My new indie film It Girl

Can I say I’ve fallen hopelessly in love with Greta Gerwig, (left) right here, in public? It didn’t take much, just a screening of her role in Whit Stillman’s recent Damsels in Distress. Who, I wondered, was this brainy if slightly sardonic femme, who looked like she just graduated from an Ivy League college, which in fact she has, Barnard, the traditional female equivalent. In Damsels, also set in an east coast university (natch) Gerwig plays Violet Wister, who leads a group of co-eds in an effort to undermine the crude and boorish values of the male students in their midst. Yes, I thought at that moment, I want to see more of this actress – more & more! And, as if someone was answering my prayers, along comes the new movie Lola Versus (Daryl Wein) which has opened in Toronto and I await it in Detroit (hopefully). True to form, Gerwig plays a late-20s weary of the world young woman who, when her fiancé dumps her, descends into an existential crisis (what else?). But this movie, like Damsels, is a comedy, and a smart knowing one at that. Set in New York City (natch) I can imagine the acerbic barbs Gerwig’s Lola shoots at contemporary bourgeois bohemian life in the Big Apple......Up to now my favourite Indie It Girl has been Parker Posey (right), aka Queen of the Indies as she’s known in the industry. Posey, smart, offbeat, sexy and simply beautiful, had long been living in a kind of indie film ghetto since the early 1990s but has poked her head into a few roles in bigger films like 1998’s You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron) and 2006’s Superman Returns (Bryan Singer). But she is much more famous for her roles in small independent movies such as the Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries Waiting for Guffman (1996) and Best in Show (2000). Posey’s first big role was in 1992’s Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater). Her latest was in last month’s HBO’s Hemingway & Gellhorn (Philip Kaufman) as journalist Martha Gellhorn playing opposite Clive Owen as husband Ernest Hemingway.....I still love Posey, so maybe I have two indie It Girls now. What a harem!

The Detroit Film Theatre’s summer series has moved from its namesake home at the DIA to the DIA’s smaller but also beautiful Lecture Hall. The 1927 DFT (left), one of Detroit’s most beautiful theatres, underwent major renovations a few years ago which both modernized it and returned it to its original elegance. But this time the work is on the marble staircase and windows in the upstairs Crystal Gallery, where the cafe is located, both of which needed renovations and repairs.