Monday, February 29, 2016

The Ten-Year Lunch (1987)


Academy Awards, USA 1988

Won
Oscar
Best Documentary, Features
Aviva Slesin

PBS
Directed by Aviva Slesin
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(YouTube)

Documentary about the literary and acting personalities comprising the "Algonquin Round Table", who met at the same NYC hotel/restaurant throughout the 1920s on an almost daily basis. They exerted great influence in magazines such as Vanity Fair, Life and eventually the New Yorker, started by one of their members. There are interviews with the few remaining elderly survivors, such as Ruth Gordon and Helen Hayes, who fondly recall the days spent sitting around trading witty remarks. Unfortunately it all comes off as rather self-serving today, with poorly delivered quotations rendering witticisms into eye-rolling one liners.

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