My Dinner with Andre

One of those movies that often gets mentioned as one of the greats, but probably not actually watched by too many people.When I watched this film as a younger man (20s), I identified - more like aspired to identify - with the Andre Gregory character: traveling all over the world and having all kinds of new agey consciousness-raising adventures and expounding on the vacuous emptiness of modern-day life. But now watching this film as an older man (ahem, NOT in my 20s), I realize I identify a whole lot more with Wallace Shawn's character, who has a somewhat insular life, but doesn't think you have to go to a commune on a mountaintop on Tibet to feel a sense of heightened aliveness. Sometimes being truly alive is being comfortable with the routine of your life. Andre actually struck me as a pretentious dilettante.A detail that stuck out to me for the first time last night was when Andre goes on a long tangent about how the doorman at his apartment building calls him Mr. Gregory, while he calls the doorman Jimmy, and how this is an artificial class distinction and that he has arrogantly made himself superior to his doorman. Almost as soon as he gives this speech, the waiter walks over, asks if everything's OK, and Andre is a bit curt to him. "Yeah" he snaps, annoyed at being interrupted. After his long monologue about how wrong he is to treat the doorman this way, he is automatically dismissive of the waiter, displaying the same heir of superiority he just criticized about himself.Anybody else ever see this film? via /r/movies https://ift.tt/2MWjcBg