for providing her with insight that her motives might not be altogether altruistic. and no, she’s not being facetious.The movie transcends a run-of-the-mill chick flick—above even a Whit Stillman film. after a series of unfortunate incidents involving Frank and two new love interests for Lily—the French Cathar Xaviar (Hugo Becker) and “strategic operator” Charlie Walker (Adam Brody)—Violet’s pretentious posturing is revealed not as a sham persona, but part of a larger quirk in her own personality: a strange, obsessive-compulsive weirdo who doesn’t seek out the company of “doofi” (the correct plural of doofus, we learn) because she needs someone to feel superior to, but because those are the people with whom she feels the most kinship with. Damsels in distress is a sweet film putting on airs. it offers up an original view of all those “cool girls” in college with their great vocabularies and noses turned up, as well as the frat jocks who so often play the cruel foils to their more bookish counterparts. in Damsels, it is the nerds­—like the head of the student paper Rick DeWolfe (Zach Woods in a character turn from the whipping boy, Gabe, on The Office)—who are presented as the true cynics, while Violet, Frank and Charlie are the actual weirdos. A great role is made of D.U.’s bartender and frat brother Thor, whose goal in life is to be able to identify colors. It’s a throwaway gag that, in a lesser writer’s hands, might be played only for laughs, but Mr. Stillman uses it to underscore some of the more poignant moments about the dangers of precociousness.“I thought you were the cool girls,” Lily says sadly as she ditches Violet and her posse near the end of the film. Lucky for Violet (and for the audience), that’s so far from the point of college—and life—that the new girl’s desire for normalcy actually makes her the meanest girl of them all.

DAMSELS IN DISTRESSRunning Time 99 minutesWritten and Directed byWhit StillmanStarring Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody and Analeigh Tipton

Drew Grant is a Staff Reporter for The New York Observer. Follow Drew on Twitter or via RSS.

Jennifer Lawrence’s

Wednesday, March 21, 2012 » 05:27pm

Jennifer Lawrence’s ‘Hunger Games’ hair cost 18,000.

The 21-year-old actress went from blonde to brunette to play heroine Katniss Everdeen in the new movie, but had wigs of various shades of brown brought in as she was reportedly reluctant to let stylists experiment with her actual hair.

Linda Flowers, Head Hair Designer for film – which is based on Suzanne Collins’ book trilogy – told BellaSugar: ‘I rented 18,000 of hair of all different shades of brown, from light brown to brown with a little bit of red in it.

‘It made Jennifer comfortable that we weren’t going to experiment with her colour.’

Once the final colour was selected, Jennifer then allowed her hair to be dyed to increase her resemblance the Katniss described in the novel.

Meanwhile her conditioning coach Joe Horrigan has revealed how he helped transform her body into that of the 16-year-old hunter.

He told MTV News: ‘Jennifer and (director) Gary Ross had discussed how they felt that she should look, they thought that she should be a little bit leaner – it is, after all, entitled ‘The Hunger Games’ – but she shouldn’t be gaunt.

‘She worked with me usually twice a day, and that could be a combination of work at the track, which included agility drills, sprint work and running work, and she also had to work with an archery coach three or four days a week, and in the evening we would do stationary bike work, a mix of anaerobic and aerobic work.

‘At a certain point she had to start working with the stunt crew. They had their own obstacle course and wanted her to be able to hop over trees and climb trees and that type of thing, so she was very familiar with it.

‘Everything just came together and we all felt that over a period of time she became Katniss.’