In 1993, we saw Martin play the video game on The Simpsons: "Trenchant insight! Bon mot! Tell me more!"
In 1996, over the closing credits of Waiting for Guffman, we saw Corky St. Clair playing with the action figures.
But now we are truly in end days, people. As reported in the Jan/Feb 04 issue of Film Comment, there is a hip-hop album that samples dialogue from Louis Malle's uber-talkie, My Dinner with Andre. Really.
The outer limits were first charted by underground collage artists like Steinski, whose cut-ups of sonic ephemera included media coverage of the JFK assassination. But one cultural colossus has until now remained unattempted. There it loomed, off in the mists, a Mount Everest of uncool and possible the whitest film in modern history. And now at last, My Dinner with Andre is not just a sample but the conceptual touchstone for an entire hip-hop album.Released in 1981, the same year as Grandmaster Flash's "Adventures on the Wheels of Steel," Louis Malle's Andre--in which playwright Wallace Shawn and theatre director Andre Gregory do nothing but sit, eat, and talk--went on to attain its own brand of Old School notoriety, as a pinnacle of inert art-house cinema.
You can listen to Wally and 'Dre drop some science here.
