My Dinner with Andre (1981)

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Before watching My Dinner with Andre I watched Autumn Sonata. The only thing I liked about My Dinner with Andre was that it mentioned Autumn Sonata, how lovely. But that's about it. The monologues in Autumn Sonata are beautiful and interesting, the monologues in My Dinner... are dull and boring. Seriously, I've heard far better monologues from drunk or high collegestudents sitting in their dormroom talking nonsense about life. The ideas exchanged in My Dinner are not even pseudo-intellectualistic. There's absolutely nothing there. I expected a lot because I love movies that are all about the monologues and dialogues (Coffee and Cigarettes, Before-trilogy, Locke, Eric Rohmer, Ingmar Bergman...whatever) but I'm so dissapointed with this one. I see a lot of positive reviews, how that is possible, I don't understand. People calling this thought-provoking and intellectual probably haven't watched a lot of or the right cinema or read some decent books.

I had always heard how amazing this film was from every critic and pseudo-intellectual I came across while in college. It rented all the time at our video store. My Dinner with Andre was considered by Siskel and Ebert to be one of the greatest movies of all-time. BOTH of them said they wished Hollywood would put out many, many more similar movies. I can't tell you how excited I was waiting for the Criterion DVD to arrive this week for this "masterpiece"...I've never been a fan of Hollywood's elite choosing what should and shouldn't be made into a movie. The mind-numbing trash Hollywood is putting out today in straight-to-video quality of writing and visuals is overwhelming. But whatever powers that be chose to never make another movie about two dull, middle-aged, marginally-talented (Wallace at least) Broadway wannabes talking existential nonsense for TWO HOURS while we watch them eat.... THANK YOU FOR NOT MAKING ANOTHER MOVIE LIKE THIS!!!!There's a reason Louis Malle worked on almost no budget to create this. Put three cameras in a restaurant and tell two guys to talk about whatever comes into your brain. No point. No direction. No rest for my ears. It's just Andre talking and talking and talking and talking... I mean NON-STOP. I tuned out in the first 15 minutes and never found my footing again. It was like listening to white noise when you go to sleep - you know there's something happening in front and around you, but you couldn't care less what it is and eventually you just fall asleep through the incessant racket. Welcome to My Dinner with Andre.I know there is supposed to be some higher meaning that my dimwitted brain cannot grasp that superior intellects will look down their collective noses at me and shout, "See! THIS is art! And you're too thick to grasp the overall nuances of this masterpiece." Okay, here's my dilemma... Explain to me how watching two guys talk - about nothing really interesting or tangible btw - is entertaining. They (or, to be more precise, Andre) talks about existentialism, nipple-suckling teddy bears in Poland, Tibetan stories that make no logical sense... and I'm an idiot for getting to the end and saying, "That's it?"Movies are entertainment. I get more entertainment watching carefree school children playing any sport for two hours. Sitting in an abandoned schoolhouse in the middle of the Peru rainforest singing an English hymn, only to be surrounded by Spanish singing villagers creating a choir of angelic proportions. Hiking for two hours into the forest or along a beach where the only noise I hear is the wind blowing, or waves crashing, or branches rustling... that's entertainment too. But it does not make a two hour Hollywood movie.I am starting to question what qualifies as an "important movie" in the Criterion Collection. If this movie is art, I'll steer clear of future Criterion movies and find something better to do with my time. Come on, Criterion. Do a revival of Buster Keaton's "The General". Do a first-class Blu Ray of "Cinema Paradiso". Find a long-lost noir from the 1940s like "Nightmare Alley" that deserves to be rediscovered. But a two-hour film about two full-of-themselves playwrights talking about a fantasy world that only they inhabit??? Worthless waste of time. Wally Shawn: LOVE you when you act in a proper movie. Not in this garbage. Sorry.It only gets a 2 out of 10 because Wally is an awesome human being. No other reason.

My Dinner With Andre is a movie anybody in the world could have made. Just place a camera in a spot and turn it on. Woop-dee-doo! Instead of the movie actually being a pleasure to watch, it is just two acquaintances eating dinner together and having a conversation. Less than ten minutes take place outside of the restaurant and less than fifteen minutes take place with the men out of their table. Very simplistic films like this have potential to fall hard on their faces and totally suck. In order for simplistic movies like these to succeed, the dialogue needs to be at an extra high calibre. My Dinner With Andre wasn't even close to sucking.My Dinner With Andre is partially a true story. Before dinner, Wallace Shawn gives a voice-over of who he is and what he says is all true. He is invited by Andre Gregory to have dinner with him. Andre Gregory plays himself. I think that the only false things are some of the stories they tell. Also, their conversation must've been written and memorized. They couldn't just wing it. Good thing they wrote it and took the time to put lots of thought into a meaningful, provocative conversation.Shawn and Gregory have dinner at a fancy New York restaurant and talk about a variety of topics. Some of what they talk about can be a bit boring, but not all of it is. Gregory returns from a trip and shares his experience with Shawn and tells him how to live life to the full. They talk about how downhill the world has come and people becoming pseudo-robots. So much of what they talk about is so exciting and intellectual. All of what they say results in automatic imagery: the audience gets a clear image in their heads of what they are talking about. So this movie can also trigger imagination as well as gaining an insight about the world we live in and how to enjoy life. My Dinner With Andre doesn't have action, or car-chases, or profanity, or sex, just two men have a conversation at a nice restaurant.

Do we really need to go to plays when everyone around us is putting on an act? When we fritter away hours in front of the tube or read the autobiography of Charleton Heston aren't we really just lobotomizing ourselves? How often when we seem to be listening do we actually hear?These are the kinds of questions one ponders while watching this talk fest that transpires almost entirely at a table at an upscale Manhattan restaurant.Wally (Wallace Shawn) is a literate kind of Everyman, a would-be playwright who pays the bills by taking acting jobs, and Andre (Andre Gregory) is a successful director in the throes of an existential crisis.Super-intense and obsessively discursive, Andre may seem like a kook but he asks important, overdue questions like, "Who am I, really?" "What am I doing here?" and "What are we doing together?" Andre's emotions have been so labile that a mutual friend is worried, and he's prevailed upon Wally to go to dinner with Andre, who happened to have produced Wally's first play.Though Wally dreads it, he is able to meet the challenge when he remembers that asking questions always relaxes him. So the movie unfurls, a real-time depiction of their cultural-reference-studded give-and-take. Most of the time it's quite interesting. The archetypal good listener, down-on-his-heels Wally gets to savor a gourmet meal of quail while managing to drop some gems about his own happy though humdrum existence.Rarely in a film -- or life -- does one witness such a mutually attentive, intricate, and extended human interaction.I have seen "My Dinner" at least four times, liking it more at some points in my life than others. This time around I found it profound. Andre's right. Though he's the last one who would lean on a cliché, we really must wake up and smell the java! Life is too fleeting to be on auto-pilot so much of the time.I enjoyed the movie's sparkling setting with its dapper, elderly waiter, a 75-year-old Jean Lenart in his acting debut (in consonance with one of the messages of the film, look up his Wikipedia entry and be surprised). And I particularly enjoyed the performance of the amazingly visaged Shawn, whose advocacy for zoning out amidst creature comforts is something many viewers will understand.Andre presents a timeless and important message -- too much comfort can be dangerous, lulling us into a dream trance in which life just passes us by. Andre says he mistrusts technology -- and he was talking about an electric blanket! Given today's obsession with electronics, his jeremiad is more compelling than ever.