Before Community riffed on it, My Dinner With Andre was the kind of thing you chatted about over Merlot while chuckling and pretending to know what you were talking about. After Community, that’s still the case, but you can reference Community referencing it and still seem cool.
The truth is, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory’s contemplative dinner conversation about the nature of art is fascinating because it features two men who know way more than they should talking about the broad-reaching subject of the humanities. Even as high a pedestal as they should be on, they manage to come off casually. Why there hasn’t been a podcast featuring the two yet is baffling, but according to The New York Times, they’re both set to work together again, and they’ll be doing it with directing icon Jonathan Demme.
After Dinner, they did Vanya on 42nd Street, so naturally for desert they’ll be twisting up Henrik Ibsen’s play “Master Builder” for a movie called Wally and André Shoot Ibsen. There’s nothing like tackling the depressingly Norwegian father of prose drama to create a stir, and doing it with the genius behind Caged Heat and Silence of the Lambs is even better. No cynicism, no irony, everything about this project sounds ridiculously amazing. Plus, the director claims “it’s like a Hitchcock movie with a vein of humor running through it.” Get. Ready.