Louis Malle- My Dinner with Andre (1981)- 2 Disc Special Edition- DVD9 (NTSC Format)

Well...we got passed over during The Rapture, so we're back to posting. I'm guessing Jesus doesn't have the sense of humor that I thought he did, so, in effect, L&S and I are fucked. But whatever. On to bigger and better earth-bound issues.

A few weeks back, someone (who shall remain nameless) was complaining that "your site doesn't have enough action movies, and I like action movies, 'bro! I hella like to see shit blow up and bloody daggers whizz past my face. 'Bro, you need to chill on the wordy flicks!"

Then he did one of those internet sad faces and said "You got served!" To me. He said that to me.

And he was right. I had just gotten "served" for the very first time...'bro.

So, in Wakamatsuian "self critique" tradition, I began to search my soul (the same soul that apparently wasn't up to Jesus's standards on May 21st) and asked myself "is ForTheDishwasher one of those stuffy elitist sites that only cater to people with beret's and soul patches???"

"But leclisse...you do post action movies. What about "Fuck You, Tarantino!" Week. There was lot's of cars blowing up, hot Japanese titties and Kung-fu. That ass of a poster was wayyyyyyy off base. God, you're handsome."

But maybe the 'bro was right. Maybe L&S is a bit stuffy.

So we decided to make a concerted effort to post more action flicks for you, the unwashed masses. And to start out, we've picked the Godfather of all action movies, My Dinner with Andre. The movie does require a warning, though. There is a graphic sex scene where Andre performs cunnilingus on a nubile young waitress in an exploding car while being tracked by homosexual robots with fully erect metal penises. If you're under 18, please DO NOT download this flick, 'bro. You have been warned and served. Enjoy!




From Matt Mazur at PopMatters:

Louis Malle hit the ground running his first time out of the gate, directorially-speaking, as an outspoken critic of the bourgeoisie with such provocative films as Elevator to the Gallows and The Lovers. Through his decades-spanning career, he continued to touch on issues of class disparity with interesting takes on poverty and socio-economic mores with films such as Pretty Baby, Atlantic City, and even his more slick early ‘90s offering Damage. My Dinner with Andre is a different kind of directorial vision from Malle, yet is a film that firmly remains true to his critical spirit.

Found bereft and weeping on the street after hearing Ingrid Bergman’s line in Autumn Sonata (“I could always live inside my art but not my life”), Andre bumps into a mutual acquaintance of his and Wally’s before the film begins, and the men schedule a meet up for the titular meal at a high-end eatery. This is not simply a film of two men talking for hours, as it can often be reduced to – it is a grand, intimate philosophical dissection of love, art, creative freedom and self-importance, and the time flies listening in, voyeuristically, as this intimacy is exchanged between these two multitasking storytellers.




Wally (Wallace Shawn) wonders if his friend Andre (Andre Gregory) is happy with his life, and points out that most people don’t have the kind of privileges the theater impresario has been able to enjoy. After all, Andre has frolicked in the Polish forest with an experimental theater troupe in the moonlight, and has given his body and soul over to discovering his process—a luxury afforded to him by his financial autonomy. Shawn, a struggling poet-actor-writer, is keen to point out, perhaps acting as a surrogate for Malle, that these kind of lofty activities are generally not what real people have in mind when they think of “art”.

“Art”, Wally (Shawn) reasons isn’t something that will pay the bills. Perhaps it will satisfy the soul, but his friend Andre (Gregory), a kind of globe-trotting, theater world bon vivant would beg to differ, as he is apparently independently wealthy and can afford the quirky opportunities that come his way. “You need to cut out the noise,” says Andre, in order to achieve artistic nirvana. Wally, ever the devil’s advocate, says that without the “noise” he would be lost.




Gregory and Shawn penned this eloquent conversation and starred as the characters based on themselves, so that they so effortlessly slip into the roles is hardly a surprise – though both men, on the disc’s excellent extras interviews, talk about the difficulty in performing the piece for film. They knew “Wally” and “Andre” on many planes of existence, yet Malle challenged them to uncover the unforeseen truths of the script, taking them outside of their comfort zones, effectively killing the idea that they are just “playing themselves”. Their back and forth provides a look into how different approaches to the artistic process can converge into a virtual waterfall of results when the current is swift enough.

In the hour-long [...] extras, writer-director Noah Baumbach nestles into the catbird seat and actually sits down with both Gregory and Shawn (separately) for a kind of follow-up to the film, to assess their experiences of working with the late Malle. Gregory says that he had no clue as to “what director would want to watch two completely unknown people talk for two hours”, and jokes that he and Shawn bandied about names such as Akira Kurosawa in their fantasies of who would helm the project in its early stages.




He goes on to explain that Malle called him “sobbing” on the phone extolling the virtues of the “beautiful script”. He thought someone was pulling his leg. Malle humbly offered to direct, or at least produce. He was so passionate about the content of Gregory and Shawn’s experimental script that he had to be involved somehow.

If the creative process is examined with a fine-toothed comb in the feature, the extras provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the process the film’s principles achieve with a thorough artistic synergy. The confines of Andre’s near-claustrophobic setting conversely sets the filmmakers free, and the resulting discussion of the meaning of art is the culmination of the smartest, most visionary guys in the room forming an alchemic cinematic brain trust.

Add in the contemporary element of Baumbach, a great writer, filmmaker and artist in his own right, and even more light is shed on the process of producing art. The theater actor had to become a film actor. The director of plays had to take a back seat to the auteur and give tips from the sidelines. The film seems a prime example of give and take, of ceding control when necessary and asserting oneself at the right times.




Hearing about this particular kind of artistic generosity, hearing the stories of the participants being pushed out of usual comfort zones, is fascinating. Taking a hard look at the kind of commitment one must have to producing a final product called “art” is reminiscent of the kind of creative freedom that Gregory tries to explain to Wally in the film’s infamous “Polish Forest” scene.

Shawn, underrated all around, gives an illuminating talk in the extras about fear and his “personal goal” with the film: destroying the character he was playing. He wanted to “kill” that side of himself because he reasoned that the character was ultimately motivated by fear. Shawn said he was “sick of his own imagination” when he began to write the script for My Dinner with Andre, and was attracted to writing about “real things”. He talks of his passion for his own script, his passionate defense of even the minutest detail, down to specific sentences that he refused to let Malle cut.

Shawn goes on about the director’s own generosity in working with a virtual novice, yet allowing him to be, in Shawn’s words, “difficult”. Malle’s commitment to the material, and to Shawn (they would go on to do Vanya on 42nd Street), belies the fact that Shawn claims to not “understand the concept” of collaboration, a sharp, antonymous contrast to his onscreen partner Gregory.




Roger Ebert, who was one of the first major US critics to embrace My Dinner with Andre (along with his own legendary onscreen partner Gene Siskel) said in his review “They are alive on the screen, breathing, pulsing, reminding us of endless, impassioned conversations we’ve had with those few friends worth talking with for hours and hours. Underneath all the other fascinating things in this film beats the tide of friendship, of two people with a genuine interest in one another.”

In an age where most people are more inclined to interact more with their computer screen or their Facebook friends than their families or real friends, My Dinner with Andre becomes more of a symbol for a kind of intimacy that seems antiquated or perhaps even dead. Has the art of conversation been laid to rest in favor of instant messaging, constant text-messaging and emailing? Could Wally and Andre still have these kinds of chats today or would they simply log onto Skype from the privacy and comfort of their apartments?




Disc 1 Technical Information:

Title: My Dinner With Andre (Disc 1)
Year: 1981
Country: USA
Director: Louis Malle

Source: Retail DVD9
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.05 GB
Length: 1:51:36
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~8800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: English- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 384 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source




Disc 2 Technical Information:

Title: My Dinner With Andre (Disc 2)
Year: 1981
Country: USA
Director: Louis Malle

Source: Retail DVD9
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 6.89 GB
Length: N/A
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~8800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: English- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 384 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched

DVD Extras:
-Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn
-"My Dinner With Louis"




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Disc 1
Disc 2

Louis Malle- Ascenseur pour l'échafaud/Elevator to the Gallows (1957)- DVD Rip (480p-x264)

Elevator to the Gallows is as well crafted a film as you'd expect from a veteran filmmaker, and this being Louis Malle's first outing as a director makes the film that much more amazing. Add Henri Decaë's ultra-modern noir Paris as Jean Moreau's backdrop, and layer in Miles Davis's slithery soundscape, and it becomes just too fucking much (pardon my French). This is such a great film. Everything fits like the pieces of a good alibi.




From Terrence Rafferty:

François Truffaut once wrote, “All of Louis Malle, all his good qualities and faults, was in Elevator to the Gallows”—a statement that, even given French film criticism’s traditionally high tolerance for the counterintuitive, pretty unambiguously qualifies as, well, false. What’s most striking about Elevator to the Gallows, in fact, is that Malle, having made this almost insolently proficient Série noire thriller, never went anywhere near the genre again, and for the rest of his career rarely displayed much interest in the sort of tightly controlled visual and narrative style he uses with such mastery here. It would be more accurate, I think, to say that “all of Louis Malle” is all that is not in Elevator to the Gallows—or, for that matter, in any individual Malle movie—but is, rather, what lies in the spaces between his films, in the habit of renunciation that required him, it seems, to turn his back immediately on whatever he had just accomplished.




To put it another way: Malle spent the four decades of his filmmaking life saying, “Been there, done that,” over and over again, searching constantly for somewhere he hadn’t been and something he hadn’t done. From the chilly elegance of Elevator to the Gallows, in 1957, he moved quickly to the humid romanticism of The Lovers (1958) and then to the frenetic zaniness of Zazie dans le métro (1960). Next came A Very Private Affair, in 1962, a caustic film à clef about and with Brigitte Bardot, which was followed immediately by the melancholic, Fitzgerald-like The Fire Within (1963), the movie that was the occasion of Truffaut’s rather desperate attempt to fit the director’s already bewilderingly diverse body of work into an off-the-rack auteurist suit.

The best way to look at Elevator to the Gallows, it seems to me, is as an anomaly—as the first in the long series of anomalies that was Louis Malle’s career. The uniqueness of Elevator to the Gallows is that it is the only Malle film designed purely as a genre exercise, the only one in which execution seems more important to him than process. He was all of twenty-five when the movie came out, and it’s clear that he was testing himself, the way a young poet might flex his or her muscles with a conventional form like the sonnet. The screenplay, adapted by Malle and Roger Nimier from an undistinguished novel by Noël Calef, is a fairly straightforward murder-gone-wrong story: more elaborate than most, perhaps, but still characterized by the sort of swiftness and brutal linearity that thriller audiences expect.




An adulterous couple, Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) and Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet), kill her husband (Jean Wall), a middle-aged grand-fromage businessman, and do not get away with it, because, as is so often the case in thrillers, fate is seriously not on their side. The murder, which takes place in the first few minutes of the film, has obviously been lovingly planned, and Julien, who works for the inconvenient husband in a high-rise Paris office building, does the deed briskly, just before quitting time. But he forgets a potentially incriminating piece of evidence—sacrebleu!—and before he can retrieve it gets himself trapped in the elevator, in the now utterly deserted building. As if this were not misfortune enough, his getaway car, a snazzy little convertible, is stolen by a couple of brainless kids named Véronique (Yori Bertin) and Louis (Georges Poujouly), who go joyriding in the country, eventually stopping at a hilariously futuristic motel, where they register as Mr. and Mrs. Julien Tavernier and do something very, very criminal. Florence and Julien must have been born under the same sign as Albert King: if it wasn’t for bad luck, they wouldn’t have no luck at all.

Florence, waiting for word from her lover, is quietly frantic. (Frantic was, in fact, what the film was called for its first American release, in 1961.) She wanders the lamp-lit streets of Paris searching for him, often to the accompaniment of the sinuous, evocative jazz of Miles Davis, who, playing with a group that included the brilliant bop drummer Kenny Clarke and three Frenchmen picked up on the fly, recorded the score in a single session. (That impromptu session has since acquired a certain historic significance as an early instance of Davis’s interest in the modal approach to jazz composition—the approach that culminated, less than two years later, in the classic album Kind of Blue.) These nighttime sequences, voluptuously photographed by Henri Decaë, are the movie’s most original and memorable passages, the moments at which you can feel, faintly but unmistakably, the stirrings of something young and fresh straining at the boundaries of the thriller form, like a baby kicking in the womb.




The new wave doesn’t quite get born in Elevator to the Gallows, but it’s clearly in the late term here, more than ready to emerge. You can sense it in Decaë’s remarkably daring natural-light cinematography (which he would soon be putting to good use for Truffaut and Claude Chabrol as well); in the funky ebullience of young bit players like Jean-Claude Brialy and Charles Denner, both destined to become new wave luminaries; and, most of all, in the unleashing of Jeanne Moreau, who, nearing thirty, was a busy actress but never quite a star until Malle turned her loose in the nocturnal city and did justice, for the first time, to that amazing, imperious, gravelly sexy walk of hers—which would, over the next couple of decades, come to seem the defining movement of the new wave, the embodied rhythm of freedom.

Malle later said of Elevator to the Gallows, “I showed a Paris not of the future but at least a modern city, a world already dehumanized,” a statement that, I think, serves as a useful description of the film itself: not of the future but at least modern. Some of that modernity is on the surface—in the “automated” paraphernalia of the office and the motel, in the glass-and-concrete boxiness of the Carala building, in the sleekness of Julien’s sports car and suit. What’s most deeply modern about the film, though, is an undertone of war weariness and general cynicism, which is most evident in the character of Julien, a veteran of France’s recent wars in Indochina and Algeria. Ronet, who doesn’t have much dialogue, is the very picture of postcolonial tristesse: all haunted eyes and uselessly correct bearing. (He would employ these same resources, and several more, in his indelible portrayal of a suicide in The Fire Within.) And it’s probably not an accident that Malle gave the role of the anomic punk Louis to Poujouly, a young actor best known for playing one of the death-obsessed children in René Clément’s great 1952 antiwar film Forbidden Games.




These characters are not, however, the sort of complex, rounded, infinitely surprising people that Malle would explore with such exhilarating curiosity in films like Murmur of the Heart (1971), Lacombe, Lucien (1974), Atlantic City (1980), and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994). Florence and Julien and the rest are all essentially working parts of a thriller machine, and whatever nuance Malle gives them is just a little oil to keep them from clanking too loudly. The film’s beauty lies in its economy, in its formal rigor (Malle once said that he was torn between Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock, and both influences are apparent here), and in the sly, nearly absurdist humor of the cascading coincidences that doom the homicidal protagonists.

And although nowhere close to all of Louis Malle is present in Elevator to the Gallows, the movie does supply a nice ironic metaphor for his unique, bravely eclectic career. This terrific thriller is about the horror of being stuck, trapped, unable to move: that is, about the stasis this filmmaker devoted the rest of his life, and the best of his art, to avoiding.




Technical Information:

Title: Ascenseur pour l'échafaud/Elevator to the Gallows
Year: 1957
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle

Source: DVD9 Retail
Video Codec: 480p-x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 4.04 GB
Length: 1:31:29
Programs used: DVD Decrypter, JoinVob, SubRip, RipBot

Resolution: 720x432
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG4 H264 @ 6144 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: Dolby AC3 mono French @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English




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