"Dear Wendy" fires blanks

If Jamie Bell can't rescue a movie, it's probably not salvageable. After his thrilling debut in "Billy Elliot" - and after making "Nicholas Nickleby," "Undertow" and "The Chumscrubber" all watchable to varying ...

[vincent ward]

okay. more to the point, this is the story of a boy who falls in love with a gun.one of the rules of the gun club is that a Dandy never touches another Dandies gun. In one creepy scene, Sebastian (the maid"s grandson)fondles Wendy and you can almost swear she"s alive! The senseless gun violence in this film is actually the point. When is gun violence ever not senseless? This is not my favorite Jamie film and it"s a deliberately difficult film to watch (I understand that even Bill Pullman wept during the shoot out scene)but I've added it to my Jamie collection because it's part of his body of work and he is, after all, excellent in it. As usual.As a treat, though, if you watch the extra features, you get to see Jamie tap a little. Cosmic!

[vincent ward]

The theme of DEAR WENDY is supposed to be "Pacifists with
guns" but this is more evident in the DVD commentary and special features than in the film itself. In fact, when any of The Dandies refers to themself as a pacifist in the movie, it somehow rings untrue.
Who are the pacifists with guns alluded to in DEAR WENDY? Soldiers? Especially American soldiers? Specifically, American soldiers in Iraq? But soldiers don't choose their own wars. The leaders of their countries do.
DEAR WENDY takes aim at The Military, misses and hits parents who are concerned about violence among teens and pre-teens in schools, insults people who are genuinly pacifists and leaves world leaders completely alone!

[vincent ward]

DEAR WENDY; A BOY AND HIS GUN page one
I would love to sit and chat with Jamie Bell.
sure, I'll admit it's partly because he's my favorite actor, but I'd also like to talk with him about his unique fim choices. What draws him to certain scripts, captures his imagination and compels him to want to play certain roles? DEAR WENDY is one such film.
Now on DVD, DEAR WENDY was filmed in Denmarl about three years ago. Not your warm and fuzzy family film at all! A disturbing tale, but deliberately designed to be so.
The film opens with a group of teens preparing guns and ammo for some sort of showdown. Their leader Dick (played wonderfully by Jamie) sits composing a farewell love letter to "Wendy", recpping his life up to that point. We soon learn that Wendy is his gun.
Dick first meets Wendy when (thinking she's a toy) he buys her as a spiteful birthday gift for Sebastian, the grandson of his family housekeeper Clarabell. When he finds out Sebastians actually likes toy guns, he pulls a last minute switch and keeps the gun for himself.
Years later, teenaged Dick (now an orphan living on his own) discovers, through a friend that his toy gun is the real deal. He and his friend form a gun club, The Dandies, which they invite other outcast teens to join.
The Dandies each furnish their own antique gun, which they give names to and Dick calls his gun Wendy. The group meets in an abandoned mine where they study about guns and practice shooting them. They ultimately come to see their guns as living things with special qualities (the only female Dandy even believes her gun, not nature, has enlarged her breasts) and they form a sort of wedding ceremony in which they become united to their guns at "partners".
Among the Dandy rules: Never draw your partner in public because this gives them control over you. Never touch another Dandy's parner. Never use the word "killing" to describe the action of a gun; they call it "loving" instead.
One day, the town sheriff (Bill Pullman), unaware of the gun club, asks Dick to mentor a young delinquent on probation. The probate turn out to be Sebastian, the kid Dick switched bithday gifts on years before.
Sebastian learns about The Dandies and joins half-heartedly. He doesn't want to violate his probation (which forbids him to be around guns) and he comes to realize he does not share his new found friends' feelings about guns!
He does trust them enough to share a family problem. Granmother Clarabell has become a recluse, afraid ti walk down the street to visit a relative because she thinks she'll be attacked by a local gang.

[amanda]

hi

[vincent ward]

DEAR WENDY: ABOY AND HIS GUN page two
Dick has the solution. The Dandies will escort Clarabell. Along the way, however, a tragic and unexpected event forces The Dandies into a new plan. They prepare their partners from their hideout as Dick finishes his love letter and says "It's time for loving!"
Sebastian lingers behind to read Dick's letter, realizes Dick's true feelings for Wendy and what he must do to help him achieve intimacy with her.
DEAR WENDY is a think piece to raise awareness of and create dialogue around gun violence and attempting peace through force ( what director Thomas Vinterberg and writer Lars Von Trier refer to as "pacifists with guns"). The tale shows senseless gun violence to prove the point: when is gun violence ever sensible?
On I lighter note, I find something subtly sexual and subliminally gay about DEAR WENDY. At 17, Jamie must laughed when he read a script calling for him to play a guy named Dick (phallic) who falls in love with a gun (phallic) and forms a club called The Dandies (gay).
Even the bold Vinterberg and von Trier, as they speak out against "enforced peace" on the DVD commentary, turn shy when one of them mentions the gay connotation of the term "dandy" but Jamie, being from the United Kingdom must have been aware that, while the dictionary definition of a dandy (or fop) is a man who is overly concerned about dress and appearance, the innuendo is usually that the man in question may be gay.
When I was a boy and an uncle who didn't like me much told my parents "I think you have a little dandy there!", he was not referring to my jeans !
Perhaps the implied sexuality in DEAR WENDY is meant to soften what might otherwise be a tough film to digest.