No. 64: My Dinner With Andre
Talking it out
December 06, 2011
1981, dir. Louis Malle. There still aren’t any Dinner With Andre video games, as suggested by The Simpsons, but the much maligned film—consisting mostly of a long conversation, between theater director Andre Gregory and writer and actor Wallace Shawn, about the idea of what constitutes a good life—can sometimes be as thrilling as a first-person shooter. Louis Malle’s direction is so seamless that many people are still convinced the film is merely an unedited documentation of an actual dinner between the two men.
Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.