FOR TV SHOWS (See below)but FIRST-if you like the style of "My Dinner With Andre" you should also check out a later film title by the same director (Louis Malle)called "Vanya on 42cnd Street"...Using the same intense close-up dialogue setting also featuring Wallace Shawn (this time in a theatre just zeroing in on the actors/actresses on stage doing rehearsal of Chekov's Uncle Vanya. (As far as I know this was also Malle's last film before he died). Second would be the film "God said Ha" with Julia Sweeney (the character Pat from Saturday Night Live)recounting her true sad family story-which only in a way that Sweeney could pull off, she actually makes funny (she is truly hysterical -her personal tragedies only being survived by virtue of her incredible witt which proves to be her own salvation/compensation in the face of such loss and otherwise dysfunctional abusurdity).If you like the on-stage extemporaneous/improv style, I would also recommend Peter Bogdanovitch's, "Noises Off". Although (unlike the aformentioned films)it is more purely comedy than philosophical treatise, "Noises Off" also features an incredible roster of talented actors/actresses...using their Broadway skills in a cinema setting that nevertheless still makes us feel like we are more in "the raw" of a theatre with them and all their ludicrous mistakes.
The very talented writing/directing style of Peter Bogdanovitch also brings me to the GENIUS OF TELEVISION: DAVID CHASE (whom Bogdanovitch interviews on Sopranos Xtras DVD and who also wrote a couple of episodes for Chase's series, "The Sopranos"-I think the very talented/intellect of David Chase (NORTHERN EXPOSURE/THE SOPRANOS) is the closest television has ever gotten to duplicating the type of experience we find in My Dinner With Andre. (Northern Exposure for its shear intellect, and Sopranos for its complex/uncut/probing through the multi-faceted/undulating terrain of each character's psychological/spiritual/physical landscapes.
Although the subject is radically different in his HBO production of North Jersey Mob Family, "The Sopranos"-his aim is essentially the same...to make the viewer more intimate with the situation by representing a continuous uncut /scene from beginning to end-allowing for more of a visceral/intellectual/evolutional experience than the rapid-fire editing we normally find in television that both produces and resolves a point/problem/scenario within the space of 15 minute chunks (necessary to insert advertising.) but obviously cutting off the possibility of character depth, growth, and intellectual stimulation for us as the viewer.David Chase is the only person (I can think of) in "TELEVISION" (WHICH HE ACTUALLY HAS BEEN QUOTED AS HATING FOR EXACTLY THESE REASONS) who GETS this and gives us anything close to the experience we get from My Dinner With Andre. Hope this helps....
PS...Also rent The Russian Film (The Russian Ark for this style-1 continuous shot-and an amazing tour-de-force of Russian History via uncut walking through of the beautiful Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg)
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