Welcome to the Dollhouse
An unforgiving look at the hell of junior high
``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' remembers with brutal and unforgiving accuracy the hell of junior high school. Many movies reconstruct those years as a sort of adolescent paradise; it's a shock, watching this film, to remember how cruel kids can be to one another, and how deeply the wounds cut.
``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' stars Heather Matarazzo in a dead-on performance as Dawn Wiener, an unpopular seventh-grader whose glasses are wrong, whose hair is wrong, whose complexion is wrong, whose clothes are wrong, and who is as gawky and geeky as it is humanly possible to be.
She is inevitably known as``Wiener Dog'' in school. She is also known as``Lesbo'' and ``Stupid,'' and when she asks a classmate why she hates her, she gets a refreshingly direct answer: ``You're ugly.'' She isn't ugly, simply unformed in that in-between way, but she projects the vibes of a potential victim, and there are always going to be sadists whose antennae lead them straight to their targets.
But I'm making ``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' sound like some sort of grim sociological study, and in fact it's a funny, intensely entertaining film: intense, because it focuses so mercilessly on the behavior of its characters that we are forced to confront both the comedy and the pain. (R. Ebert, Chicago Sun Times)
Welcome to the Dollhouse
Free show!
Thu September 14, 2006, 7:00 only, Muenzinger Auditorium
USA, 1995, in English, Color, 88 min, Rated R
Tickets
10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission.
$7 w/UCB student ID,
$7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.
Parking
Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the
Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters
along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.
RTD Bus
Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus
International Film Series
(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.
First Person Cinema
(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.
C.U. Film Program
(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil
Grillo.
Celebrating Stan
Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.
C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.