Okay, I know we’ve got at least one Brit reading this thing regularly, so David, this one’s for you …
Before I latched on to my current Japanese movie fetish I had a bit of a thing going for the Danes and the Dogme 95 movement, thus I leapt at the chance to see a little film called Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself when it screened at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. Though it stars a nearly entirely Scottish cast the film was written by Anders Thomas Jensen, who was heavily involved with the original batch of Dogme films; financed by Lars Von Trier, who was a co-writer of the original Dogme manifesto; and directed by Lone Scherfig, still the only female Dogme director. So I was drawn in by the behind the scenes people, but the film itself totally, completely won me over with its biting black humor, excellent performaces and subtly beautiful – and completely non-Dogme style – cinematography. This, folks, is a great and widely overlooked film. It’s currently running in extremely limited release in the US – so limited I didn’t even realize it had happened until I spotted the reviews on Metacritic – so go see it if it’s playing anywhere near you and if you happen to be living in the UK, or have an all region capable DVD player, you can pick it up on DVD on April 19th.
If you want to know more about it, you can check out a more detailed review I wrote of it here, or Jason Morehead’s review here. Jason’s the man behind Opus, and you should be reading his stuff anyway. He won’t steer you wrong.
The trailer doesn’t do it justice, but you can see it here.
