"I mean, all of them. I remember the first night my parents let me stay home alone I rented Metropolitan for the sexy VHS cover—I stayed up till morning trying to talk like those characters. And The Last Days of Disco is low-key brutal in its honesty about post-college party life. But man, everything really clicks into place with Barcelona—Cold War Spain, super early Mira Sorvino, prime Chris Eigeman, the stylish but not mannered cinematography, a broad eighties definition of “jazz.” I’ve been thinking about what’s so liberatingly beautiful about Stillman’s dialogue. It’s how everyone is trying to be so precise—and hearing that thought process is very rare in films. And how that extreme precision generates its own excesses and poetic absurdism. Like the crystalline moment: “Plays, novels, songs, they all have a subtext, which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind . . . So subtext, we know . . . But what do you call . . . what’s above the subtext?” “The text.” “OK, that’s right, but they never talk about that.”"