My Dinner with Andre

Rating:
Summary: DVD Quality is Still Awful
Review: This DVD title went out of print and then reappeared Feb 2001, so I thought it might have been improved because of complaints. Not so! The quality is awful, and it is not divided into chapters nor is there any indication of time so you can't search or bookmark the CD. The VHS version is superior in every respect. It's a shame that such a great film is ruined by lousy DVD design.

Rating:
Summary: SEE IT WITH MY BREAKFAST WITH BLASSE
Review: As a young man struggling to be an intellectual, I was so impressed with this that it is hard to believe I was taken in by this nonsense. Years later I was completely freed of the pretense of this film when I saw the wonderful "My Breakfast with Blasse." See the first if you haven't already and then watch the second.

Rating:
Summary: Bourgeois Bohemian drivel
Review: Poor Andre. Travels the world in search of depth and meaning, but where does he end up? Why, back in New York City, of course. Back to his comfy upper middle class life replete with a doorman, summers on Long Island, posh restaurants, children he no doubt sends to private schools (children who incidentally would now be of age and probably trying to amass large dot.com fortunes and think of the old man as a nutty gas bag). Andre himself admits he misses the sixties, thereby revealing everything you need to know about this film. In his younger days he felt alive and connected. Now he's old and disenchanted, the typically insufferable baby-boomer. And to compare such a life to that of a concentration camp victim is the height of immaturity and self-absorption.

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Summary: My Dinner with Andre VHS
Review: This film is a surreal, mindbending masterpiece, with a self-aware cleverness in its message that's sure to reach its target. It's a film that's very cognizant of the limitations of a feature focused on a single dinner conversation; but it uses these limits as a springboard to make a point about modern alienation and the average person's dwindling attention span and sensitivity to detail and emotion.
It's NOT boring. The acting is flawless. Andre Gregory draws you in like a campfire, and Wallace Shawn plays the perfect straight man. Together they represent the left brain and right brain, finally uniting. The reviewer who claimed it was "bohemian bourgoeis drivel" missed the self-commentary it contained on the alienation of the rich. This is subtle and spiritual and surreal stuff. Watch it and wake up. This is a film that can change lives.

Rating:
Summary: A great film and a great book
Review: This book is as great as the film and then some. Like most all screenplays, it includes the parts that were left out of the film. Another plus about reading this screenplay is that you can absorb what they are talking about more deeply, and then when you watch the film again it all comes together and makes more sense. The film and this book are really two halves of one whole, and any fan of the film will enjoy it even more after filling in the gaps with this book.

Rating:
Summary: an amazing movie
Review: If you are looking for a lot of action, forget it. But if you would like to see something that may cause you to question all of your assumptions about life and who you are, you need to see this movie!

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Summary: I Fell Asleep the First Time but I am Learning New Words
Review: Two men are talking at the dinner table in a restaurant. The first time i seen this it was so boring I fell asleep. Then I watched it over a few times and I am learneing new vocabulary words for school. I still don't understand alot of what they are talking about but I am stuck with the DVD because I already open it at the party. My Uncle was kiding and told me this was about Andre the Giant from wrestling eating dineer with his fans. So i get it for my birthday present. I was excited but then dispappointed. The men use alot of words to make a good talking. You can learn stuff if you don't fall asleep and I like the way they have good manners and smile at each other. One guy chews with his mouth open laughing and they should have cut it out.

Rating:
Summary: One of the few movies that really expands your horizons.
Review: In the course of a two-hour conversation, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory prove that cinematic stasis need not be boring, and in fact can even change your life to some small extent. In a way, this is almost like listening to a conversation between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, if Quixote and Sancho were modern-day New York intellectuals. Andre, the Quixote of the film, speaks of his attempts to find meaning in his life by traveling around the world, staging avant-garde theater experiments, participating in the rites of bizarre death cults and consulting Buddhist monks; Wally, the Sancho, is happier to stay close to home, seeking contentment in a good cup of coffee or an electric blanket. But the two men are united in their mutual conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living. Andre's story about the fabulously wealthy duchess who starved to death because she refused to eat anything except chicken is much to the point. How many of us end up starving to death, in one way or another, in the midst of plenty? In any case, few people could come away from this movie without feeling a little more appreciation for the fragile beauty of life.

Rating:
Summary: Rent, don't buy this great movie/horrible DVD
Review: I rented this after the horrible comments about the DVD quality. They're right...it's horrible. The movie is, however, wonderful. It's a polar movie in that people either seem to love this or hate it. My ex-girlfriend left after 15 minutes because it was so boring. I was watching and listening with the horrible feeling that the main characters could stop talking at any moment. It is riveting stuff. This kind of thing should be like the James Bond movies - each year a new conversation comes out. That would make me so happy.

Rating:
Summary: An Intellectual Tour-De-Force!
Review: I remember that after seeing this movie for the first time in the early 1980s, I walked out of the theater stunned by what I had just seen. Yet after seeing the movie dozens of times since, I am even more amazed that such an incredibly creative and intellectually stimulating work actually made it to the silver screen, and that it then became an all-time cult classic. This is a dream conversation between two old friends re-establishing ties after some time apart. It starts very slowly, but take heart, it doesn't start to roar until the conversation finally turns away from an interminable monologue by Andre that leaves one wondering what his mental state really is. The discussion builds into an amazing critique of the nature of life in modern society and the frightening characteristics of individual consciousness in an increasingly vapid, superficial, and materialistic culture. For anyone concerned by the way in which contemporary culture has indeed become a hyperbolized and fractionated shadow of what it once was, and especially for all of those disheartened former counterculturists who despair for exactly where the sixties dream went, the movie resonates with a raft of relevant and provocative issues and interesting intellectual twists and turns. It is a spellbinding intellectual rollercoaster ride, and one leaving one breathless and yearning for more. If you want to turn a dull Sunday afternoon into a provocative and stimulating excursion, run this video. And don't bother taking notes; you'll be back to watch it again, hoping to discover more.

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