Review: 'My Dinner with Andre' is pretentious and deadly boring

My Dinner with André    PG           

            Louis Malle's somber but sometimes sarcastic pretense of two men talking for 2 hours at dinner is perhaps one of the most banal flicks of all time. You want to snooze, rent it. The flick had a lot of dialogue, in fact, it was all that. The pretentious critics ate it up like candy and thought it an amazing celluloid masterpiece, as nobody dared just film some guys talking before. It was nominated for Oscars. Heralded as brilliant for acting, it really wasn’t so hot. The problem was, anyone under the spell of how clever the director was being was really convinced it was so awesome. They were wrong. Anyone not interested in the slightest was bored. Did they even talk about anything interesting? Not really. Talking movies can work, like ‘The Breakfast Club’ or ‘Dead Poet’s Society’, so it is possible to make a movie like that work. On the level of much later’ Six Degrees of Separation', the story isn’t very memorable. You never feel for the two misanthropes, not like you might in say the previous ‘The Odd Couple’ or the later ‘Sideways’. It’s the kind of movie snobs go to see to feel like their lives are important when actually they’re as mundane as everyone else, maybe more so. 

Review by Adam Browne