Still, he returned for the 2005 festival with his third film, Dear Wendy, in which he directed a von Trier screenplay about Americans and their firearms, starring Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) as a teenager who writes a love letter to his gun.
There's an old maxim, "write what you know."
See, that's the thing--this movie's
not about "America's gun culture," one of the most peaceable and rational demographic subsets on the planet. It's about an imaginary misfit--and one dreamed up in the prejudiced, neurotic fantasies of a snotty Danish elitist, at that.
Here's something else I can't help notice--the Danes publish some Muhammad cartoons and the whole Islamic world goes apeshit. They release a film calculated to provoke and enrage gun owners, and we not only have to inform each other it exists via minor blogs--but I don't see us rioting and torching, issuing death warrants and killing people.
Most of us just won't go see the movie--not that it looks like it has mass appeal, anyway. If we react at all, it will be to remark on the foolishness of the filmmakers.
Is that your best "shot" guys?
Yawn.
I do have a few more questions for our artsy, disdainful detractors, though. How long did it take the Nazis to conquer and occupy Denmark? Why didn't the same thing happen to Switzerland? What effect do you think the absence or presence of a "gun culture" had on the different outcomes?
As the bug-eyed deputy to Griffith, Knotts carried in his shirt pocket the one bullet he was allowed after shooting himself in the foot. The constant fumbling, a recurring sight gag, was typical of his self-deprecating humor.