Whit Stillman Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Whit Stillman hasn't made a lot of films. In fact, there are only three: Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco. All filmed in the '90s, his trio of movies morphed from upper-class teen Manhattanites, to heading out into the international working world, and finally to a look into the end of disco. Unfortunately, the last was sadly overlooked because another big disco fest hit the big screen -- 54 -- which may have been terrible, but with the likes of Mike Myers and a big-name cast, it was the flick in the spotlight.

Nestled in the shadows was The Last Days of Disco, starring Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale as two young book editors who fill their nights with dance and banter while looking for romance. Each night, as they head to the club, they come across a myriad of faces, from the Stillman pro Chris Eigeman, to the likes of Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Beals, Burr Steers (recently directed 17 Again), and even Drew's mom, Jaid Barrymore. They gossip, discuss intellectual pursuits, analyze Lady and the Tramp, and even purr over the sexiness of Scrooge McDuck -- all to a classic disco soundtrack.

If you love satire, and a mixture of surreality intermingled with spot-on dialogue (think intellectualism on the back-drop of all-out glam), you've got to check it out. Best of all, should you adore watching this for free, you can then pick up the new Criterion on sale at Barnes & Noble, where they're having their wicked 50% off sale again.

Watch The Last Days of Disco over at SlashControl!

It's not easy being a fan of Whit Stillman's. We fall for Metropolitan in 1990, get an international treat 4 years later with Barcelona, and then The Last Days of Disco another 4 years after that. Eleven years since, we're still waiting for a fourth -- for any of the many projects on Stillman's plate to come to actual fruition and reach our eager eyes. Granted, it could be worse. Three fun films and silence is probably better than filmmakers who continue to throw out work that doesn't begin to meet their early success, or directors who jump into an entirely different path and leave behind the beloved work that gave them their name.

All this said, there is a new treat today for Stillman fans -- Criterion's release of The Last Days of Disco.

It's perfect for a double-header with the previously released Metropolitan, but I wonder about other possibilities. What films are good if you want a whole weekend of Stillmanesque fun, or want to pair Whit with another filmmaker, or just want more options to dig into until Little Green Men hits the screen? Or, outside of Stillman's world completely: What if you just want overly verbose kids who can do nothing more than talk, youths who try to play dress-up seriously, 80s yuppies who are more obsessed with status than genuine life, or dips into the foreign allure of Catalonia?

I've learned my lesson on not falling into excitement about Whit Stillman news. As much as we've been asking over the years for more Whitty fare, all news seems to fade into development nothingness. But this bit of news -- this is only a few steps away. Following in the steps of the wonderful Metropolitan (a film that scored New Line its first Oscar nod for Best Original Screenplay), The Last Days of Disco is going Criterion.

The release, which will hit shelves on August 25, 2009, is a director-approved special edition that has a whole bunch of goodies that are just about the best thing for a fan wanting more Stillman. There's a new digital transfer, but that's nothing compared to: An audio commentary with Stillman, Chloe Sevigny, and Chris Eigeman (score!), four deleted scenes also with commentary, an audio recording of the director reading a chapter from The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards, a behind-the-scenes featurette, a stills gallery with captions from Stillman, theatrical trailer, and an essay by David Schickler.

While the wonderfully verbose director Whit Stillman is rather elusive, whetting our cinematic appetites with the classic trio (Metropolitan, Barcelona, and Last Days of Disco) and then fading away, he hasn't been forgotten. Nor has he stopped working. Rumors have been circling his name in small bursts for years, and now the director has spoken with IFC about the work that has made him an icon of discussion cinema, and the work that is yet to come.

First: While Disco remains an elusive disc to those who didn't grab it all those years ago (it's one of the few DVDs I paid full, exorbitant price for), Metropolitan is now online, for free, over at Hulu (courtesy of Cinetic Rights Management). But if you're looking for more of Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny, Whit says that there have been slow negotiations with Criterion, which may or may not come to light.

But enough about the old. Here's a quick rundown of his upcoming projects (go read the interview to get all the gritty details):

Dancing Mood, the Jamaican Film -- Financing woes have caused delays for the film, which is a love story set mainly in gospel churches. Once they get the money, everything else is set.

Red Azalea -- An adaptation focusing on China's cultural revolution, Whit says that he worked on script drafts, but "it never really got that far along."

Little Green Men -- That wacky movie where a political talkshow host is kidnapped by aliens was once said to have John Malcovich and Peter Sarsgaard attached. Stillman says the script approach hasn't been finalized, but that Greg Kinnear is now interested in the film.

So yeah, financing has been a big pain for Stillman, which is sad. So, will one of you rich readers go invest in the guy already? Please?

What happened to Whit Stillman? I'm not the only one who keeps asking. Cinematical has been posing this question, and trying to answer it, for years. After his deliciously verbose conversational trio, the man pretty much fell off the face of the earth. Instead of delighting in yuppie angst, I've had to pull out my Yuppie Game, get over-dressed and fire up my DVD player to get my fill. However, it seemed like we were on to something in May of last year, when Martha Fischer whetted our appetites with news of Little Green Men, the flick meant to be the return of Stillman. (Without the 80's yuppies.) Then, there was nothing.

Well, what would you say if I told you that Stillman says that John Malcovich and Peter Sarsgaard are attached to the film? After hearing that my beloved Whit was out and about to see a screening of Kind Hearts and Coronets, I decided to see what the deal was with his upcoming alien movie. It seems that Forrest Hartman from the Reno Gazette-Journal had a brief chat with Stillman, who gave lots of info about himself and the all-too-juicy tidbits about the alien movie.

While I'm disappointed that Chris Eigeman won't be bourgeois bitching with the likes of aliens in outer space, at least he's got some meaty male replacements -- and hopefully official word will come on them both soon. And, if you're hoping for more EigeStillman, the director supposedly promises that he has plans for more projects with Chris. That is, if he ever gets them off the ground!

That Whit Stillman is such a kidder. Less then two weeks ago, Sandra reported on a piece he wrote in The Guardian, detailing all the meandering his movie career has done since The Last Days of Disco was released seven years ago. In the article, he discussed two concrete projects, one of which (a film version of Red Azalea, a memoir of the Chinese revolution) was dead, and another (a small film about ... Jamaican churches) that was sort of getting close to happening. Mostly, though, he made it sounds like he had nothing cinematic really going on. Until, that is, the end of the piece, when he snuck in a suggestion that something might actually be percolating, saying "So I now have a project to take to Cannes;" the clear implication was that the project was the Jamaican churches movie.

It turns out, however, that he had a secret up his sleeve: The movie Stillman is talking up at Cannes has nothing to do with churches. Instead, it's a screen version of Christopher Buckley's (he of Thank You for Smoking fame) Little Green Men, a novel I'm now very much regretting never having read. Check out this summary: The book is "a Washington, D.C., insider comedy about a political talkshow host who's plucked off a golf course by aliens after a particularly probing presidential interview concerning America's space program." HA! HAAAA! Yes, please. (And yes, I'm going to now go and buy ANOTHER book because of this damn job.)

According to Stillman, the film's schedule depends entirely on the whims of "Mr. Big Comedy star," a mysterious fellow who is currently being courted to star. The screenplay is done (but not by Stillman -- that's a first for him), though, so if the cast can be brought together with reasonable speed, the hope is that the movie will go into production later this year. (That said, however, Red Azalea was also once announced at Cannes as Stillman's next project, so these are chickens we really shouldn't start counting just yet.)

There's nobody better at delivering overwritten and/or expository dialogue than Chris Eigeman. From the three near-masterpieces he starred in for MIA indie auteur Whit Stillman in the 90s, to his twenty-episode arc as love-interest for Lorelai on that hallmark of overwritten genius, Gilmore Girls, there's no one out there as capable of making an artificially literate script seem natural. In Metropolitan, his 19-year-old preppie casually counsels a friend, "barbarism is cloaked with all sorts of self-righteousness and moral superiority" -- in the midst of a conversation that was ostensibly about detachable shirt collars. Such densely packed rejoinders flow out of Eigeman's mouth with perfect naturalism, to the point where one wonders why he isn't called in last-minute by big-money productions to deliver all of the rough, expository dialogue that Hollywood script doctors can't quite smoothe out. This guy could have made Crash seem witty and urbane.