My Dinner with André (1981) has become famous largely due to impressions of the film that are often wildly off base. To many viewers it’s simply that film where two guys spend the whole time just sitting and talking (an impression that led to one of the funniest Simpsons references ever). Something like that might …
The mid-season break The Good Wife took over the last few months was almost certainly not built into the show’s plan for the season (if it was, it was not handled particularly elegantly). Where plenty of other network shows have taken to doing “mid-season finales” and structuring their longer, more unwieldy episode counts like two mini-seasons that form a more coherent whole, this is a show that works best as a behemoth, a large series of interconnecting plotlines that slowly fade in and out of relevance and become increasingly or decreasingly important across the season.
Better to have an ungainly surplus of ideas than none at all; that seems to be Richard Ayoade’s philosophy behind The Double, a wild, uneven, but never dull sci-fi black comedy that purports to tackle Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, but is at least as interested in pilfering visual ideas from films gone by while marrying them to Ayoade’s winningly dry comic sensibility.