Virtuous fun and romance

A couple of new things for you…

First, Rebecca Tirrell Talbot has written an article on Metropolitan and Barcelona at The Curator, ‘Virtuous Fun in the Films of Whit Stillman’:

I’ll tell you candidly — I love dark, cynical, yes, even nihilistic films. The macabre side of human experience is fascinating, and there has been a strong run of artistic, bleak films lately. I propose, however, that it’s equally important to examine another side of life: experiences of virtue. Whit Stillman’s three films Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and Last Days of Disco (1998) show virtue as fun, not fusty.

Second, Barcelona was recently included in A.V. Club‘s ‘Romance minus the schmaltz: 29 falling-in-love movies we actually believe in’:

The Spanish girls that Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols date in Whit Stillman’s culture-clash comedy Barcelona don’t care for the Americans’ limited sense of culture or their inadvertent imperialism, but they’re still open-minded enough to sleep with them. Yet the rigidly ethical Nichols — a firm believer in the healing power of American business — is looking for something more than just a fling, and finds it only after Eigeman gets shot, and Nichols is joined in his bedside vigil by a woman as faithful as he is. Discovering true love in the revelation of shared ideals: That’s a happy ending in Stillman-world.

Finally, I just added the trailers for Metropolitan and Barcelona from YouTube to their respective pages (the Last Days of Disco trailer has been removed from YouTube unfortunately).