The run-up to the OSCARS 2023

[Chris Knipp]

FROM METROPOLITAN, CHRIS EIGEMAN AS NICK, CENTER

Holiday watches, Christmas 2022:

A Whit Stillman trilogy

METROPOLITAN (1990)
BARCELONA (1994)
LAST DAYS OF DISCO (1998)

A perfect entertainment because these films are cozy, sophisticated, witty, and ageless and METROPOLITAN takes place over Christmas vacation with members of the preppy class attending dances and deb after parties in Manhattan. Stillman's dialogue is like if WASP preppies made a Woody Allen movie with script by Jane Austen. Everything comes out in fully framed sentences and paragraphs and is often very funny. BARCELONA, not quite so interesting, came out of Stillman's living in that Spanish city and is about a slightly older age group, beyond the deb parties. LAST DAYS OF DISCO finds Chris Eigeman, Nick in METROPOLITAN, a manager of a huge Studio 54-style discteque where drugs and money laundering are involved, but a beautiful young woman (Chloe Sevigny, then 24) is working with friends for a small publishing house. Stillman is an 'auteur' whose capturing of dry humor in sophisticated dialogue among the denizens of or refuges from the upper class is rather unique. Unfortunately, he has not been able to get the funds for many films, and his 2014 "COSMOPOLITAN" pilot for a six-part TV series about young sophisticated American expatriates in Paris did not lead on to the desired series. But he did in 2011 make DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, featuring Greta Gerwig, about a trio of young women at a college seeking to raise social and cultural standards; and in 2016, most recently, he made LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP, the logical outcome of his sensibility: the adaptation of a never-before-on-screen minor Jane Austen novel.

Rewatched (in part): Matt Reeves' THE BATMAN (R. Pattinson) for its broody gorgeousness.