July 29, 1994
BARCELONA is the second movie (and first studio movie) by writer/director Whit Stillman, following up on his Oscar nominated low budget debut, METROPOLITAN (1990). I love his 1998 film THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, which is considered part of a loose trilogy with these two (and has some overlapping characters), but if I ever saw these other two it was a long time ago and I donât really remember them. So I guess Iâm going in backwards order.
Stillman is one of those true originals, he has his own thing that he does really well and nobody else is much like him. His movies are very light on plot, very heavy on dialogue, and almost entirely about self absorbed, Ivy League educated yuppie dorks, and yet I find the experience light and funny and not grating. This is in part because he also has a very distinct humor and tone and somehow gets these finely tuned performances that deliver it just right. One of his secret weapons is Chris Eigeman (unaired Red Dwarf USA pilot), who plays different characters in all of them, always with the absolute perfect wide-eyed sense of outrage at the stupidest shit. In LAST DAYS OF DISCO I highlighted when he got upset about someone’s interpretation of LADY AND THE TRAMP – in this one my favorite is when he sees anti-American graffiti and says âTheyâre calling us pigs. Thatâs meant to hurt!â (read the rest of this shit…)
It really didnât occur to me, when I decided to finally rewatch MIMIC, that it was a movie about a pandemic. One of the main characters is the deputy director of the CDC! But itâs not at all similar to the pandemic weâre currently in – âStricklerâs Diseaseâ seems to only affect children, putting them in comas. Because itâs spread by cockroaches, aforementioned CDC guy Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam, 
I try not to be too set in my ways, which is a good reason to rewatch a movie years later and see if you respond differently than the first time around. So something told me it was time to revisit something from those heady days when the emerging international popularity of Hong Kong action cinema fired peak John Woo and Chow Yun Fat out of a cannon aimed at the heart of Hollywood. Iâm not sure what kind of a cannon shot them so that Woo landed in 1993 and Chow not until 1998, but life is a mystery. Anyway, they exploded and in the case of Chow, we were mostly disappointed and then happy that he didnât stick around that long, because Hollywood clearly didnât know what they were doing with him.
I donât feel like I quite understand its intentions. But thatâs okay. Whatever they were going for, they came up with something unique.
