Steve Sailer likens "My Dinner with Andre" to "The Joe Rogan Experience," in "The Film of the Future: 'My Dinner with Andre'/Who knew in 1981 that in 2025 the dominant form of entertainment would be dudes sitting around talking about far-out stuff?"
Thanks to everyone who emailed me this link. A lot of people know that "My Dinner with Andre" is my favorite movie. It's been my favorite movie since I first saw it, in a movie theater in 1981, long before before podcasting got off the ground. "The Joe Rogan Experience" began in 2009. I love "The Joe Rogan Experience," which might seem odd — I'm a 74-year-old female — but it's not at all odd that I fell in love with "My Dinner with Andre" when I was 30, so it all makes more sense now. Like those 19-year-old students, I too find it hard to watch "old-fashioned films with characters and plots."
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41 comments:
"Raiders of the Lost Ark" is an old-fashioned film?! I'm stabbed through the heart.
AA
Your new favorite movie is going to be, "Frankenstein, Part II."
DDB
For dinners, Jules, Jim, Catherine, trinitarian triangle, complete with mistaken "Lord's Prayer" as "our Father who ‘arts’ in Heaven," and Moreau, exceeding in mystery a mere two men alone at any dinner, or maybe not?, Moreau commanding Jim to humble himself before God, or god?, by coming to her, for her final exorcism of madness away from endless dinner tables, if ever there is a final exorcism for such a woman, then off the end of the bridge, a relief to Jules reduced now to manageable monologue, though ghosts of Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, elective affinities haunting the leftovers of his future communion dinners, though my memory from 1962 is liquid, watery, almost drowned.
I prefer the "Community" spoof of My Dinner with Andre.
Your new favorite movie is going to be, "Frankenstein, Part II."
Wasn't that the Biden administration? Reanimating the dead and all that?
My favorite film of the last 5 years is Wim Winders' "Perfect Days." Life lived without the trap of storylines. Missed it when it came out in 2023, but fell into it on Prime.
To young people it must stand out as a different kind of film…
Of course it feels contemporary to them, it's all about a Jew-hating libtard cadging a free meal while he whines about normies. Today's youth has been nurtured on such shit.
Steve Sailer is now accepted in polite society.
The Great Vibe Shift marches on.
This was one of my top 5 movies all time until Wallace Shawn outed himself as a vicious anti-semite. I guess I will put this movie on the shelf with Cat Stevens' and Pink Floyd music. It is such a loss but I will never see Wallace as grounded and engaging again.
Caligula and Debbie Does Dallas also now dated with pointless plots.
I am not sure Steve Sailer is accepted in polite society, yet. You know what would be cool though - Ann on Joe Rogan. I don't think Ann would do it - I think she likes her cruel neutrality too much -- but it could be a great interview.
I have to watch this, Ann. I respect your judgment. The Band was wonderful. Scott Walker was a good gov. I look horrible in shorts. Dylan I don't get. Hopefully I can find it on Netflix, Max, Hulu, or Prime.
Wow! I had no idea Sailer had a substack! Guess it was time to dump the Unz Review!
Inconceivable!
I do enjoy Joe Rogan --a recent discovery. A casual conversation for two and a half or three hours reveals a lot about both Rogan and his guest. The Vance and Trump interviews were particularly impressive--and carried a lot of weight in the election.
I am a 70 year old female who also loves "My dinner with Andre" and also loves Joe Rogans podcast. But I can follow films with "complex" plots and actually read and understand books with more words than pictures. The students of today are fed TikTok short videos and graphic novels, no wonder they can't follow the plot of a movie.
Michael Fitzgerald said...Of course it feels contemporary to them, it's all about a Jew-hating libtard cadging a free meal while he whines about normies
That was something I missed the first time through but that dominated my second viewing—how dismissive Andree was of the waiter and how much the waiter disliked him.
College students now find challenging the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark?
We are truly doomed.
I wonder if he's calling those films old-fashioned because they actually have people in them who do things and take risks instead of just sitting around and talking?
He shows a two-hour movie in his classes?
Raiders has a plot? I mean other than "Indiana Jones hates nazis".
"...until Wallace Shawn outed himself as a vicious anti-semite"
LOL. Sadly some may not get the joke. Shawn is Jewish, and married to Jewish writer Deborah Eisenberg
In the mid 80s college students prefered (sic) Raiders and Star Wars to "character and plot driven" movies like Citizen Kane or Vertigo. I guess College students still don't like plots or characters, but rather than action they want talk. Lots and lots of talk.
Predator was a forward-looking conception between an alien hunter and bounty.
I’m capable of watching a traditional movie in that I can follow the various doings if I force myself to watch, but I just don’t like to spend my time that way. When I had Covid and was weak and stuck in bed, I watched a couple movies each day and enjoyed them well enough, but on a normal healthy day, it is not what I want to do.
"It can be hard for them to watch old-fashioned films with characters and plots"
That's because they are functionally illiterate.
I can't say it was my favorite, but I did see it twice when it first came out to make sure I didn't miss anything. It was incredibly literate for a more or less mainstream movie.
Shawn and Gregory are both Jewish (and both Harvards, if anyone's wondering), though Andre's father and the father of his first wife were reputed to have had some unsavory German connections during and after the war.
"Atlantic City" and "Raiders" were both sort of meant to be period pieces. "Raiders" was set in the 1930s and "Atlantic City" involved Burt Lancaster pondering his past (I think -- I barely saw that one once).
If "Andre" has special appeal for young people, it's probably the lack of superheroes and CGI. It's also not a long day's depressing journey into drama. And it's not a sequel to anything and doesn't have any sequels. Wally might have written one, but blessedly it was never filmed.
Those two (Andre Gregorgy and Wallace Shawn) made two other movies, which I gather were critically acclaimed (see: https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/1110-andre-gregory-wallace-shawn-3-films) Has anyone seen them and would recall enough to comment?
Quibbling over the label to assign him is beside the point. Shawn has embraced Hamas and called Israel "demonically evil" and worse than Nazi Germany. He's morally deluded and cruel.
"Vanya on 42nd Street" was rehearsals of the Chekhov play, with some very familiar NYC theatrical faces, plus Julianne Moore. It wasn't bad. "A Master Builder" was something similar for the Ibsen play (with Julie Hagerty instead of Julianne Moore). Again, not bad.
Wallace Shawn's said a lot of stupid things over the years, like the implied association of Henry Kissinger and the Nazis in one of his plays. Wally's an emotional kind of guy. His father was the long-time editor of the New Yorker, so it goes with the territory. Looking at the roles he's played, I don't think anybody takes what he says very seriously.
Given the ubiquity of superhero movies, it's a little hard to take seriously the idea that modern audiences have a general problem with films based on 'characters and plots' (and action and spectacle).
OK, I was watching it, my GF comes in the room and asks me what I am watching, I say "My Dinner With André" and she asks me "André the Giant?"
But anyway, it is a great movie. "Who am I? why am I here? Where did I come from? Where am I going?" are all good questions that people should ask themselves in real life from time to time, for sure.
Locke is a movie in which the entire thing takes place in the main character's car while he drives into London talking on his cell phone. Sounds like a loser, but it's a remarkably compelling movie.
"My Dinner With André" is on Criterion, of course. It's like the companion streaming service to this blog.
It is a lot like a podcast. Wally as the Rogan figure and Andre as the eccentric of the week who goes on and on about everything. There is a sort of "plot" in that you wonder where all this is going and what if anything it's leading up to. "Tristram Shandy" comes to mind, or maybe "Rameau's Nephew."
If you're in USC's film department you probably aren't satisfied with superhero movies. You're predisposed to look for something different. If you're tired of "characters and plots" in general (and not just tired of the characters and plots in movies like "Atlantic City" and "Raiders") it could be because the characters are so thin and unrealized in comic book flicks, and because each plot has to top the last one.
In the first film or season, we have to save the city. Next year or film it's save the country. Then the world. Then the universe. And the (essentially repetitive) plots get ever more nonsensical. At the same time, though, today's young people haven't been as adventurous as earlier generations were and the world is more homogenized, so the material the young have for original and diverting plots and characters is thin gruel itself.
"Sadly some may not get the joke. Shawn is Jewish, and married to Jewish writer Deborah Eisenberg."
Don't you know? Anyone who criticizes the state of Israel for any reason or transgression is, by definition, an irredeemable anti-Semite, a dog to be put down, defamed, tarred-and-feathered. (Or so the propagandists of Israel have successfully convinced many nitwits to think so.)
So after I read this post, I watched MDWA again (5th time?). Again, worthwhile. Again, parts resonate with me and with the present. Different parts this time than last time or the time before.
Strange to think I'm now almost 30 years older than Wallace Shawn was in that movie. I was 19 when it first ran. Among other things, it introduced me to the music of Eric Satie. It's a movie that keeps on giving for me, regardless of whatever stupid rot the filmmakers have gotten up to in the last year or two.
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