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Welcome to the Dollhouse

Welcome to the Dollhouse

List Price: $27.95
Your Price: $22.36
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: you'll laugh..you'll cry
Review: Take a trip into the life of a typically deemed dork in highschool. 'Welcome to the Dollhouse' manifests that being the "ugly" outcast at school isn't so lavish. One can't help but feel sympathy for poor Don. This film almost makes me feel regretful about laughing at some very sad scenes that weren't exactly a laughing matter. However I have this God-forsaken intuition that that was director Todd Solandz's intention. The humor in this film was very witty and ironic. I've seen the film a couple of times and each time I've spent the duration of my week singing "welcome to the dollhouse, welcome to the dollhouse..." This film is great entertainment that will suit all tastes and will definately change any highschool student's perspective on, as trite as it may sound, life.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: It's all comin' back to me now...
Review: I've no idea why I decided to give this flick a whirl-- I usually cringe at movies that feature a socially-inept geekoid being taunted and abused by the hipper students. It could be because I had some masochistic desire to once again experience the living nightmare of my junior-high days vicariously through the misfortunes of the WeinerDog, becoming bitter over past events that I can't change, railing at the society that rejected me for being different, and-- uh-oh. I'm beginning to sound like some super-villain layin' out his pompous spiel about why he became a bad guy, aren't I? Sorry 'bout that...

Maybe I watched it because I could relate to the movie's protagonist to a degree, as I was pretty much the biggest loser on campus at my middle school (and judging from a few of the other customer reviews for this flick, I ain't the only one!). Fortunately, I never experienced quite the level of torment the WeinerDog does here. And, being an only child, I never had to deal with the 'rents giving their attention to another sibling like our heroine's mom & dad does with her prima-donna little sister. I was also fortunate to not have teachers who were quite as overbearing as the ones she had to endure in this film. And unlike the endless sequence of depressing scenes displayed in "...Dollhouse", I do recall experiencing a few good childhood moments here and there. Y'know, now that I think about it, my childhood was a birthday party compared to what I saw here! Now I don't feel so bad...

One thing I found interesting about the WeinerDog is that, in spite her utter geekiness and lack of social graces, she's not made out to be totally sympathetic, which I found to be a refreshing change from your typical "story-of-a-schoolyard-loser" movie. There's none of that "heart-of-gold-beating-beneath-the-nerdy-exterior" nonsense here. Final note: I'm not sure anyone else does this, but I found myself coming up with a few good retorts to many of the insults and put-downs that were thrown Dawn's way. Well, I thought they were pretty good, anyway. Shame I didn't have these zingers on file back in my middle school days...

'Late

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Depressing and not humorous....
Review: It simply was not funny, and it was disturbing and depressing in a trite way. I could go into depth but it's worthless to even speak about. It just was not funny.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Welcome to the Dollhouse!
Review: Dawn play very good the geek of the school, how can a poney tail, glasses, clothes and the way you behave can make you look so geek, even ugly but in reality I didn't find Dawn ugly, she's even pretty but her look and the way she behave make her a total geek. Some parts of the movie you wish to be there and tell her, hey defend yourself don't just stay there, push them back, do something, don't let this happen to you but no Dawn don't say nothing, well sometime she do but very rarely. Some odd situations I found in this movie are why she went to meet the boy (Brandon) who said he would rape her and she even want to be his girlfriend? That's weird, not realistic at all!Her young sister get kidnapped, Dawn go to NY to find her, she called home her brother respond to the phone, he told her that their young sister was found, he make it sound like she was just over some place and now she is back. Very weird!It's a interesting movie but some parts of it are way not realistic and I found the end have no meaning, well the movie don't even go real meaning, except to see how a geek at school get bully by her classmates!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: hell of youth only a prelude to adulthood
Review: This is probably the blackest of all black comedies to come out of childhood - unflinching in just about every way you'd imagine it wouldn't be. For one thing, in this film about the hell of youth, the child characters here are not only meaner and openly malicious, but they actually look like children, and not merely post-teens you'll see in every other movie who speak in arch dialog and are interchangeable with adult characters in just about every way.

The head doll of this flick is Dawn (Heather Matarazzo) Wiener - for whom looks and last name have earned her the sobriquet "Wiener Dog". Dawn is the middle child of a middle class family - enjoying none of the benefits of seniority monopolized by her geeky brother Mark, nor the fruits of being the baby, greedily (if unconsciously) grasped by her younger sister Missy. To add insult to injury, Dawn is stuck behind glasses and a huge over-bite. Those who populate her world either use her as a convenient repository for their own insecurities, or simply hurt her never knowing how fragile she is. She lusts after the hunky Steve - front man in a band that inexplicably includes the nerdy Mark (Mark seems every bit as Dawn's brother, simply older; he drops some hints of wisdom in Dawn's lap, probably painfully acquired through ordeals not unlike her own; why Steve would put up with being with him is a mystery). While Steve remains painfully beyond reach, she also "engages" Brandon, a younger and more dangerous fellow-student who keeps Dawn's school supplied with pot. Ostracized by everybody else (no one will accuse this flick of making that behavior seem cool) Brandon fixates on Dawn. He threatens to rape her, though we know that this is his way of simply reaching out. (In every sense the child of a broken home, Brandon is incapable of intimacy as we know it, and can only communicate in threats of violence.) Even when Brandon and Dawn meet, it's Dawn who makes the first move (much to Brandon's painful dismay). Missy is the other focus of Dawn's life - as relentlessly cute and loveable as Dawn is not. In their war for their parents' affections, Dawn is less a combatant than collateral damage - often being a prop in Missy's shows of compulsive cuteness.

Though the script shows the pressure coming to boil in Dawn's thick skin, the film is actually anti-climactic, which is the big surprise after all. Regardless of Dawn's feelings and her capacity to explode, surpassing the heart-rending crisis that rocks the Wiener family in the last half-hour, Dawn remains as ignored by her family and spat upon by her peers as she was in the first reel. (The script hysterically enhances this by having Dawn imagine herself the hero of the crisis that was somewhat her fault; in her dream, even her class learns to love her. In reality, they fall back on "Winer Dog" despite the drama that her family has weathered). In short, the script works that rare miracle - the ironic non-ending.
Though this picture will strike many as remote and unfinished (the lack of closure is only one reason this flick will never be mistaken for Hollywood product), it makes a very decisive statement shortly before the final scene - cruelty isn't something limited to childhood - they call you names in junior high (and presumably through adulthood as well), but never to your face.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: still laughing
Review: One of the funniest movies about life's eveyday cruelties I have ever seen. Although adolescents can relate to the junior high experience, parents should screen before sharing with kids. The humor is definitely for adults.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: must see
Review: it's hard-hitting, disturbing, but the the fact is that it is true and real...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: wow....
Review: I'm a fourteen-year-old girl, and after watching this film, I became very attached to the characters. Especially Dawn! She and I shared similar sentiments. For example, we both have had rather traumatic junior high experiences (although Dawn's is far worse than mine), and we both are extremely naive/desperately pathetic. Despite the movie's tendency to make every slightly humorous moment into something eerily dark, I loved this film. It stays so true to reality: for some, life is easy, and for other's it's so-so, but for people like Dawn and me, life (or in this case, junior high) will remain a neverending hell.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Welcome to the Dollhouse
Review: the music is good
Brendan Sexton Jr.'s at his best
it endeared me to all the Dawn Weiners of the world forever
don't feel perverse for loving this movie
it is excellent
and a nice change of pace from the teen comedy/horror scene

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Life is so Cruel
Review: This movie made me cringe with the horrible treatment of Dawn, or otherwise known as weinerdog. It is the kind of movie that makes you want to throttle her parents, all the kids at her school, and especially her little brat of a sister. Watching it made me remember my middle and high school years of being tormented for being an all A student geek and for also teasing others. It is such an interesting movie because does any of that really end after high school? I don't think so. Anyway i have already recommended this to many of my friends, and when i first saw this with one of my friends she wanted to end it in the first thirty minutes or so but I wouldn't let her. At the end she was glad she watched all of it and really liked it. I think that most people will love this movie and sincerely stamp it with my approval to watch it for yourself.


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