Welcome to Me

Honestly, I usually have theories but this time I have no idea why this show received any rating under 80%. Some theorized people had specific expectations with a Will Farrell production. Some theorized 'it wasn't Bridesmaid enough'. Some theorized 'people will prejudge any show with a female lead as chick flick and trash it'. Maybe they're all correct. Perhaps because I went in with openness and moderate expectation, I see this deadpan, no-laugh-track comedy classic as Farrell candid ROTF funny, better deeper funnier than Bridesmaid - and 300% not a chick flick. I watched Bridesmaid but still Kristen didn't immediately register. I gave it a go based on a few well-written IMDb reviews alone. As the show starts I was delighted to learn that heavy weights like Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Joan Cusack are on board. Later I was pleasantly surprised by familiar faces like Linda Cardellini, James Marsden, Wes Bentley. All contributed wonderfully to this well-conceived well- executed story about 'what a psychologically-unstable woman do with her lottery winning'. The premise is rich, the result is delicious. Kristen Wigg's actor chop, range, and fearlessness, is superb, admirable and definitely entertaining. Various related subject matters are explored: post-Facebook post-YouTube me-me-me vanity culture, reality show production standards and ethics, borderline behavior, value of true friendship, things most people could related to... The lead character has no filter, is an "emotional exhibitionist", has OCD protein *, brittle, yet manipulative, mean, vengeful, sexually aggressive, deeply self-pitying yet oblivious to human suffering right next to her, hence a natural at shock value generation. The reaction in the TV production control room is just priceless. YouTube goers would find a particular cake eating scene sarcastic funny. Still the narrative tone is never cruel or judgmental, an amazing feat in itself. Other characters' distinct reactions to her 'charisma' and big plan to exhibit herself is also both hilarious and insightful. Side note: The show didn't go out to explain borderline behavior but oddly afterward I'm slightly more enlightened about the triggers of occasional borderline outbursts of people I had interacted with. It also shows that borderline condition describes more a gradient spectrum rather than entire persons (and therefore more prevalent than commonly thought) Visually and aurally the show is captivating and fun. The pink plastic princess reality TV circus, her self-penned theme song, her romantic overtures, Tim Robbin the tennis tan therapist, Jason Leigh the crazy hair grouchy producer with strong ethics, Cusack the versatile voice actor, backstage dogs and swans, OCD recipes and cheesy re-enactments, are all bonuses... Rarely a comedy makes one laugh so much, yet feel a little more at the same time. I've added the director Shira Piven to my Director to Watch "movie quality filter" list. Welcome To Me is a comedy gem among under-rated comedy gems. 9/10. Plus 1 star for balancing. Highly recommended.

This is the story of Alice Kleig (Kristen Wiig). She wakes up every day at 12: 15, her TV has been on for ten years, she knows by heart a great number of Oprah Winfrey shows. Alice was diagnosed bipolar at 16. Well as she explains it, in those days it was called manic-depressive, then bipolar and now borderline personality disorder. Alice win 86 millions of dollars at the lottery. So she pays for her own TV show, where she'll be the host and will talk about herself. This film could be considered as a critic of our selfie and real TV era where anyone plays his/her life as a show. It could be seen as a critic of how people consummate themselves in their image, and lose their soul with this profusion of extimity, like American Indian who thought that pictures stole their soul. But instead of being a parody, and a critic Welcome to Me stays focused on Alice. And Welcome to Me becomes an idea of what would be the equivalent of Outsider art for television. Alice is helped in creating what she wants by her greedy producer, and her knowledge of television, so the show looks like a performance, and this kind of humour reminds of Andy Kaufman's. It is brilliant. The soundtrack use is very interesting. I was very interested in the way a weird song like Happy Talk by Daniel Johnston is used as a standard. Is he credited? Or is it some kind of standard I didn't know of? The fact that the author uses his music, or the music he used shows that she's interested of the creativity of madness. (In fact Daniel Johnston created a show called Welcome to my World, so he probably inspired Shira Piven or Eliot Laurence the writer (impossible to say). What Alice exposes here, are her defense mechanisms against falling apart, all of the creation of her soul to hold on to herself: her things ordered by colours (once I was very bored and colour coordinated my books), her highly proteinated diet, her traumas… and she's capable of putting all that in a form that makes it watchable (a student in communication compares her work to Cindy Sherman's). Like the filmmaker who turned Daniel Johnston's music into a jazz standard, Alice's world is standardized for television, and makes madness watchable. (This is so rare in cinema, that it makes this film very important). Madness is sort of censured by general medias; it scares people, so it's very rare to have it portrayed in an interesting and creative way. It's most of the time reduced (especially since the DSMs became psychiatric bibles, cutting the classical mental categories into symptoms and little pieces) to neurological troubles, and simplify the human being as if we were only a mass of facts. But Alice because of the considerable sum she won can beat the censorship, explain herself, and tell her life like no one ever heard it. The film doesn't try to explain her madness or to cure it, but it shows her humanity and her fight to be defined by something else than a diagnostic that changes with medical fashions

Like a car accident in the next lane, I watched 30 minutes of this, wondering if it was ever going to get any less uncomfortable. Eventually, I drove past the accident, then I couldn't even see it in my mirror, and I found something else to watch.

its a story about boring-mentally ill girl who wins the lottery and she doesn't know what to do with her money. she's moving to casino hotel and making her own talk show about herself and her boring life before she won. the story himself is awful. The film moving slowly and when it moves, nothing is advanced the plot. Here and there having sex with some persons, cry, seeing the psychiatrist, goes, comes back, nothing happens there! wouldn't recommend for this movie to my worst enemies. and i didn't even started to speak about this poor acting of kristen wiig and the other actors. and her voice when she's singing - awkward!! don't waste you time on this. you will regret. honestly.

Welcome to Me is much more than a dark comedy. It is the evilish innocuous lovechild of whack of center films like Eagle and Shark (2007), Gentleman Broncos (2008), and Lars and The Real Girl (2007) if they coupled with satires like Network (1976), and Bob Roberts (1992), and it does so with dark whimsy, subtle charm, and is laugh-out loud funny. The resulting film is a superb satire on the all out illusion of the American dream. Firstly, it derides the notion that money and fame are the goal of living while lauding it, a tough balancing act, and, secondly, that, in a country where 70% self-medicate for some form of depression, anxiety, or just can't cope with life, that mental illness is what happens to others. It combines the two, and lets the lunatic take over the asylum. We might well ask whether the crazy is the message or the medium... Kristen Wiig is Alice. And let's start by saying in this Wonderland it's a great name for the character; and, a name that's almost become a cliché name for all woman in crisis, as Bob has for all blue-collar guys. Alice is a heady mixture of cutely crazy. We tried to list it all, but kind of only got as far as obsessive-compulsive, bipolar, narcissism, and manic-depressive, all veiled behind an obsession with voyeurism by her, and of her, through the TV. And that is the first point: she is non-categorizable - she is not just do-lalley, she is not even complex, she is Alice - wanting the world to love her, and wanting the world to cure her, to cure her past, and to see how important her pain is. When her own therapist, a snappy turn by Tim Robbins, effectively gives up, Alice gets beyond lucky and gets her chance to have her own TV show through an amoral (or just pragmatic?) James Marsden. What results is a truly roller-coaster ride into Alice's bizarro gonzo world, where her unedited world is literally broadcast. This is the best satire we've seen is a while. Like Nightcrawler (2014), it pokes the bear of TV for all its worth, and looks at America as a modern freak show, where empty calories and instant gratification have replaced any meaningful content. It is also really a film about the death of TV for the YouTube generation - who under 30 watches more TV than internet now? This is post-hipster, post-modern, life out loud funny, that leaves you with a bad taste - it is smart, both kind and cruel, and a brilliant take on Modern America. Above all, it is original and deserves to be praised for being a film that belongs more to indie films of the 1970s than now - it is a surprisingly lingering, has just enough sympathy while still skewering its subjects, and for us, is a gob-smacking watch.

This film has a few chuckle worthy moments, but I find most of it cringe worthy. Whenever Hollywood decides to portray a mental health issue, it is almost always underplayed or just way over the top. As someone who has had BPD his entire life, I feel this film is a reflection of the second option. There are some elements of Alice's behavior that I can identify with, but certainly not too that extreme a degree. Just because someone has BPD it doesn't mean that they are a total train wreck. Even when we see Alice when she is "medicated", her behavior to me is unrealistic for someone with this condition ALONE. This is only my take based on my own experiences though, and realize that everyone's situation can be completely different from mine. If you want to get a more fact based, serious point of view on BPD, there are several good YouTube videos out there. This is just entertainment, which at the end of the day is really all it's intended to be, from a business point of view. Even on that basis alone though, I still don't find it as entertaining as a film like Lars and the Real Girl.

If Welcome to Me is a comedy, then it's a very dark one. Alice Kleig (Kristen Wiig) has Borderline Personality Disorder that manifests itself in ways like eating a meatloaf cake with sweet-potato icing on TV and walking * through a casino. After winning the lottery, she buys a TV talk show and proceeds to talk the whole boring time about herself (no surprise as the title of her show is the title of the film and leaves no room for doubt that it's all about her). She strangely advises the audience, "You can have what I have if you really believe in it." She asks a stranger on the street if there was "a rape in A Tale of Two Cities." She's not even goofy, just much past the borderline of normalcy with few laughs. To be fair, she's attempting to find out, as we all should, who she is, and therefore using the therapy of a talk show to expunge her demons and discover "me." It just doesn't make for good comedy—bizarre yes, funny no. Although I find little humor in her BPD, at least in the dreary way director Shira Piven and writer Eliot Laurence present it, I was hoping for some broadcast humor such as Will Ferrell (a producer of this film) and Adam McKay gave in Anchorman or the insightful satire in Broadcast News and Network. Her talking on TV about masturbating and actually neutering animals in front of the camera were off the mark and weird without being witty. It's fun, however, to see Tim Robbins as Alice's therapist and too little of Jennifer Jason Leigh as a TV staffer. Joan Cusack in the control room expertly expresses my disbelief in Alice's shenanigans, and like me, she finds it dreary without being funny. I have to hand it to the filmmakers, however: I have a very good idea about Borderline Personality Disorder. In a summer chock full of blockbusters, this small film looms larger than it ought.

If you only know that "Welcome to Me" stars Kristen Wiig and is produced by Will Ferrell, the only conclusion would be that it's a slapstick comedy. But this movie is nothing like that. Wiig plays a woman suffering from borderline personality disorder who gets her own TV show. And on this show, she talks about whatever's on her mind. I've seen Wiig in a couple of dramas recently and I've liked all of them. "Welcome to Me" is more of a comedy-drama, with the comedy resulting from Wiig's character's awkwardness. One of Wiig's scenes was particularly bold, but the fact that she was willing to do it shows what a good actress she is. I hope that Wiig continues with these kinds of movies, although I do also like her straightforward comedies). In fact, I wish that there were more of these movies. It's a really good one. It won't be for everyone, but I recommend it. Also starring James Marsden (JFK in "The Butler"), Linda Cardellini (Cassie in "Brokeback Mountain"), Wes Bentley (Ricky in "American Beauty"), Jennifer Jason Leigh, Alan Tudyk (the Duke of Weselton in "Frozen"), Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack.

I normally like dark comedies. I normally like weird movies. But the main character is not likable. It is a movie about a woman who has borderline personality disorder. Again, normally I like this. But the character wasn't funny, was so self indulgent that the main character lacked any attraction. I began to start skipping along in the film, which to be fair, may not be fair to the film. However, after going back and forth in the film, I could still not find anything in it that was interesting, funny, quirky, etc... The only redeeming quality this film had were the other characters in it. Specifically Tim Robbins and Lisa Cardellini, and James Marsden. Don't waste your time or money on this film.

I found myself continually waiting for this movie to come to an end. At first glance, it seemed as though the film may be decent (in the sense that it would be OK as a one-time watch) but I was so wrong. I could tell by the tempo of the movie that it was a low budget film. Also the scenery and acting was rather low end as well. The film reminds me of a 70's made-for-TV drama. There's no humor in this movie. Multiple attempts at making a humorous situation out of awkward emotional drama, continued to fail throughout the film. My wife actually walked out of the room after about 45 minutes because she was so bored she began to fall asleep. Now mind you, I don't typically take time out to write reviews on "boring films", but I really want the audience to understand how long and drawn out this movie is. For such a dull & tedious film to have no build up, and try and create humor out of gawky mental disorders (the disorders do not even match their true definitions) this film couldn't genuinely be justified as even a one-time watch. The director confuses Bi-polar disorder, with multiple personality disorder, alongside obsessive compulsive disorder, all while the main character is unequivocally displaying characteristics of asperger's syndrome (or borderline autism). The acting was not horrible, but by the way that the director provoked certain situations, there was no saving these actors/actresses from the disaster at hand. If you have ever seen the movie "Punch Drunk Love" with Adam Sandler, you may understand what I am getting at. Both films are similar in nature and in cinematography. Also, it's as if the writer was just bored out of his mind, and just simply wanted to write a script about nothing in particular because as the film unravels, you start to realize that there is no real point to it. The film in 30 seconds is about a girl who is emotionally and mentally challenged. She hits the lottery for 86 million. While televising her post winners interview, she states that she has been using * as a sedative for so many years, and naturally the TV station cut her off. She got all worked up about being cut off and not being able to speak her mind that she goes and hires a TV station to host her very own talk show (a talk show about herself, and her weird ideas, and random thoughts). Basically it is a show about nothing at all. She receives good viewer ratings, but the staff absolutely hate working with her, due to her unorthodox topics, and unprofessional methods of speaking openly about her personal life (sex, verbal abuse, awkward situations with her friends, etc.). Plus she becomes psychotic if irritated (displaying outbursts of anger, and emotional distress). The film maintains this same tempo for quite some time before the main character has a few bumps in her show, and ultimately does one last show where she apologizes to her friends for the way she has acted and gives her remaining 7 million dollars to her lifelong friend (a friend whom she had earlier made fun of in an episode of her show). The end. If my re-cap still hasn't bored you to death, then feel free to waste your money on this pile of garbage and indulge in 105 minutes of excruciatingly painful boredom. I don't see how anyone could possibly enjoy this film. Please ignore all of the other reviews, as I am the only person to date giving an honest critical opinion on this film. For all of the above reasons, I have rated this film 2 stars. I chose 2 stars instead of 1 star, just because I have seen worse, and I wanted to be fair. But yes, this film is that bad, that it only deserves 2 stars. After you watch it, you will be left with these questions in your head "what did I just watch, and why did I sit though it all???". Do yourself a favor and skip this one ;D You can thank me later!