my favorite movies of 1995:

(1) Welcome to the Dollhouse

(2) Before Sunrise

(3) Living in Oblivion

favorite of 1995:

Welcome to the Dollhouse

(Heather Matarazzo, Brendan Sexton III, Eric Mabius. Directed by Todd Solondz.)

Coming-of-age movies typically show youth as a magical time, in which all the adolescent struggles are worth it for the wild fun and personal growth. There are geeks at school, but don’t worry about them — they’re in the background, or for comic relief, or to show us that the nerd can turn out to be a cool kid.

Welcome to the Dollhouse is the opposite of all that. From start to finish, the focus stays on a 7th-grade girl named Dawn Weiner (Heather Matarazzo), who looks, acts, and feels hopelessly awkward in her every waking moment. Her time at school is spent less on learning than on being tormented by students — from mockery over her last name, to insinuations about her sexuality, to rape threats. Going home offers no respite: she’s the ugly duckling of her family too.

Dawn tries to connect with people — with her only friend, with boys she likes. But, spoiler alert: there’s no hero to save her from her plight. She doesn’t undergo any stunning transformation. The torrent of abuse doesn’t help Dawn become a better person; on the contrary, she becomes so used to the bullying that she starts emulating it. No one in her life seems to have prepared Dawn for the daily slings and arrows she endures. (In a meeting with the principal and her mom after shooting a spitball, she explains: “I was fighting back.” Her mom is aghast: “Who ever told you to fight back?!”)

Welcome to the Dollhouse is a rare movie that refuses to lie to us to make us feel better. It never assures us that Dawn’s problems have solutions. So why watch it — just to be depressed? No, to love the unloved … to see how someone who isn’t saying or doing the right things still needs kindness and understanding … to think about how someone like Dawn will see better days but needs to take a long and bumpy road to get there.

Stream Welcome to the Dollhouse on Tubi or these sites.

2nd favorite of 1995:

Before Sunrise

(Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy. Directed by Richard Linklater.)

Richard Linklater’s trilogy about lovers and their conversations starts here.

I always have this strange feeling that I’m this very old woman laying down, about to die — you know, that my life is just her memories or something.

That’s so wild! I mean, I always think that I’m still this 13-year-old boy … who doesn’t really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll, you know, really have to do it.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy largely wrote their own lines. Hawke revealed how this idea emerged:

“Before Sunrise” was partly born out of Linklater’s disappointment with his previous feature, cult favorite “Dazed and Confused.”

“He was really disappointed in himself with how much better he did with the men than the women,” Hawke said. “The feeling he had ultimately when he was finished with the movie was that it was a boy movie. Its focus was on the male characters. It didn’t achieve the Chekhovian goal of being genderless, and his goal for ‘Before Sunrise’ was to invite a very strong woman and get two actors, male and female, and have them create their characters together.” …

Hawke recalled Linklater telling him the following: “I don’t want you to worry too much about the script. I’m inviting you to be a filmmaker with me. My whole life I’ve gone to the movies and there’s espionage and shootouts and helicopters, all this action. Everything that I see is all this drama, [so much so] that you would think my life, our lives, have no drama. That’s not the way I feel. My life feels very exciting to me and I’ve never been involved in a chase or a gun shootout. … And what’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me? Connecting with another human being. …”

Hawke continued, “Really what he is saying is that we are enough. It’s a hard thing for us, as people, to comprehend that. We are interesting. We are valuable. … At its essence, the movie is saying people witnessing each other has a huge power. Sometimes I leave ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘Avatar’ and I feel blue because I don’t have superpowers or magic. But I think Rick’s movies make you realize your life is magic.”

Stream Before Sunrise on these sites.

UPDATE: The next movie in the trilogy, Before Sunset, is my favorite movie of 2004. The end of the trilogy, Before Midnight, is one of my favorites of 2013. 

3rd favorite of 1995:

Living in Oblivion

(Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Peter Dinklage. Directed by Tom DiCillo.)

An indie comedy about making an indie drama.

At one point the director of the movie within the movie (Steve Buscemi) complains that an actor keeps missing his cue in a dream sequence, and the actor (Peter Dinklage, in his movie debut) retorts by challenging the director about why he was cast:

Why does my character have to be a dwarf?

It doesn’t have to be a dwarf.

Then why is he? Is that the only way you can make this a dream — put a dwarf in it? Have you ever had a dream with a dwarf in it? … I don’t even have dreams with dwarves in them!

Stream Living in Oblivion on Amazon Prime (free with ads), Tubi (free with ads), Kanopy, or these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.