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| The blue sky-filled poster for Thomas Vinterberg's Dear Wendy |
QUICK REVIEW:
Some youngsters in a small West Virginia mining town form a gang around their possession of firearms.
- What is Dear Wendy?
A youth film, an adventure, a love story, a surreal experiment or perhaps a political commentary? It is written by master filmmaker Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves (1996)) and directed by fellow Danish master filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration/Festen (1998)). And it it hard to say just what it is.
The film feels like it is drifting by without much going on in the plot-department. And Jamie Bell's (Billy Elliott (2000)) character's narration is overused.
Dear Wendy is, however, handsomely shot (by Anthony Dod Mantle (Antichrist (2009))), and has a possibly interesting idea in it, but, unfortunately, it squanders its potential by being unfocused.
Vinterberg is busy at the moment wrapping up two films, his eagerly awaited, big adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd (2015), as well as the Danish drama Kollektivet (2015) [The Collective].
Related review:
Thomas Vinterberg: The Hunt/Jagten (2012) - Vinterberg's strongest film since 1998 is a reversed Celebration
Watch the trailer for the film here
Cost: 50 mil. DKK (equal to around 8 mil. $)
Box office: Below 1 mil. $
= Megaflop
[Dear Wendy was shot in a custom-built studio lot outside Copenhagen. Only 13,733 paid admission to see it in Denmark, and it only made 23k $ in the US, where gun-critical Von Trier is not exactly popular. Box Office Mojo tallies its worldwide gross to 0.6 mil. $, but that is not counting all markets. In any case, Dear Wendy was an Italian/America/Dutch/Spanish/Danish/French/German/English (!) co-production that was a financial rattrap for the investors involved.]
What do you think of Dear Wendy?
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