Dear Wendy
Dogme 95 giants tackle guns in America
The first surprise in the unpredictable and original "Dear Wendy" is that its young hero, Dick (Jamie Bell), who at the outset of the film starts writing a letter that will serve as voice-over narration, is not addressing a girlfriend but his cherished revolver.
Dick lives in a desolate coal mining town, shot in desaturated hues and likely set in West Virginia, and he feels like a loser until Stevie (Mark Webber), a heretofore near-silent co-worker at a grocery store, informs him that a recently purchased cap pistol is in fact the real thing, a high-quality revolver. The discovery bonds the two teenage loners, and Stevie's vast knowledge of guns infects Dick.
In a beginning more intricate and clever than outlined here, two of Denmark's Dogme 95 co-founders — Lars von Trier, who wrote the script, and Thomas Vinterberg, who directed — launch an allegory on guns and violence in America that is all the more resounding for its acutely observed foreigners' perspective.
The entire film was shot in Denmark and Germany, but one would never know it, so astute is the production design, with only one or two props in the entire film not likely to find their way in into a U.S. coal town.
It's clear from frame one that "Dear Wendy" is almost certainly not going to end well, but the complex course it takes cannot be guessed, and by the time this astute and entirely distinctive film is over, the folly of America's love affair with guns, past and present, is laid bare with the same inescapable force with which Gregg Araki exposed the horror of child molestation in "Mysterious Skin," a similarly poetic and deceptively affectless film. (K. Thomas, L.A. Times)
Dear Wendy
Thu & Fri March 2 & 3, 2006, 7:00 & 9:15, Muenzinger Auditorium
Denmark/France/Germany/UK, 2005, in English, Color, 105 min
Tickets
10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission.
$7 w/UCB student ID,
$7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.
Parking
Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the
Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters
along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.
RTD Bus
Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus
International Film Series
(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.
First Person Cinema
(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.
C.U. Film Program
(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil
Grillo.
Celebrating Stan
Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.
C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.