Good Letters, the daily blog hosted by IMAGE journal, where many of my favorite bloggers (including Sara Zarr, Bradford Winters, A.G. Harmon, Allison Backous, and others) contribute inspiring work every month, and where my film reviews are posted twice a month, is moving!

Good Letters will still be hosted by IMAGE, but it will be published on a larger platform that will bring us many new readers (and probably a much livelier circus of comments).

Where is this mysterious new kingdom of blogging?

Here is Gregory Wolfe’s big announcement at IMAGE.

And here’s a sneak peak of the new blog.

Many thanks to Gregory Wolfe and the whole team at IMAGE who have helped develop Good Letters into a lively, unpredictable, eloquent blog about abundant life. And thanks to Cathy Warner, who recently took over as the blog’s editor.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering… LookingCloser.org is staying right where it is.

And, as if in celebration, Twitter is serving up one exciting link after another.

Here are some of the highlights that I’ve discovered there today…

1. A teaser for the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, The Master.

2. A trailer for the next James Bond film, Skyfall.

3. A teaser for Anchorman 2.

4. Reviews of Like Someone in Love, Abbas Kiarostami’s follow-up to Certified Copy.

5. Reviews of Amour, the new film by Michael Haneke.

Are you following me on Twitter? If  not, you’re invited.

In this case, I’ve seen the movie, but didn’t emerge with much to say about it. I think I need to see it a second time. Either Damsels has a lot of good things on its mind that never cohere into a satisfying comedy for me, or I just need more time to think about and appreciate its finer points.

These reviews intrigued me. Check back from time to time, as I may add more reviews to the list.

Damsels in Distress

Eric Hynes, Riverfront Times:

Four features in, Whit Stillman’s cinematic sensibility is both plain as day and hard to pin down. In a Stillman film, a lost gentility is regularly romanticized but rarely ever properly defined, let alone reacquired. Rules are fetishized for the implication, if not the realization, of order. And in this, his most plainly satirical film that is also arguably his least cynical, a bunch of aspiring conformists reliably do the most abnormal of things — sniff bars of soap, conjugate the plural of doofus, choreograph the sambola. Dancing breaks out in all of Stillman’s films and usually just because. All the cardigans and brass-buttoned blazers in the world can’t cloak that kind of eccentricity. 

Noel Murray, The AV Club:

… even though I’m not sure I understand what Stillman was going for minute-to-minute, I was swept away by how original Damsels is, and how funny. It’s essentially an‘80s-style campus comedy (complete with cheesy faux-rock soundtrack), in which dopey fraternity boys and prissy girls clash with artsy types, activists and ruffians. The difference is that Stillman appears to be at least superficially on the side of the snobs. He paints the frat boys—who in this movie’s world are “Roman,” not Greek—as dim and helpless, in an overtly broad comic touch that doesn’t always work. And he paints their ladyfriends—led by Greta Gerwig—as staunch idealists, who helm a suicide prevention organization and try to lead their peers by setting good examples. Dig beneath the fast-paced chatter, bright colors and absurdist turns (there’s more than one dance number in the film) and you’ll find that this is still a movie about the way young people try to define themselves, and how they hide their petty hypocrisies behind convoluted modifications to their public identities. But this time, the method matches the meaning, as Stillman creates a thick-lined, screwball universe.

Scott Tobias, The AV Club:

Peel back the 15 layers of irony and I’m not convinced there’s much to Damsels In Distress, but funny is funny, and Stillman allows Gerwig’s daffy charm and blankly inflected line-readings to set the tone. Between the accumulation of droll one-liners and the bright, infectious song-and-dance numbers, the film overcomes its lumpy, episodic pace and a stiltedness that’s not wholly by design.

A.G. Harmon, Good Letters:

In Damsels in Distress, Stillman again features the upper classes, those most maligned by the yawn-inducing “independent” film establishment that applauds its own supposed bravery by shooting ancient fish in an ancient barrel.

When he broke onto the scene in 1990 with Metropolitan, a tribute to debutante after-parties, Stillman won my devotion with characters lamenting the plot of Buñuel’s over-hyped film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: “When I first heard the title,” says Charlie, “I thought: ‘Finally someone’s gonna tell the truth about the bourgeoisie!’ What a disappointment. It would be hard to imagine a less fair or accurate portrait…The truth is, the bourgeoisie does have a lot of charm.”

Of course it does; people are people, even if they do dress better and live in nicer houses than we do. Stillman is the champion of those seldom championed.

You can revisit that article here.

I thought of that article today when Alan Jacobs posted this link to The Atlantic…

It’s an excerpt from Wallace Stegner. On Jacobs’ own Tumblr Page, he has posted his response to it.

I wish I’d known about Stegner’s account at that time, and that I’d known Alan Jacobs and asked him to participate.

Here’s the trailer for Hyde Park on the Hudson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQaScjiWDyY

It looks a little bit too tailored for the Masterpiece Theatre crowd — made from the same stuff as The King’s Speech. And this trailer, let’s face it, launches Murray’s Oscar campaign early. But I don’t care about such perceived rivalries. This cast — Laura Linney, Olivia Williams, Olivia Colman — will put me in a theatre seat this December.

• Part One
• Part Two

It’s not really a film review. It’s more of a personal consideration of the film: what I remember of its reception among Christian moviegoers, what I loved about the movie when I was a kid, how it changed my life in college, what it’s saying to me now.

If you want to read a more straightforward film review, here’s one from Steven Greydanus.

Thanks to Kirk for asking the questions.

- Part One
- Part Two

• Part One
• Part Two

It’s not really a film review. It’s more of a personal consideration of the film: what I remember of its reception among Christian moviegoers, what I loved about the movie when I was a kid, how it changed my life in college, what it’s saying to me now.

If you want to read a more straightforward film review, here’s one from Steven Greydanus.

Anderson’s cinema contains a peculiar mix that makes it an ideal opening night vehicle. There’s a kind of absolute auteurism, a hyper-aggressive formalism, an insistence on the camera’s view as a proscenium arch inside of which an entirely theatrical universe is created, alongside a lightness, a preference for melancholy swathed in the scent of vanilla, sadness as a weekend romp, the melodramas of parents and the children they don’t understand as storybook fantasies.

Robert Koehler attended this year’s Cannes-opener: Moonrise Kingdom, the new film by Wes Anderson.

Writing about it at Film Journey, he says:

Anderson doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone, and piles it on in the second half, until Moonrise Kingdom loses much of its mirthful charm.

Elsewhere…

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw:

Anderson’s movies are vulnerable to the charge of being supercilious oddities, but there is elegance and formal brilliance in Moonrise Kingdom as well as a lot of gentle, winning comedy. His homemade aesthetic is placed at the service of a counter-digital, almost hand-drawn cinema, and he has an extraordinary ability to conjure a complete, distinctive universe, entire of itself. To some, Moonrise Kingdom may be nothing more than a soufflé of strangeness, but it rises superbly.

Todd McCarthy at The Hollywood Reporter:

As in Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson is able to express sincere personal connection and compatibility while employing a highly artificial style. The result is that the core of Kingdom — the bond between the leads played so forthrightly by newcomers Hayward and Gilman — is strong, even bracing in its resilience.

Budd Wilkins at Slant:

… an unabashed continuation and, what’s more, intensification of the rigorous aesthetic preoccupations and occasionally precious thematic concerns that have long marked Anderson’s films. Since, time and again, adolescent precocity has been his narrative meat and potatoes, he can be given a certain amount of latitude for such indulgences as his obsession with handwritten notes and other kinds of communiqués. Another mainstay, exacting period detail (let alone the sheer density of compositional elements), is certainly never less than faultless. The film’s visual and sonic textures are often mesmerizing: Hitting a Kubrickian note with the precision of his shot compositions and motivated camerawork, Robert Yeoman’s cinematography isn’t afraid to come off the dolly and go handheld for woodland chase scenes.

Mike D’Angelo at The AV Club:

… it’s hard to imagine any consistent fan of Anderson’s work not surrendering to its trademark amalgam of precision and melancholy. … Anderson packs every frame with sight gags, many of which you can barely glimpse as his camera elegantly glides to its next designated position; actors toss off razor-sharp dialogue as if blithely unaware that they’re saying something funny, which is exactly how one-liners should be delivered but so seldom are.

And David Hudson has much, much more for those of you who are, like me, champing at the bit.

My review of this enormous book will be published in the upcoming issue of Books and Culture.