Sunday, November 30, 2008

I don't get it - My Dinner with Andre

Dr. Desert Flower and I tried watching / listening to a DVD of "My Dinner with Andre" last night, as we put up Christmas decorations. We made it about 20 minutes into the film, where there were in-depth discussions of beehives and the 'love of the theater'. "Well, if you could give me forty Jewish women who speak neither English nor French, either women who've been in the theater for a long time and want to leave it but don't know why, or young women who love the theater but have never seen a theater that they could love, and if these women could all play the trumpet or the harp, and if I could work in a forest, I'd come!" ...um... whatever. I guess I'm not sophisticated enough, and definitely don't have a refined taste for eclectic theater. We turned it off. Just not my cup of tea, and I love all sorts of tea, honestly. It goes back to the library Wednesday, unless anyone can tell me why it's truly a classic really worth watching.

I much preferred Wallace Shawn as Vizzini: "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia." But only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.""

7 comments:

  1. in high school, i wanted nothing more than to go to the Fine Arts and watch that film. didn't happen.

    but i did rent it some years ago. like you, i was thinking "wtf?", though i made it through much more of the film.

    i stopped it and returned it.

    i was telling this to Ann H, and where i'd stopped it, when she informed me i stopped it just before it got good. oops.

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  2. maybe I just lack patience, or I'm vastly "unrefined". Oh well.

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  3. I saw it... 17? years ago, and liked it. I was exasperated by Andre Gregory, as was, at times, Wallace Shawn. It wrapped up pretty well, and the very end was really nice. I wouldn't want to rewatch it, though, and there's no reason for you to sit through the rest if you don't like it (and no need to be defensive, either).

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  4. Not being defensive, just soliciting others' perspectives. We watched "Last Tango in Paris" some time ago last year also, and thought it was not the "tour de force" that we'd heard it was supposed to be. That's the nice thing about Netflix and Library DVDs - if you don't likem, you eject them and watch something else. No worries. =)

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  5. I was unimpressed with Last Tango In Paris as well. Thank f**k for the internet, at least now people can get free titillation without having to resort to "art" films.

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  6. Face it, Joe...we're unrefined cretans who prefer films like Slingblade or Repo Man to art films like this. I, for one, am proud of my pedestrian tastes in art. Getting too sophisticated on taste puts us at risk of becoming hipsters.

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  7. that Mirkgard link is Hilarious! Thank you Joe! =) I am laughing here.

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