Month: December 2018

Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan”: Spending the Holidays with some “basically good” people

Cover illustration by Pierre Le-Tan for the Criterion Collection DVD.

“Metropolitan,” Whit Stillman’s beguiling Upper East Side comedy of manners, is classic in more ways than one. But since it became an indie sleeper hit upon its 1990 release, it has never been considered a holiday perennial. This despite its classic New York look (aside from a few giveaways, like the taxi roof ads, this could be mid-century Gotham) and the fact that the events of the film take place over the course of a week where Christmas falls right in the middle. The trees and the stores are decked out and the film starts with a snippet of holiday music, before slipping into some self-consciously (yes) classic jazz. Yet the event that is December 25th is barely mentioned by the characters and the season is more like a seductively twinkling backdrop. Still, the setting and Stillman’s unshowy compassion for his leads makes this a nice alternative viewing at this time of year, especially if you’re looking for a break from the yearly repeats of Scrooge and the Grinch.

The story concerns a group of young and wellborn Manhattanites, most of whom seem to be home on the winter vacation of their freshman year at Ivy League colleges. Stillman’s stand-in would be the less well-of Tom Townsend, a red-headed Princeton newbie first seen leaving a posh hotel alone after a society dance and who is mistaken as a competitor for the same cab with a group his own age. This mixed group of friends is the self-named “Sally Fowler Rat Pack” (SFRP) and before you can say “after party” Tom has fallen in with them, finding himself in the spacious parlor of her family’s Park Ave. penthouse. What follows is the first of the many hyper-intellectual and often catty group conversations which are “Metropolitan’s” main claim to fame.


The Sally Fowler Rat Pack convenes.

Here, the sophistication goes way deeper than the surface appearance of tuxedos, evening gowns and a parlor filled with old-money furniture. An almost ridiculously erudite skull session is underway as outsider Tom reveals a left-leaning world view and admits to being a “committed socialist” as the talk quickly turns to French philosopher Fourier, of whom he is a fan. Despite some doubts about this, the group decide that Tom is a “basically good person,” a high form of praise with this crowd.

The group comes into focus. The bespectacled Charlie is a self-appointed defender of the positive values of the old WASP aristocracy, even though he (like some of the others) recognizes its decline. The bookish and wispy Audrey has a sharp intellect and a love of Jane Austen; she soon develops a crush on Tom, to Charlie’s chagrin. She stands in sharp relief with Jane, the tall and confident brunette as well as with the fair-haired Sally Fowler and Cynthia, who would probably be mean girls if they weren’t so well-bred.


Jane (Allison Rutledge-Parisi), Nick (Christopher Eigeman) and Sally (Dylan Handley)

The real standout, however, is the handsome, dimpled and (seemingly) impertinent Nick. Unabashed about his privileged status and easily seen as rude, Nick (as brilliantly portrayed by Chris Eigeman) is the de facto leader and conscience of the SFRP. Nick breaks down Tom’s resistance about returning the following night, and senses Tom’s insecurity about the cost of his rented tuxedo and his lack of an overcoat (though his raincoat “has a lining” as he is obliged to explain to the others). These scenes between Nick and Tom (played by Edward Clements) are a highlight of the film. The cajoling may start out because there is a “severe escort shortage” at the start of debutante week, but turns into something more. With the group clued in to Audrey’s feelings, Nick informs him that he has made a “big impression” on the girls and that he should drop his moralistic objections to high society and enjoy the amenities. Check out this well-played scene between Eigeman and Clements.


Nick and Tom parry in the vestibule in my favorite scene from “Metropolitan.” Come for the debs, stay for the “hot, nutritious meals”

The famous good advice to authors to “write what you know” is assiduously followed her by the writer-director. Stillman based his Oscar-nominated script on a similar experience he had on his first Christmas back from his own freshman year at Harvard in 1969. This rarefied upper-class milieu of society balls and formal fashions is not the most readily sympathetic subject matter but Stillman owns it with panache. He deliberately amped-up the cultivated banter for comic effect and takes semi-satirical delight in arcane details. Charlie (played by Taylor Nichols) name-drops Averell Harriman and earnestly comes up with a more accurate acronym for the WASPs, namely the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie (UHB, or “The Ubbs” as Nick would have it) while Audrey would defend the old-fashioned virtues of Austen to the ends of the earth. Oblivious to her affections, Tom still pines for Serena, his ravishing but flighty ex-girlfriend who he hasn’t seen since “Yale game weekend.” Nick details at novelistic length the alleged sex crimes of his arch-nemesis, the conceited Rick von Sloneker, an actual baron. It keeps “Metropolitan” likably light on its feet even as the characters, suspecting that this is last real debutante season, see their way of life fading.


A photo from a recent reunion of the “Metropolitan cast and director Whit stillman (far right).

“Metropolitan” can’t help but suffer a little when Nick departs the scene with about a third of it left to play out. (Chris Eigeman would delightfully reprise this character type in two later Stillman films, 1994’s “Barcelona” and 1998’s “The Last Days of Disco”). Shortly after a confrontation with the young baron goes awry, Nick catches his train upstate to his dad’s place, where he’s sure his evil stepmother has plans to murder him. In case he doesn’t return, Nick makes Tom and Charlie promise to uphold the tradition of the UHBs. Although it would have sounded corny, he could have suggested they uphold the principles of the “basically good” people, especially in light of the Rick von Sloneker’s of the world. The UHBs certainly had their flaws but their straight-laced civic-mindedness and charitable tendencies stand tall in contrast to what we get with the infamous 1% of today’s economic upper strata. Nick describes von Sleneker as “tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, insolent and possibly psychotic.” Take out the “good looking” part and it sounds suspiciously like the current occupant of the White House. Who knew this would combination would be so “irresistible” to so many voters. Nick’s righteous indignation at the baron (also the name of Trump’s youngest son), misunderstood by many other characters, sounds impeccably prophetic today.

METROPOLITAN, Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, 1990


Audrey and Tom look to better days. Happy Holidays, everyone!

Now available: The complete “I Was a Teenage Proghead” comic book!

 

Comic Book

Postage included (even outside the USA), please provide mailing address in PayPal

$5.00

Spin yourself back down all the days to…
Wilsontown High School, 1974

It was a time when the hair was long and so were the musical attention spans. That fall the mellow vibe of Wilsontown High gets disrupted by a mysterious rich-kid bully. But he makes a “sad” miscalculation when he focuses his grievances on Sean and Paul—two know-it-all aspiring rock critics—and their two new friends: clairvoyant Jane Klancy and kung-fu enthusiast April Underwood. Things are going to get personal in a hurry…

It’s here! The complete 32-page “I Was a Teenage Proghead” is now available in a shiny new standard comic-book format. Text is by me (Rick Ouellette) and artwork is by Brian Bicknell. The recently added 8-page epilogue catches up with the kids in the summer of 1975, a year after the events of Part One.

This project is 100% author-funded. If you would like to support indie, rock ‘n’ roll-inspired comics, you can purchase your own copy (and/or buy one for a friend) for only $5, postage included.

Thanks, Rick Ouellette

A Cheap Movie Holiday in Other People’s Misery: A Punter’s Guide to 40 Years of Brit Punk on Film, Part 1

Illustration by Eric Bornstein

In June of 1977, much of Great Britain was celebrating the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, who had ascended to the throne in 1952. At the same time, the punk rock uprising—which had been a disruptive presence in English society since the previous year—was reaching the apex of its notoriety. The Sex Pistols were certifiable public enemies by that time. They spent Jubilee Night on a hired Thames riverboat, sailing past the Houses of Parliament and railing against what they saw as an artificial figurehead looming over a fractured society and a declining economy. When the boat docked after this open-air shindig, the police were waiting…

Almost as soon as bands stared forming and a scene coalescing, Punk was being filmed. On the riverboat that night, camera in hand, was Julien Temple. While at university he became enamored of the French anarchist filmmaker Jean Vigo and in 1976 befriended the Pistols. Also on the scene in these days, with a newly purchased Super 8mm camera, was Don Letts, the dreadlocked DJ at London’s Roxy club. He filmed many bands during the famous 100-day period in early ’77 when the Roxy was an all-punk venue. This footage included performances by the Pistols, X-Ray Spex, Billy Idol and Generation X, the Clash, Subway Sect, the Slits and also American acts Johnny Thunders and Wayne County. He edited together his best clips of bands and fans at the Roxy as well as on the seminal White Riot Tour and released the endearingly primitive “Punk Rock Movie” in 1978.

The film ends with an electrifying 5-song clip of the Sex Pistols playing at The Screen on the Green in April ’77, their first performance with Sid Vicious. It’s an invaluable depiction of a revolutionary band as yet unburdened by their own infamy or by the Machiavellian manipulations of manager Malcolm McLaren.

Around the same time, a fledgling German filmmaker named Wolfgang Buld set out for London and shot many of the same bands as well as others like the Jam, the Adverts and Chelsea. Buld also paid homage to the first-column punk followers in several scenes, and for contrast ventured into a club chock full of conservative Teddy Boys (1st Ted: “One of them (punks), he had a dog collar on. There’s nothing good about that, is there?” 2nd TED: “That’s why we give them a good hiding every time we see ‘em.”) Buld also captured some bands playing live in their practice spaces, most notably X-Ray Spex and their dynamic singer Poly Styrene.


X-Ray Spex singer Poly Styrene in a still from “Punk in London”

The resulting “Punk in London” (like “Punk Rock Movie”) closes with an extended sequence of a top-line punk outfit. The Clash rip thru several of their politically-charged numbers on a spacious well-lit hall in Munich, making this one of the better filmed documents of the group’s early years. Both these movies show punk in straight-up mostly cinema verite form. It was a homegrown protest calling out Britain’s faded postwar promise and a raucous reaction against a stale pop music scene.


The Clash, “Garageland” Live in Munich 1977

Punk’s real Days of Rage started December 1st, 1976, when the Pistols where hastily invited to appear on the early-evening “Today Show” when the guys in Queen cancelled. A drunk and condescending host named Bill Grundy questioned the equally soused group and four members of their Bromley Contingent fan group. When one of them, future star Siouxsie Sioux, gets propositioned by Grundy, it’s more than guitarist Steve Jones is willing to take.


Forty-thousand pounds gone “Down the boozer”: The Grundy affair gets hashed out in Julien Temple’s 2000 doc “The Filth and the Fury“

The British tabloids went off their nut. The Pistols had just released “Anarchy in the UK” their Molotov cocktail of a debut single and the uproar that followed the “Today” broadcast instantly gained them a national infamy. Glen Matlock, the band’s bassist and songwriting contributor, was soon after replaced by the less talented but more volatile Sid Vicious, born John Beverly and a friend of Rotten’s. This fit well into the game plan of the Pistols’ rakish manager, Malcolm McLaren, who wanted to exploit this growing sensationalism for maximum shock effect and easy money. It worked only too well. By the spring of ’77, Sex Pistol gigs were getting banned in several cities and anxious record companies were signing and then quickly dropping them amid the general moral panic. Their status as media Public Enemies was no joke: both Johnny Rotten and drummer Paul Cook were viciously attacked by London street thugs. What was overshadowed in all this was that the band’s “God Save the Queen” single was a true cultural turning point in UK history.


The semi-fictional propaganda hodgepodge that was “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle” was released in 1980 as some sort of twisted Malcolm McLaren testament. Rotten had long left the band and despised the idea of it but the movie (directed, in a sense, by Julien Temple) had its moments, including a couple of nice bits of animation.

Although vilified by the press and misunderstood by large portions of slightly older rock fans, punk did find an early ally of sorts in the person of left-of-center artist/designer/director Derek Jarman. His cult film “Jubilee” was shot in ’77 and released a year later. He used punk singers and personalities like Toyah Wilcox, Jordan, Adam Ant and the Slits alongside players who were more identified with Jarman’s Warholian London art clique.

The film was a dystopian fantasy where Queen Elizabeth I, curious to see what the future holds for her country, is transported by her in-house sorcerer to an England where a social breakdown has left a blighted urban landscape where fascist police battle politically radicalized punk gangs.

At the gang’s dockside they work up militant manifestos but also aspire to be pop stars despite a global media machine as represented by an all-powerful impresario, the cackling Borgia Ginz. “Jubilee” was didactic arthouse fare that was not widely-loved when it came out in 1978. Many punk rockers were pissed off at the film’s implicit idea that they were callous and violent by default, booing at the premiere at a scene of one of the impresario’s hangers-on being tied to a lamppost with barbed wire.


Just another day in the dystopic Docklands of “Jubilee”

Today, Jarman’s movie looks more astute, pre-figuring the divisive Thatcher years and the modern media-industrial complex that marginalizes true rebellion by feeding the general public an “endless movie.” Speaking of which, the establishment got into the game by 1980, most notably with “Breaking Glass.” The script seemed to emanate from the boardroom instead of the street, although the sole credited writer-director was the BBC-trained journeyman Brian Gibson.

It starred the strident vocalist Hazel O’Connor playing a singer whose rise to messianic status defies both logic and musical greatness. Even the solid presence of Phil Daniels as her original manager/love interest doesn’t help much (Gibson, to his credit, would gone on to make two much better fiction films of real iconic female singers: “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “The Josephine Baker Story”). The year before, Daniels had starred in Franc Rodman’s brilliant screen adaptation of the Who’s rock opera “Quadrophenia.” The film was embraced by the punk community and showed in a way that this new cultural uprising was also part of a longer continuum and would eventually be looked on with the same sort of nostalgia it was then detesting. But more of that in Part Two.

You can check out the excerpt of my book “Rock Docs: A fifty-Year Cinematic Jorney” at http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html or by clicking on the book cover image above. If interested in purchasing, you can contact me directly for a special offer and free shipping! Thanks, Rick.
rick.ouellette@verizon.net