Have you heard of Spotle Movies? Hi, it's me, Blake. A month or two ago, a friend of Drew's sent him a link to Spotle Movies. It's a film trivia game, structured like Wordle. Once a day, you get ten chances to guess one film correctly. It's free, takes three minutes, and makes for a great coffee ritual. I'm fucking terrible at it. But maybe you won't be. Maybe you have what it takes. Maybe you are the sort of person with the right type of brain to parse through films like data on a spreadsheet. Drew is. We've been playing every few mornings and comparing our results.
It's fun. You should try playing it a few times. We aren't being paid for this recommendation, but we really like the game, and the guys who made it are nice. We met with them and agreed that both of our communities would love to hear about our respective things. Even better, they let us pick the movie for them on Tuesdays, so the movie you're trying to guess today is one of our favorites...
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| Where to Watch | IMDb |
If you like these things, then you'll like the film.
→ Making light out of tragedy. There’s nothing wrong with humor as a coping skill. Cancer is awful, yes. André both finds relief in and suffers through his own insatiable desire to make it all funny.
→ People who sound like Steve Carell. The most shallow observation I can make about this deeply existential film. But if André doesn’t sound exactly like Steve Carell, you can call me Miles Davis.
→ Documentaries with punk rock editing. A stop motion colonoscopy. Heads being chopped off and sewn on to other heads. And a whole bunch of other nifty editing tricks that resemble the way André seems to see the world.
→ Advertise with Tuesday Night Movie Night.1 You can sponsor Tuesday Night Movie Night, so long as you have something cool, interesting, unique, or valuable to share with the community. Check out our sponsorship page to see upcoming availability and book a few slots.
| 1 Sponsorships that don't suck. We only accept sponsorships for things we think you'll find cool, useful, or weird, and we build them into the newsletter to make them interesting instead of interruptive. |
What I think.
Is André an idiot? Sort of. He refused to get a colonoscopy until it was too late. With the time he had left, André decided to make a film about it. A documentary about his bout with what he refers to as “stage four ass cancer.” This tight rope walk between irreverence and sincerity is ever-present, seemingly, throughout the life of André Ricciardi. A man constantly at the intersection of total idiocy and savant-like intelligence.
As a subject, André is as charismatic and strange and irreverent as they come. But what really makes this documentary stand out is the way in which we get to watch André’s perspective evolve through the course of his diagnosis, only made possible because by the man himself, who increasingly permits his own vulnerability as the end of his life nears.
The fact is, this documentary could have easily amounted to a hokey PSA about getting your colonoscopy. Well-intentioned, but preachy and uninspired, and therefore ineffective.
Instead, we get an affecting character study of the imperfect man. A free spirited man who refuses colonoscopies out of principle, despite his education. A naive man who takes an interest in cryogenics and “head-swapping” despite struggling through a very humbling diagnosis. A family man who refuses to hug his daughters because “that’s not what they do.”
By making his imperfections the focus, André is an Idiot is as potent a documentary as it can possibly be.
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A fact or two about the production that makes you say "oh, neat."
→ André pitched the film to Director Tony Benna over Zoom. Benna recalls: “I hadn’t talked to André in probably five years…André jumped in and said, ‘You’re gonna love this. I’ve got a stage four cancer, and we want you to make a comedy film about it.’”
→ They decided to use stop-motion animation mid-way through production. In the Benna’s words: “If you put a puppet through 10 ways to die or 10 ways to dispose of your body, it really becomes humorous and digestible for the audience. It was a way to get some of André’s darker jokes into the film.”
No. 003 Cinenyms Can you solve this week's puzzle? Every week, Drew creates a new puzzle for the community to solve. 
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Every other edition, we conclude with a special feature — an original work of fiction completely unrelated to this week’s film.
Clinger.
By Blake Levy
