Hacker Cinema
My Dinner with Andre
1981 · Film · 112 min
Directed by Louis Malle
Wally, a struggling playwright and actor, reluctantly agrees to catch up with his old friend Andre, a theater director who disappeared several years prior in order to travel the world. Meeting at a posh Manhattan restaurant, the two share life stories, anecdotes and philosophical musings over the course of an evening meal.
8 positive2 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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11 comments on Hacker News
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the conclusion, but from a different perspective. One of the interesting things I've found about literature is that it's hard to fully appreciate the nuances in the decade it's written.
It's a bit like nose blindness; you don't appreciate the subtle way that your house smells until you've been away from it for a while. Books have a similar "smell" in the sense that it becomes easier to see what aspects are tethered to a particular era and what aspects are more universal when some time has passed. Even "fun" works like Snow Crash have aspects of this; there are parts of the book that stand out as pretty timeless and others that feel early 90s-west coast ways of viewing the world and people. When I read it for the first time years ago, none of that really stood out.
Same thing applies to film though. Ignoring pacing, My Dinner with Andre is IMHO way more fascinating to watch today than it was 45 years ago, because what's wheat and what's chaff is clearer in retrospect.
"Frasier", Season 5 Episode 12:
Niles: [walks in] Hello, Dad. I believe we switched videotapes on accident. Martin: Believe me, I noticed. Niles: Yes, there you go. [hands over video] At first I was dismayed. I popped in the tape, and there was Charles Bronson blowing away street trash, but I actually got into it. It was quite suspenseful. Martin: Yeah, well, that's the way Duke and I felt about "My Dinner With Andre." Talk about suspense! [fake, dramatic anticipation] Will they order dessert? Will they leave a good tip? [walks to chair and sits]
How about movies where the title drop is the very last line? I can only think of one (it's not really a spoiler, but SPOILERS I guess).
The last line of My Dinner with Andre is "my dinner with Andre." I think that only works because the whole movie feels like a stage play, and there's something very stagey about that choice.
Have you seen the movie My Dinner with Andre? At its core is a debate over whether or not people need to get to the top of Mount Everest (metaphorically) to have a transcendent experience, and if so, what do you do for the people who can't afford to get to the top of Everest? I've seen the movie several times and I always leave conflicted. I find these kinds of radical departures from "normal life" to be thrilling, even just vicariously. And modern life is constructed in such a way that it's extremely hard to break free from "the machine" (as you call it) without something radical, which is usually inaccessible.
I often settle on a more optimistic note, wherein the people living on boats in the ocean are setting some kind of example that even if it can't be followed directly, maybe it can give a little jolt, shocking you out of complacency.
Meanwhile, "My Dinner with Andre" will remain one of my favorite movies, despite being just a conversation over dinner.
Good point. Also, if you want to watch a movie that explores these two perspectives and has nothing at all to do with tech, My Dinner With Andre is pretty good.
A few films with an emphasis on dialogue. Made me realize how much can be carried (plot, mood, the whole world of the work of art) by party A and party B doing nothing but talking.
* Jiang Wen - Keep Cool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Cool_(film)
* Malle - My Dinner with Andre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Dinner_with_Andre
* Jarmusch - Coffe and Cigarettes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_and_Cigarettes
12 Angry Men
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Walkabout
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Koyaanisqatsi
A profound movie with no words except the chanting of a Hopi word, meaning "life out of balance", or "a way of life that calls for another way of life".
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My Dinner With Andre
"We're bored. We're all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now, may very well be a self perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks, and its not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?"
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The Third Man
(Long shot from Martins' eye line of the fairground far below and the people now on it.)
"Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped - would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man......free of income tax. It's the only way to save money nowadays."
12 Angry Men. My Dinner with Andre. Steve Jobs (a stretch, but much more a play than a movie).
There's some play adaptations which have few characters and mostly dialogue: Carnage, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Glengarry Glen Ross
Linklater's "Before" trilogy is also heavily dialogue-based, but the there are multiple locations.
This is about the future, but I think can be applied equally derisively to talking to the dead. Also My Dinner With Andre is a great movie so why not share it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vGpBYJ5_6E&t=91m00s
Very funny and enlightening analysis. I've seen the fringes of algorithmic pricing a few times in other categories -- especially out-of-print DVDs or VHS tapes.
Example: don't ask me why I enjoy the movie My Dinner With Andre, but for whatever reason, I do. A few years back, I wanted to buy a copy of the DVD and checked Amazon. It turned out that the DVD was long out of print, and new copies were going for $400 apiece. I figured this price was high, but nevertheless, it was nothing that couldn't be explained by actual rarity and supply/demand metrics. Rare DVDs have been known to climb into the hundreds of dollars, especially if new and unopened. But I came back a few days later, and the price was $1932.78 (or something unusual to that effect). The next day, $3500 and change. Which struck me as odd, to say the least. Was some nefarious Goldman trader attempting to fix the market for Wallace Shawn's back catalog?
Needless to say, I didn't love the movie quite that much. So I passed. These days, Criterion has released a new DVD version of the film, and accordingly, everything's dropped back down to about $30 per copy -- including the price of the original, OOP version. I feel sorry for anyone who actually might have taken the plunge at $400, which is not out of the realm of possibility. That's a lot of money for a film about two guys having dinner.