Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"

Dear Wendy


Peter Bradshaw
Friday August 5, 2005
The Guardian

Poor Jamie Bell, Britain's great post-child hope, has been saddled with a starring role in this unbelievably annoying film scripted by Lars von Trier, who has come up with yet another of his giggling exercises in parasitic, pseudo-satirical Americana. The director is Thomas Vinterberg, who gave us the tremendous Dogme film Festen and whose last outing was the loopy but engaging futurist fantasy It's All About Love. It can only be Lars's formidable personality cult within the Danish world of film that induced Vinterberg to accept his abysmal screenplay, a sow's ear which he has duly transformed into a sow's ear.

Jamie Bell looks weak and uncertain as Dick, the son of a coalminer in a dullish anytown USA, a lazily conceived place that Lars, as ever, imagines we will accept as uncritically as he does. Sensitive Dick doesn't want to go down the pit, of course, and unfortunately a career in ballet does not occur to him. But Dick becomes infatuated with a gun he's improbably got hold of, which he calls Wendy. Is he perhaps a JM Barrie fan?
Dick then rounds up all the other losers and no-hopers and pantywaists in the town and somehow they all get secret guns with names and form a gang called the Dandies - a sort of Dead Poetical Fight-Clubbers Society, and rule number one is: be extremely irritating at all times. The storyline collapses into extravagant and extravagantly boring nonsense, culminating in a spectacularly dull shootout that has been evidently conceived by an under-testicular Euro-intellectual who doesn't know how or whether to deconstruct the whole notion of a gunfight in the first place.
It would be great to see a film that exposes America's love affair with guns, and liberal America's guiltily complicit relationship with this love affair. But this terrible movie isn't it. Dear Wendy is a misfire, and a misfiring peashooter at that, a film that smirkingly attempts to hitch a free ride on the excitement of gunplay, while affecting to satirise it in a semi-fantasised locale which indemnifies the author against any possible charges of uncool disapproval. Only its regular toothache-twinges of irritation and pinprick-insults to the intelligence will keep you awake.


abysmal- nędzny, fatalny
collapse- rozpadac się, runąć
complicit- zamieszany w coś nielegalnego, współuczestniczący (np. w przestępstwie)
conceive- wymyślić, wyobrażać sobie
formidable- straszny, groźny, niebywały
hitch- podwozic autostopem
indemnify (against)- zabezpieczać przed
infatuated (with)- rozmiłowany, zadurzony
loopy- rąbnięty, szalony
misfire- niewypał
notion- pojęcie, opinia, mniemanie
parasitic- pasożytniczy
smirk- uśmiechać się ironicznie

• « poprz.
• nast. »