DVD Review: My Dinner with Andre (Criterion Collection): Andre Gregory, Jean Lenauer, Wallace Shawn, Roy Butler, Jeri Sopanen, Louis Malle, Suzanne Baron: Movies & TV
DVD Review: My Dinner with Andre (Criterion Collection): Andre Gregory, Jean Lenauer, Wallace Shawn, Roy Butler, Jeri Sopanen, Louis Malle, Suzanne Baron: Movies & TV
Amazon.com
The sheer audacity of My Dinner with Andre drew throngs of curious filmgoers who made the film the most talked-about art-house hit of 1981. After all, who’d ever heard of a movie consisting of nearly two hours of nonstop dinner conversation? Ah… but this isn’t just any conversation–it’s the kind of mesmerizing, soul-searching, life-affirming exploration that we feel privileged to listen to, and with unobtrusive style, director Louis Malle invites us to eavesdrop to our hearts’ and minds’ content. The film was written by two New Yorkers at the dinner table, noted playwright-actor Wallace Shawn and well-known stage director Andre Gregory, who essentially play themselves. They taped their conversations for several weeks and Shawn gradually shaped them into a scripted conversation, but you’d never know it from watching the movie. The talk flows and flows until you’re captivated by Gregory’s stories of world travel and spiritual quests in Poland, India, Tibet, the Sahara desert… the tales of a soul-searcher who’d dropped out of the theater world to rediscover his zest for living. Shawn plays the skeptic, the voice of reason, his feet on the ground but his own mind willing to soar. The cumulative effect of this conversation is almost hypnotic, and certainly plays into our eternal appetite for storytelling. Both primal and sophisticated, witty and profound, My Dinner with Andre is a film that can be savored over time, offering new revelations with each viewing as the listener-viewer develops his or her own appreciation of life’s great mysteries. –Jeff Shannon
Product Description
In Louis Malle’s captivating and philosophical My Dinner with André, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with friend and theater director André Gregory at an Manhattan restaurant, and the two proceed into an alternately whimsical and despairing confessional on love, death, money, and all the superstition in between. Playing variations on their own New York–honed personas, Shawn and Gregory, who also wrote the screenplay, dive in with introspective, intellectual gusto, and Malle captures it all with a delicate, artful detachment. A fascinating freeze-frame of cosmopolitan culture, My Dinner with André remains a unique work in cinema history.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
• New, restored high-definition digital transfer
• New video interviews with actors André Gregory and Wallace Shawn by filmmaker and friend Noah Baumbach
• “My Dinner with Louis,” an episode from the BBC program Arena, in which Shawn interviews director Louis Malle
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Amy Taubin and the prefaces written for the printed screenplay by Gregory and Shawn
Stills from My Dinner with Andre (Click for larger image)
but no stars for the dvd,
By A Customer
This review is from: My Dinner with Andre (DVD)
This is my favorite movie of all time. Period. You can sit inon the most interesting conversation ever and I’ve done it many times,every time finding myself thinking of different things, contemplating my own life and wondering about how crazy Andre actually is and how seriously to take his ideas about how human life came to an end a few decades ago, leaving us all robots in search of some twinge of real feeling. But the dvd is so bad I suspected it was a bootleg. When the camera switches from Andre to Wally the color completely changes. It’s all grainy as if recorded on bad tape off a badly receiving tv. At one point a little white hair appears and vacillates on the lower screen for oh about 30 minutes. Are they kidding? There needs to be a new edition of this great movie, and those of us who bought this sham of a version should be allowed to trade it in. Here is a film critiquing the falseness of what our modern life has become: fine, but I don’t need an object lesson costing me $20. Out of respect for the sublime Louis Malle, put out a new version!
Phenomenal movie, horrible transfer,
By Joshua Wolf (Brooklyn, NY United States) -
This review is from: My Dinner with Andre (DVD)
My Dinner With Andre is a brilliant, difficult movie.
A lot of people are turned off by this film because it’s mainly one extended scene of two unglamorous people talking about existence. But what a conversation, and what a scene! Andre Gregory’s bizarre, surreal story and his catharsis about the nature of modern life that comes from it is powerful stuff, but the real punch comes from Wallace Shawn, our Everyman, and his reaction to it. It’s a shame that so many can’t watch more than 10 minutes of this movie, because it is ultimately Shawn, at the end, who speaks their thoughts.
MDWA demands your attention for two hours, which is no easy task, because there is no real narrative in the traditional sense. It also demands multiple viewings, because it is rich with subtle detail, and there’s a lot to take in. Notice, for instance, the continual references to the Holocaust, culminating in Gregory’s account of his friend’s theory about the city-as-modern-concentration-camp. And as you watch these two actors play, ostensibly, themselves, you wonder how much of the film is true and how much is a carefully constructed narrative. It’s a great mystery, one that I prefer unsolved.
Kudos also go to the director, the great Louis Malle, whose control is so precise that you almost forget you’re watching a movie as opposed to two people just talking. It’s a reminder of how the great directors are the ones who can do so much with so little. You’ll never look at a blockbuster the same way again.
The reason I can’t give this film 5 stars is that the video transfer is HORRIBLE. The color is often off, and the sound is mediocre at best. Hopefully someone will save and restore this gem of a film.
Do yourself a favor and SEE THIS MOVIE. You’ll probably complain about doing it, but you’ll feel immensely gratified afterward.
A masterpiece! - The best movie of the past 25 years,
By M. Burns (Columbus, Ohio) -
This review is from: My Dinner with Andre (DVD)
I just finished this movie, and I feel like I need to simply get a few thoughts down before my head hits my pillow. I didn’t know what to expect entering My Dinner With Andre - after all, it is a movie about two guys who have dinner in a restaurant and talk the whole time. But from the moment that the goofy-looking, awkward Wallace Shawn lumbers down a New York street and we hear his voice-over, I knew that something more was taking place in this movie. What it was, I had no idea. There are no character names; there is no ‘plot;’ Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, both prominent actors/playwrights of New York, meet after not having seen each other for years and they shoot the breeze. I learned that it’s not as extemporaneous as I originally had imagined - Shawn and Gregory got together, recorded hours of their conversations, and then compiled a script based on them. The ‘restaurant’ is actually a defunct hotel, the waiters and barkeepers all actors. But there’s a transcendence to it all, as the men sit and chat (mostly the powerful, lively Andre Gregory doing the talking), food being brought out to them. What heightens the power of the film is the setup that Wallace gives in the voice-over before their dinner: Andre, the man he meets, has been living a peculiar existence traveling all over the world, when he used to never want to leave his family. A friend of Wallace’s saw Andre weeks before sobbing uncontrollably on the street because he was violently moved by a line in Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. Like Wallace, we don’t know what to expect in the very context of the dinner conversation. Some of the things that Andre and Wallace discuss in this movie are so unimaginably crazy, so hauntingly horrific, that even the mental images that went through my head sent chills all the way through me. At one point, Andre tells of a strange rite with some friends on Halloween in which some of them let him through a strange process of being stripped completely naked, bathed, led through a field, lowered into a grave and buried alive for half an hour. Of course, I tell you this just to tantalize you, because to begin to even summarize what goes on in 110 perfect minutes would be impossible. Andre and Wallace discuss love, marriage, perception and reality, theology, and even the validity of their very statements. That they relate it with such grace and raw, real emotion makes me refuse to believe that this was staged in any way. It feels so natural. I can’t believe that something like this could actually make its way onto film, because it’s such an amazing achievement for the art itself - in a way (especially in an early story that Andre tells about the nature of performance), seeing these men talk over dinner on film is the actual embodiment of a movie folding into itself in perpetuity. These men are real figures, play real figures in the film, recreate real conversations, and talk about reality in such a way that a heightened sense of awareness pervades the whole film. I didn’t get up once, check the time - a few times I leaned closer to the screen because what was being said struck so close to me, hit home so hard, that I wanted to just be nearer to it. At one point, I gasped as Andre related the idea of New York, of working society being a new kind of concentration camp in which the prisoners make the prison, abide by the rules, and don’t even realize it’s holding them in. Whether I believe that or not is irrelevant - the fact that it’s worked into a conversation like this is amazing. The movie moves with grace between moments of hauntingly dark realizations, to soaring epiphanies of happiness and then back again. Much of the film may be discussion about the zombie-like nature of human existence, but there is a certain empowering quality to it all. My Dinner With Andre is not just about a conversation; it is about living; it is about life; it is about reality; it is about love; but most of all it is about the fact that we can all be happy with what we have right now, even with the infinite, scary knowledge that we receive over time. We meet a man who personnifies ‘normalcy’ with every gesture (Wallace), and yet there’s a man who has done everything in his power to resist stasis (Andre). I left the movie with a changed perspective on each man, which I’m sure is what happened between them, too. More than a few times, I felt on the verge of tears watching this, and I felt it more than ever when Erik Satie’s "Gymnopedie for Piano" began at the film’s conclusion. One of the most transcendent works of music was chosen for one of the most transcendently great films I’ve ever seen. How cool. I’m sorry. I’m just rambling at 2:15am, but I just thought it was impossible to not attempt to put into words what could be one of the single most important experiences I’ve ever had with a movie. I’ve seen a handful of movies that have drastically changed my thinking about a certain theme or notion. My Dinner With Andre might have just changed my life.
Search My Dinner with Andre (Criterion Collection): Andre Gregory, Jean Lenauer, Wallace Shawn, Roy Butler, Jeri Sopanen, Louis Malle, Suzanne Baron: Movies & TV from AmAzon
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