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Having never been abroad to the Continent, I rely, as any good pop-culture pundit does, on the reporting of others to help me understand what I am missing. As it stands, a pair of my favorite albums ties in nicely with and in fact bookends this week's movie selection. Technique, released by New Order in 1989 and Seven More Minutes, unveiled by The Rentals in 1999, were both recorded under the influence of Spanish discothèque music and the accompanying club scene (as well as copious amounts of drugs and paranoia, squabbling and excess). The former incorporates this influence into the beats themselves with typically oblique NO lyrics as accompaniment, while the latter, largely penned by ex-Weezer bassist Matt Sharp and revolving around semi-autobiographical experiences, paints a dance-y but yearning look at the travails of love abroad for the "ugly American" who isn't even willing to learn the language. By the end of Seven More Minutes, the protagonist has grown too old for all night ecstasy, for "jumping around," and wonders what might be next as his music box melody winds down. With that uncertainty and melancholia in mind, let's proceed.

Whit Stillman's second film, Barcelona, was released in 1994, four years after his Academy Award-nominated debut Metropolitan and nearly a half-decade prior to his third (and most recent) feature, The Last Days of Disco. With no new credits of any kind since then, Stillman has been largely absent from the fiction filmmaking scene for as long as James Cameron's decade-plus lag between Titanic and Avatar, albeit with considerably less press and a much lower profile. An interview given last month at Sundance indicates the gap is not intentional or self-inflicted but the result of the all-too-typical frustrations that can stall any filmmaker - projects that don't come to fruition for any number of reasons, but primarily economic ones; and being pigeonholed as a director who makes a certain kind of movie that may not currently be, if it ever was, in box office vogue. In Stillman's case, that kind of movie is literate, intelligent, drolly funny and (some would say too, too) verbose. Put simply, it's the type of film it is easier for many to admire rather than like, and for most to go about blithely unaware of.

There is more than enough plot in each film, but via Stillman's presentation (he wrote, produced and directed all three) they are defiantly not plot-driven and suffer at times from slack narratives. Driven by characters and dialogue, it is virtually impossible to tell from the beginning how they will enfold and towards what end the plot strands will resolve. That being said, his films are distinct enough to be recognizable in the way that the works of Tarantino or Mamet are. His characters alternate between complete certainty and paralyzing hesitance, struck with the tendency of the severely over-educated to imagine that they have all the answers, yet resigned to doing naught but spinning wheels and endlessly reciting their knowledge, their theories and their just-out-of-reach aspirations. Noah Baumbach captured a lot of the same elements in his sublime 1995 debut Kicking and Screaming, about post-collegiates terrified of life outside of undergrad-dom. Where Baumbach's feature trafficked in the encapsulating moment where embarrassment and self-loathing meet with pop-culture overload, Stillman's creations fall more on the winsome side of the line.

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