WHET METROPOLITAN?

one of my fav movies.

It's like watching a play performed live. It takes a few minutes to acclimate to the set and the actors and their manner of speaking, OP. If you don't hate it after 5 minutes, maybe you will love the film as so many do.

Whit Stillman's "Metropolitan", "Barcelona", and "The Last Days of Disco" are fantastic, great favorites of mine.

I think I will have to get a multiregion DVD player and buy all three as I haven't seen them in 7 years or longer, and they are not available on streaming where I live.

Barely two or three days pass that I don't think of one or more of these great films.

I adored it. Stillman is touch and go, but this one is perfection

I liked it more when it was called Mansfield Park.

I enjoyed Barcelona & The Last Days of Disco, but oddly couldn't stand Metropolitan. Just wanted to punch all the characters in the face.

I've always wondered if you really have to be part of/understand that NY upper middle class/rich lifestyle to really "get" it.

“ you really have to be part of/understand that NY upper middle class/rich lifestyle to really "get" it.”

They also want you to kiss their boys right on their mouths

[quote]I've always wondered if you really have to be part of/understand that NY upper middle class/rich lifestyle to really "get" it.

The film is set at Xmas1969, and I think that date accounts for no small part of the feeling and remove, captured glimpses of a social set that already had at least one foot out the door headed in another direction. To me, the main Metropolitan characters are all too aware of their anachronisms in a time of rapid and radical transition. They sound stilted because they have chosen to do, partly their transition into adulthood, partly a conscious class association with rules of behavior they were still discovering.

I wasn't from the same social and economic background, but almost a decade later people like the Metropolitan characters made up most of my university friends and, at age 17, 18, 19 we spent endless time in NYC at posh restaurants and watering holes and thought nothing of it. We had shaggy hair and and dressed in tatty college clothes preppy business wools and tweeds and classics, and wore good shoes or very destroyed ones. We spoke in long, circuitous sentences that came, eventually, maybe, to some very important point. We smoked fancy cigarettes from Nat Sherman and knew the lobbies and bars and restaurants of every good hotel. We met strange people and were invited places. We didn't sound quite so navel gazing as Stillman's characters, but probably we did quite a bit just with much less emphasis on debutantes. A decade made a big difference in many ways, and yet our language probably sounded almost as odd as the Met characters.

Having gone to boarding school the tone rings well true

Watching that forty years later begs the question...Were Preppies in the 80s simply very pale and poor imitations of Bright Young Things or characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald stories?

I think I know the answer.

Nothing ever happened to METROPOLITAN. It's a delightful, intelligent and very funny movie. The fact that the young characters are upper class is the point. These are people who have been gifted opportunities and choices, yet they are as unformed and confused as the rest of us are.

I love this film. The first time I saw it was on PBS. Whit Stilman was a self-styled oracle of the "downwardly mobile." About ten years ago, a documentary about the Carlyle came out. It set the perfect tone for a microcosm of Metropolitan. A class, a sense of dignity and meaning that was fading, as told by the people who witnessed it. Children of privilege had the "advantage" of growing up with these backdrops. A poignant point is made when a staffer recalls how a younger DJT visited the old hotel for an event and called it "a joke." Their grandparents were children during the F. Scott Fitzgerald era, and as family wealth fractured, experiences became outpaced by memories. Edith Wharton had hit upon similar themes. She wrote about the optimism and naivety of youth amid the backdrop of old-new wealth and declining significance. To be ambitious is to betray the civility that these kinds of kids were never supposed to have had to compromise. It's a story of futility amid generational loss and grief. These people would live the remainder of their lives steeped in a past they never really knew.

Thanks for this thread, OP.

Damsels In Distress is repeatedly recommended on a streaming service. I actively avoided it because the characters on the poster remind me of paper dolls and dresses like Zooey Deschanel in that period of time. I had no idea it was a Whit Stillman film! Has anyone seen it?

Chris Eigeman is a tragedy comparing how he looked then to how he looks now.

Ed Clements is now a minister at an evangelical church in suburban Toronto

R12 Damsels in Distress was a miss for me, it just didn't amount to much. Not interested in a gang of mannered college girls and their attempts to civilize the boys. Not much humor or even believable dialogue.

R14, seriously?

I watched Damsels in DIstress but would say that I forgot it almost immediately. I wanted to like it and didn't dislike it especially, but it was disappointing. I loved the long, startling and fiunny "who talks like this?" dialogue in Metropolitan, Barcelona, and Last Days of Disco. Unusual as it was, it seemed real. In Damsels, there wasn't any revealtion of a curious reality, just some random lines that might have been culled from Parker Poesy films, half-funny, imminently forgetable.

Right. It seems his time is past

Damsels has DL fave Billy Magnussen in the cast.

The redhead kid was bad casting. He was the center of the film but he was utterly charmless. Someone like Eric Stoltz would have been better.

1969?! WTF

R4 - I think we all concur that you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Mansfield Park? Puhleeze.

Yes I'm serious. r 16. He's a minister at Church on the Queensway in Etobicoke-the west end of Toronto.

Metropolitan is one of my annual holiday movies.

I guess because I didn’t see it until the 2000s, it never occurred to me that the film was set in the sixties. It felt in every way like the 80s, and I was always confused why an older version of the Audrey Rouget character showed up in The Last Days Of Disco.

R22. Try Googling Metropolitan and Mansfield Park and see the results. You’re clearly the one doesn’t know he’s talking about.

I Googled

The movie IS insufferable and I love it.

R7

It’s set in the 80s, made obvious by the fashions and cars, etc.

The film is often considered the first of a trilogy of Stillman films set in the 1980s and portraying privileged young adults, followed chronologically (but not release-wise) by The Last Days of Disco (1998) and Barcelona (1994).

I loved “Metropolitan “.I was a 20 to 30 year old news girlie , and so many of the national news girlies stepped right out of that movie.

After pirates kidnapped me and dropped me in Indiana, I met a guy and we’ve been married for 25+ years.

One of the reasons I fell in love with him was that he was a tall, blonde midwest boy and he knew Whit Stillman’s work &had seen “Metropolitan.” (He also loved “Heavenly Creatures”)

What really sealed the deal for me was the night Fred (not his name) took my rolodex (yeah, we had rolodexes then) & called Henry Kissinger, waking him. “Hullo” spoke Henry, in that Henry Kissinger way.

Fred replied “Hello.”

Kissinger “ Who is this? What do you want?”

Fred “ I’d like to order a pizza with 10,000 dead Cambodians. “ And then he hung up.

And then I was hung up. On Fred. And he on me. And then many years later we had (and have ) two daughters who are just hilarious and beautiful and very smart and challenging. I’ve never told the pizza story in a public forum and I’m a bit scared that I did. Dump and Leon would just use local talent and ixnay on myself, my husband ad my dog. Thats fine. Just make it quick. I’m begging you - please leave my children and nieces and nephews alone. Let them live whatever normal life is now; whatever happy is now. So, when we meet- you kill Fred and myself and promise to leave the adults who were kids at the time of the writing alone?

I saw it back in 1990 and was BORED OUT OF MY GOURD watching it.

Eigeman had many classic lines in this. The titled aristocracy are the scum of the earth. And his “stepmother of untrammeled malevolence.”

I was put on tape for this movie. (This is sometimes the second step in the audition process. At an initial meeting you might read for them a little bit and briefly chat, then a selection of actors they think are the better choices will come back again on another day to be put on videotape reading a scene. The process can vary, of course.)

This was a low budget movie advertised in Backstage magazine and my roommate went to the open call audition. I had a catering job that day but she brought my headshot with her and when she was done with her own interview she produced it and they said, "Oh, who is THIS?" (I looked very preppie, which is what they wanted.)

A few weeks later there was a message with my answering service for a callback... and I finally figured out what it was for. I distinctly remember I wore a white shirt, very faded jeans, black loafers and a navy Brooks Brothers blazer. It was a bright, sunny day and I think the studio was down near Canal Jeans, and I threw up in a first floor bathroom before going upstairs. I was a somewhat nervous performer.

The reading was just with Mr. Stillman - who was very thin - in a basically empty room and he operated the camera. There was a philosophical monologue and he said, "Just try to make sense of it." I don't think I did. In retrospect, I think he meant to make it sound just conversational, to not obviously perform. It was one of those classic, reflective speeches where the character is saying, "Well, I think bla bla bla.... and once I saw that bla bla bla... and I realized that bla bla bla... then I bla bla bla... Have you ever felt that way?" It would have been nice to discuss the speech and then do it again, because I knew nothing about the story and I don't really remember the speech now... which tells me I didn't grasp it very well. But he just had me do it once.

I've never seen the movie because I wish I'd gotten it. And to add insult to injury I had done a summer acting program alongside Chris Eigeman two years or so before that, and it would have been fun to do something with him again.

But I'M not bitter, of course. I'm sure it's a GREAT fucking movie. Just GREAT. [italic]Without me[/italic] [bold] : (

[quote] I loved “Metropolitan “.I was a 20 to 30 year old news girlie ,

“news girlie”?

Christ helps us, you’re straight and insufferable.

That’s what I had thought too, R29, but apparently it’s not supposed to be the 80s. As I mentioned, the Audrey character is in Last Days, which is set around 1980, where she is older. According to this Reddit thread, Stillman has said it’s supposed to be the 70s.

Whet Barcelona is the question.

My favorite but from Barcelona, in which the newly married character Ted advises always to.marry a foreigner,

[quote]"What's really terrific is that when we act in ways which might objectively be considered incredibly obnoxious or annoying, they don't get upset at all, they don't take it personally, they just assume it's some national characteristic."

It's a very Whit Stillman line -- and very true from my experience.

*My favorite bit

The “we’re just better shots” joke is also good.

When I first saw Andrew Scott in something, I thought it was Chris Eigeman and was amazed at how well he had aged.

It’s on MAX. It was suggested for me. It’s like DL and the algorithm have fucked.

What a great movie. I loved the part where Tom and Audrey were talking about Jan Austin and Tom admits to only reading literary criticism and nothing of the original literary authors. There so many people like that and I feel like there even more of these people now. The kinds Twitter users obsessively pay attention to what people are saying about art or culture but have never directly experienced the art or book themselves. Just endlessly word vomiting up “discourse” but without original thought because they never bother to engage with the actual piece of art themselves.

I still think Last Days of Disco is my favorite movie of his. Chloë Sevigny Saying “there's something really sexy about scrooge mcduck” is still one my all time favorite lines.

Metropolitan is a fantastic film, and I can't deny that its depiction of the UHB (Urban Haute Bourgeoisie) is probably to blame for the guilty pleasure I take in reading NY Social Diary!

(And I'll admit, I didn't love "Last Days of Disco" and didn't like "Barcelona." I would have loved to see Stillman make a career out of chronicling the vapid lives of New York's old guard WASPs, like a Louis Auchincloss of film).

If this movie is supposed to be set in the 1970s, they did a poor job depicting that. This is a photo of the Grand March, Deb ball, NYE, at the Waldorf. Some of the guys have long hair, the girls have old fashioned '70s dresses on and those '70s hairstyles. The kids in the movie are styled like the mid to late 1980s. Also there's no evidence of the fiscal crisis the city was going through then.

R33, ouch! Really enjoyed your anecdote though. I would never be able to watch it either.