I miss the early 90s. Sort of. Of maybe I miss the days when I thought it would be cool to live in a Whit Stillman movie. Here’s the link to my review, which is also here.

There was a period in the early 1990s when Whit Stillman was going to be the WASP Woody Allen. With Metropolitan and Barcelona, Stillman had made hyper-verbal, hyper-intellectual, and hyper-ironic comedies about privileged white people from the Northeast, been nominated for an Oscar for the former and lauded by critics for the latter. But 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, about the “urban haute bourgeoisie” trying to make sense of disco, didn’t work; it was stilted, a bit dull and not very funny. And then Stillman disappeared for 13 years. I adored his first two movies, so I was thrilled that he had a new one; I was primed to love Damsels in Distress. As Violet says in the film, “The past is over, so why not romanticize it?” But Violet, as it turns out, is somewhat of a dolt. Damsels in Distress reminded me of what I loved about Manhattan and Barcelona; I laughed and laughed. But it also revealed that Stillman has not gotten any better at directing movies or controlling his own wit. Continue…