Speaking of long absences …

… it’s been 8 years since Whit Stillman’s last film, THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO. What Boston was to rock bands, and I to bloggers, Stillman was becoming to awesome writer-directors. A project to combine two unfinished Jane Austen works apparently came to naught, but there was good news from Cannes last week — Stillman has signed on to do his first film from another’s screenplay, an adaptation of Christopher Buckley’s “Little Green Men”. (Thanks, Mark.)I must say that, from the description at Amazon this novel doesn’t sound like prime-Stillman territory. It sounds more overtly satirical than METROPOLITAN, BARCELONA and DISCO — Stillman-penned films, while always comic and acerbic, never delved into the outrageous, parodic or surreal, or even really that much into belly-laugh territory. They were very specifically about human behavior and interaction within a social class. The Jane Austen comparisons for Stillman are obvious. But “Green Men” seems more like the work of the man who penned “Thank You For Smoking” (because it is, I guess) or maybe “Confederacy of Dunces” — more rollicking, less wry.

But this is nevertheless great news; Stillman himself says “Green Men” is “the kind of comedy that I would want to do, and a script that I saw as really well-done.” Which is reassurance enough for me. In a self-written “confession” in the Guardian, Stillman explains what he’s been doing and why he’s not produced a new film in eight years (though the Criterion DVD of METROPOLITAN is sweet … the best extra maybe being the Luc Sante essay in the booklet). The man’s prose is very much like his movies and what makes them so appealing to me — his dry sense of humor and ironic sense of self really come through without descending into sarcasm or cheap self-promotion.