Violet

In a movie as stylized as Whit Stillman's "Damsels in Distress,"decor is destiny, so it's no accident that the dorm room shared by Violet (Greta Gerwig) and her roommates at a northeastern liberal arts college prominently features the poster for Max Ophüls' maudit masterwork "Lola Montès. " Violet, an amateur self-help guru who practices her questionable theories on her unfortunate classmates, doesn't share much with Ophüls' eponymous heroine, a Scottish dancer who reinvented herself as the Spanish mistress of a Bavarian king.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation's largest retailer, is providing a big boost to Hollywood's effort to persuade consumers to keep buying movies in the digital age. Wal-Mart on Tuesday threw its support behind the industry's UltraViolet program and unveiled an exclusive arrangement with five of Hollywood's top studios to convert people's DVD collections into digital copies. Starting next month, consumers will be able to take their DVDs to about 3,500 Wal-Mart stores and leave with a digital copy stored in the cloud - a storage system offering access from a broad array of Internet-connected devices - for $2 each.

Embrace A Novel Jessica Shirvington Sourcebooks Fire: 400 pp., $16.99, ages 12 and up If angels are the new vampires, then "Embrace" is a worthy follow-up to "The Twilight Saga. " The kickoff to a new young adult series from debut author Jessica Shirvington has many of the same strengths - and flaws - as the Stephenie Meyer blockbuster with a heroine who doesn't understand her own strengths and becomes entangled in a complicated, steamy, love triangle. "Embrace" opens on the eve of Violet's 17th birthday - a bittersweet occasion that overlaps with the anniversary of her mother's death.

When Jason Mockford bought a DVD of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" with the words "digital copy" on the box, he assumed that he would be able to watch it on his iPad. But the digital version of the film was accessible only through a new technology called UltraViolet. It required him to register on two different websites and download new software. It wasn't compatible with the iTunes application he uses for all his other music and video. Finding the process too difficult, the 30-year-old San Luis Obispo resident said, "I just stopped at some point because it asked me to do too much.

Update: The longtime Bel-Air home of actress Elizabeth Taylor has sold for an undisclosed amount. The house came on the market in May at $8.6 million. The listing agent, David Mossler of Teles Properties in Beverly Hills, declined to reveal the sales price, and weeks or months may pass before it will appear in public records. Owned by the Oscar-winning actress since 1981, the 1960s ranch-style house sits on 1.27 acres, which include a swimming pool with spa, gardens and a koi pond.

Violet Cowden never lost her love of flying, a passion born when she was a young girl envying the hawks soaring above her family's South Dakota farm in the 1920s. When she was a young first-grade teacher learning to fly out of an airfield in Spearfish, S.D., in the early 1940s, her students always knew when she had been flying because she was so happy. Her love of flying only increased when she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II. And although her career as a pilot ended after her wartime service, her enthusiasm for flying never let up. Indeed, Cowden gleefully co-piloted a World War II-era P-51 Mustang with dual controls and flew from San Bernardino to Orange County last year when she was 93. As she put it in a 2010 documentary about her life in the sky: "I always say the worst thing about flying is coming back to earth.

For proof that parenthood does change everything, just look at the Mar Vista garden of landscape designer Elizabeth Low. The birth of daughter Violet, now 2, inspired her to consider the question: How would the arrival of a child change the landscape — and not just in a metaphorical sense? Her answer will be evident April 30, when the garden opens to the public as part of the Mar Vista Green Gardens Showcase. What tour-goers will see is a project that started two years ago, when Low and her husband, David Cash, purchased their home.

"Tell Mama. Tell Mama all. " If you are a fan of Elizabeth Taylor, and how could you not be, you don't have to be told the source of that dialogue. It's the heart of Taylor's country club love scene with Montgomery Clift in "A Place in the Sun," and the actress' face in huge close-up is so exquisitely, so heartbreakingly beautiful you never doubt that Clift's intoxicated character would do anything to keep her in his life. Up to and including murder. Both on the screen and off, Elizabeth Taylor and her irresistible violet eyes had that effect on men. She was only 17 when she filmed that scene for director George Stevens in 1949 (the film was released two years later)

Pity the poor "fruit fly. " That's the term Violet ( Mindy Cohn), a straight woman whose social life revolves around gay men, uses to describe herself in the enjoyable if uneven sex comedy "Violet Tendencies. " So immersed has this plus-size 40-year-old become in the romantic, er, comings and goings of her tight circle of party-down gay pals that she finds herself at a dead end for any amorous satisfaction of her own. At the urging of a noodle-brained co-worker (Kim Allen, funny)

The new release of "Kuroneko" ("Black Cat") a simultaneously raw and gracefully spectral 1968 curio from Japanese filmmaker Kaneto Shindo, should be a special occasion for connoisseurs of arty black-and-white chills, especially those who treasure Shindo's 1964 masterpiece of war-torn horror, "Onibaba. " It begins with an assault on a farm mother (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Kiwako Taichi) by a band of grimy soldiers, who then burn down their house. What follows is a ghostly vengeance fugue wherein the women ?