the Whit Stillman Poll

I am watching Barcelona

i really want to see barcelona again haven't seen it since it was in the theaters and i remember being very lukewarm about it.

carolyn farina is so cute

i saw all of them in the theaters you hulu watching poseurs

metropolitian almost definitely the best, barcelona almost definitely the 'worst', last days of disco my fave.

that is an acceptable pov

We'll all realize our hubris when posterity declares that episode of HOMICIDE he directed to be the best.

I just watched Barcelona and it was very unengaging.

http://storage.people.com/people/archive/jpgs/19901001/19901001-750-85.jpg

a secaret ant land-a-ing strip

https://www.twitter.com/whitstillman

WAH

a stepmother of unTRAMMELED malevolence!!

it's weird how many of the actors in Met look familiar but have sparse imdb pages + i can't quite place them. maybe they just have the look of someone who could've been famous

soto, morbs: new one opens here friday

I haven't seen it, too busy writing about shit no one cares about.

omg these poll results are dead wrong!

yeah...carolyn farina has a bit part in damsels, too

― horseshoe, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 11:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i saw this last night & didn't notice, what was it?

barcalona is the funniest one imho

just googled taylor nichols and it suggested to me that i search for chris eigeman instead

i like barcelona a lot; eigeman's genuinely wounded imperialism is hilarious.

jumping out of the car to huffily try and remove anti-american graffiti with a sharpie.

eigeman is definitely the best part, but it's not as funny as ldd

i like when he's making fun of dustin hoffman in the graduate. "elaine, elaine"

Metropolitan is the only one I've seen. I don't remember a lot about it except feeling like there were a lot of inside jokes going on that I didn't get. The friend who recommended it to me was a scholarship kid at a highly prestigious private school so maybe it meant more to her.

it def helps if you find the mention of well-placed Averill Harriman, Bunuel, and Trilling references thrilling in itself.

I don't read literary criticism, I just read blogs about it.

just realized Robert Sean Leonard is in Last Days

omg these poll results are dead wrong!

yeah metropolitan is the best but i like them all so much that theyre all deserving winners, gold medals all around imo

who do you think whit stillman's favourite authors are?

f scott?

jane austin?

fourier

i'd guess oscar wilde too

he says jane austen & tolstoy and then some other author/novel that i can't make out at 9:40 here

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/3494

can you figure that out?

■The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (unabridged edition)
■Essay on Man by Alexander Pope
■Childhood, Boyhood, Youth by Leo Tolstoy
■Portrait of Max: An Intimate Memoir of Sir Max Beerbohm by S.N. Behrman
■The Price Was High: Fifty Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

otm re fitzgerald, his short stories were his best work

can you make out what he's saying in that charlie rose clip, mordy?

i cannot

Salinger!

"Essay on Man" is awesome for its epigrammatic virtues.

lol "The Price is High" I read as a senior year high school Fitz obsessive.

have any of you read his (stillman's) novel?

Bought a ticket to see him introduce The Last Days of Disco on Thursday. He's here Wednesday for Metropolitan, which is probably the better film; just felt like seeing Last Days instead. (I've still never seen Barcelona.) I feel like I should wear a bow tie for some reason.

Baumbach gets points for Carlos Jacott, a Whit Stillman actor who never appeared in a Whit Stillman movie.

I just want to pedantically point out that Carlos Jacott actually does have the tiniest of cameos in Last Days of Disco

that is a pivotal scene

I liked The Last Days of Disco more than the couple of times I saw it when it first came out. I probably liked it as much as I can like a film where every conversation sounds like lines being read. Great music, of course, and excellent Demme-like coda.

The Q&A was an ordeal. First of all the guy running it took up the first half-hour--I just wanted him to shut up and turn it over to the audience. Stillman mumbles and rambles--I could barely understand him. (It wasn't the acoustics; I could hear the other guy fine.) If I did hear one thing correctly--Stillman saying that by 1969, black music had disappeared from the radio--his memory is either extremely faulty, or he was listening to some format other than Top 40 radio. 1970-72 was one of the greatest periods for black music on Top 40 radio ever. If he meant that there were obscure proto-disco records not being played on the radio, then I'm sure he's right about that--even though something like Chakachas' "Jungle Fever" was a big hit.

Watched Barcelona for the first time last night. It has its flaws but I loved it like nothing I've seen in a long time.

despite the fact that someone is shot and there are explosions, it has only the vaguest notion of a plot, just Eigeman and Taylor hanging out 80% of the time.

^This. I guess how compelling this is to you determines whether or not you'll like this...

barcelona is so good.

i recommend this insane collection of rightwing stillman criticism: http://www.amazon.com/Doomed-Bourgeois-Love-Essays-Stillman/dp/1882926706

25th anniv podcast for Metropolitan

http://www.filmlinc.org/daily/the-close-up-whit-stillman-and-cast-talk-metropolitan/

so YOU'RE one of those public transportation snobs!

last days definitely the worst of these three. i still love it but it's stilted in a way the others aren't. maybe the acting isn't as good, obviously he writes the least natural sounding dialogue ever but in metropolitan you can kind of suspend disbelief and just live in the dream, in the flow of precocious & perfectly crafted sentences.

best most LOL thing about last days is how it's the period piece least concerned with being a period piece... not that it was outright anachronistic (altho i feel like some of the dudes had 90's hair and the female leads' dresses were too tasteful for '79, like GIS studio 54 1979) but he just didn't really gaf about evoking the 70's, just wanted to write a movie featuring his favourite songs and some well dressed folk, didn't fuss over set design, just throw on some high-waisted pants

when I saw LDOD a few years ago for the second time I also thought it stilted and the first time his limited visual imagination cramped the film. I didn't buy the discos -- they looked like cheap sets. But I wanna watch it again.