Reviews

The most amazing thing about this film is the considerable amount of people around here who seem to find something in it. When I first read about the story of a girl ending up all by herself in the middle of nowhere with just her dead dad, I thought it could be something, especially if directed by Terry Gilliam, the man behind some of my all time favourite films. Well, to put it short, it's not quite something, it's nerve-wrecking. The lead role might be acted decently, but you never get near to her character or get the chance to build up any emotional involvement. She keeps tossing around dolls' heads, talking in fancy voices just the way ten year old girls do. My sister did that when I was a kid, and since then it hasn't become any more interesting than it was 20 years ago. The rest is just painful, utter boredom with hysterical loonatics jumping on and off screen, wearing strange costumes, screaming and overacting in a way that is beyond description. The script has no idea where to take us, the whole film acts like a three-year old on drugs. Keep away from it, especially if you're in love with Gilliam's masterpieces, like "Brazil" or the Monty Python animations. 2 out of 10 for camera-work and dream sequences.

There is something very fundamental that shouldn't go wrong in a film, and that is the so-called "suspension of disbelief". When you sit watching a film and can't keep yourself from thinking that it's all just a film with actors saying their lines on a film set, then it's obviously gone wrong. And that's the very thing that happens to "Dear Wendy". It's a cleverly thought-out, well conceived plan, but it doesn't come to life. The characters feel two-dimensional all the way through, I didn't care for any of them, so I just kept watching from the outside, which felt a bit like looking at fish in an aquarium. Furthermore, the story is painfully predictable - once people take a gun in their hands, it's always an easy guess to tell what will happen in the end, and so it does. Cinematography and everything is good as usual, but cinematography and everything never made a boring film good. "Festen" was such a great, deep, human film - where did the guy go who made it?

I think we might be dealing here with a film which has weak elements, but the strong elements are strong enough to even it all out. The leading gentlemen might be rather boring, both of 'em, but Emmy Rossum is simply flabbergasting, she's just so more interesting than all these Barbie dolls you usually get from Hollywood, she even looks as she had some thoughts of her own inside her head, and that's good enough to forget the rest. Anyway, at the core of this film is a unique blend of music and motion, brought to a level which you rarely get in cinema. Webber's tunes won't look good on the Bach or Beethoven scale, but they've always been ingeniously catchy, and here they go in line with one massive explosion of big screen extravaganza like it was last seen in "Moulin Rouge". The Phantom ist less post-modern than the former, it's more old-schoolish, straightforward stand-and-deliver performance, but it does deliver to some extent. The excessive musical blockbuster kind of cinema seems to have become rare since Luc Besson turned to producing (although there's lots of the bad kind around), so let's be thankful for this, not point at some minor flaws.