"Well that's the point: People don't normally take away things from films anymore. You go and see a $100 million film, half an hour later, your biggest concern is what are you going to be eating"
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La Salle’s jab lands because it’s less a complaint about audiences than an indictment of an entertainment economy designed to be forgotten. By dropping the "$100 million" figure up front, he turns spectacle into a receipt: a reminder that scale has replaced staying power. The punchline about food isn’t anti-snob; it’s a bleakly funny image of how quickly a movie’s emotional residue evaporates in a culture trained to treat experiences as disposable.
The subtext is attention, not appetite. Modern studio filmmaking often optimizes for opening weekend heat and broadest-possible comprehension, sanding down anything that might linger as ambiguity, discomfort, or risk. If the movie doesn’t demand interpretation, it doesn’t follow you home. It just hands you back to your day, and the next decision your brain makes is brutally practical: dinner. La Salle’s line captures the post-streaming rhythm where entertainment isn’t an event you metabolize, it’s a unit you consume between other units.
There’s also an actor’s weariness in it. Performers live with the difference between work that haunts people and work that merely performs. His phrasing, "people don't normally take away things", isn’t nostalgia for some golden age of cinephiles; it’s a critique of how the industry has redefined success. The irony is that the very budgets meant to make movies feel larger than life can end up making them feel smaller than memory.
The subtext is attention, not appetite. Modern studio filmmaking often optimizes for opening weekend heat and broadest-possible comprehension, sanding down anything that might linger as ambiguity, discomfort, or risk. If the movie doesn’t demand interpretation, it doesn’t follow you home. It just hands you back to your day, and the next decision your brain makes is brutally practical: dinner. La Salle’s line captures the post-streaming rhythm where entertainment isn’t an event you metabolize, it’s a unit you consume between other units.
There’s also an actor’s weariness in it. Performers live with the difference between work that haunts people and work that merely performs. His phrasing, "people don't normally take away things", isn’t nostalgia for some golden age of cinephiles; it’s a critique of how the industry has redefined success. The irony is that the very budgets meant to make movies feel larger than life can end up making them feel smaller than memory.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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