Lately, I've been reconnecting with a lot of former friends and acquaintances from high school and college. And no, I don't mean on Facebook. I mean sitting down and having an actual conversation, filled with meaningful dialogue, heart wrenching regrets, near-death experiences, and spirited philosophical debates. While watching My Dinner with Andre, sometimes I checked out from whatever they were talking about and let my mind wander to things relevant to my own life. By the end I was moved and refreshed, just like I feel after these dinners/meet-ups I've been having that are becoming more and more frequent as I get older.

I can't say I have anything in common with white male playwrights, one of whom is content…

Wallace walks to the restaurant like a long-dead ghost wandering to no place in particular through a bustling city of the living, he appears uncertain and anxious and blue, two hours later he will walk out of the restaurant with his feelings not inverted but irrevocably various and eager and rose coloured. He looks at the passing streetlights with eyes that cry out "jesus christ, have these things always been here?" He instinctively connects these miraculous lights with memories that had long since been abandoned to the lonely chasms of his shadowy mind, left to rot under the label "unimportant/insignificant." He has dinner with Andre and they discuss many things. He says things like: "how can you say something like…

On my last day of physics class in my junior year of high school, my teacher Mr. Stern gave a slideshow of "Mr. Stern's Life Lessons." Everyone was done with their final, and so seemed pretty distracted, but his third life lesson really hit me.

"Being Happy isn't the same as being numb."

Junior year had been a difficult time for me and it hit me how much time I spent playing dumb games on my phone trying to numb my experiences. Six years later, and sadly I often resort to the same coping mechanism, though it comes in different forms.

My dinner with Andre is the movie-version of this effect.

In the age of social media and phones it…

I watched this twice today. Wallace Shawn speaks from a place of familiar futility. He's the voice of the audience. Upon first viewing, I somewhat disliked Andre. He has the luxury of purchased hipster reality. He participates in quack cult-like retreats in foreign countries as away to reconnect with his humanity. Wally struggles to pay his bills and is content with the simple details of life, but in turn never bothers to ask important questions or take any risks.

Having lived in poverty for many years I will say that questioning your relationships and goals is a privilege of the rich. Travel is impossible, you're lucky if you can make your way out to a party that you probably don't…

This whole conversation plays right in front of our eyes and there's never a moment in which it panders away. Yet the whole movie's primary focus is directed towards not what the film is about, but what it is that our subjects are discussing thoroughly. Louis Malle's My Dinner with André exposes a form of art which can be found right from seemingly simple conversation. It's an idea that on its surface seems very fairly small, but suddenly as we find ourselves pulled into this discussion, specific thoughts come into our mind that also go on to question how we're perceiving what we believe to be ordinary within our own lives, it's truly something more exciting than what could be…

A movie that works on a seemingly infinite number of levels, yet one that can be perceived as a failure because it only succeeds in connecting to the most insightful of its audience. The resulting paradox only serves to prove the film's lesson to be true.

While the film deftly places both characters on equal ground in the conversation, it is Wallace, as the stoic everyman, who has his foot on the pedals rather than the more freewheeling and dynamic Andre. For a long time, Wallace's desire to avoid confrontation leads him to react with bemused, fearful, and puzzled silence to Andre's increasingly odd stories and claims of spiritual breakthroughs. This is the uncomfortable, strained conversation that Wallace dreaded at…

Entry 27 in the month-long NYC movie marathon is one of Richard’s all-time favorite films!

An underemployed playwright submits to a long-avoided reunion with his former mentor, colleague and friend in Louis Malle’s philosophical two-hander, My Dinner with André. Wallace Shawn plays an iteration of himself, Wally, who trudges up from the grime of a pre-gentrified SoHo to begrudgingly meet a similarly adapted André Gregory at the upscale Café des Artistes in the Upper West Side for dinner after years of estrangement. 

Shackled to thoughts of his meager existence, the stagnation of his work and income, and the execution of his daily rituals, Wally represents the viewer as an artistically intellectual everyman in this metaphysical hangout piece. André, by comparison,…

"The world comes in quite fast."

Louis Malle met and cast Wallace Shawn in a bit role in Atlantic City on the basis of his friendship with screenwriter John Guare. Thank heavens for chance meetings such as this. For when Shawn and André Gregory decided to fashion a screenplay entitled My Dinner with André around playfully modified versions of their public personae, Malle needed little convincing and was able to pull off the job immaculately for less than half a million dollars.

The premise is alluringly simple: at the urging of a third party, playwright Wallace Shawn reluctantly agrees to meet his erstwhile mentor André Gregory for a high-end dinner in a posh New York City restaurant. Shawn's reluctance to…

My loving wife bought me the Criterion some time ago ( with the caveat that I’d most likely be watching alone ). Well, an alone watch night came about last night, and I plucked the disk from the shelf with particular anticipation. The first thing that stuck me about this new Criterion is it’s unflinching accuracy in reproducing Malle’s tiny budget 16mm esthetic; there is no attempt to de-noise and de-grain the original negative to produce a more pleasing image; all the rawness and grain is there, just like I remember it on the screen so long ago at the Festival of Festivals.

I have a cousin that lived on the East Coast that I would summer with at his…

Conversation - it’s a beautiful thing. Not only in itself but also in the fact that it’s one thing everyone has in common. Whether it’s through words, actions, or anything else, it’s how we establish connections with other people. 

This film portrays a very accurate depiction of how conversation plays out. It starts out with the more mundane but as both parties become more comfortable it becomes deeper and more interesting.

Andre and Wallace together discover a lot about each other in the two hours at dinner, only at the end to realize they are the only two left in the restaurant. It’s beautiful how entrancing talking can be with another individual, especially when both are so engaged that times…