Whit Stillman's Metropolitan is finally available on DVD, as a part of the Criterion Collection.
Review of Metropolitan by Christopher Orr. An interview with Mr. Stillman. (Thanks to AustenBlog.)
I made one of my sections of Philosophy of Person watch Metropolitan (they had seen In the Company of Men earlier that semester)--I don't know how they reacted to that movie, though they did write about it for the final exam, iirc.
Mr. Stillman's other movies include Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco, which is out of print (but I suspect it will eventually be re-released by another company.) One can only hope that his next film will be out soon, the state of America cinema these days is rather abysmal. A friend inquired about Hostel this afternoon as we were taking a walk around Brighton, and we were left deploring the "culture of death."
Manners and boundaries... and the attempt to strengthen them through the adoption of tradition... while women and men will continue to be perplexed by each other regardless of how "open" and "informal" they are with one another (and usually such informality and radical egalitarianism works to the deteriment to women, as the Lady Downstairs will attest), the careful circumscription of relations is actually liberating, in so far as it provides for the recognition that men and women are different from one another and allows one to treat serious matters seriously, without being mocked or considered "weird" as a result. Rules enable (that is, make possible) growth and maturity rather than hindering development. George Weigel's "A Better Concept of Freedom," summarizing the writings of Servais Pincakers, O.P., make clear the different conceptions of freedom, which ultimately influence our perceptions of everything from ethics to the seemingly more mundane topic of manners and etiquette.
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