Welcome to Me (2014)

When Alice Klieg wins the Mega-Millions lottery, she immediately quits her psychiatric meds and buys her own talk show.

Director:

Shira Piven

Writer:

Eliot Laurence

Stars:

Kristen Wiig, James Marsden, Linda Cardellini

1 win & 2 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Kristen Wiig	...	Alice Klieg
Wes Bentley	...	Gabe Ruskin
Linda Cardellini	...	Gina Selway
Joan Cusack	...	Dawn Hurley
Loretta Devine	...	Barb Vaughn
Jennifer Jason Leigh	...	Deb Moseley
Thomas Mann	...	Rainer Ybarra
James Marsden	...	Rich Ruskin
Tim Robbins	...	Dr. Daryl Moffet
Alan Tudyk	...	Ted Thurber
Kulap Vilaysack	...	Grace Dao
Mitch Silpa	...	Derek
Anelia Dyoulgerova	...	Magda
Joe Roland	...	Technical Director
Joyce Hiller Piven	...	Miriam Klieg

Storyline

Alice suffers from borderline personality disorder, but she has what she needs in life. She has an apartment, she has a best friend, and she has tapes of every Oprah Winfrey show. And now, after winning the lottery, she also has 83 million dollars. What she doesn't have is an outlet for the whole world to know who she really is. The TV station cut her off when she tried turning her lottery announcement into a frank discussion of her sexual experiences, but with her money in hand, she's off to LA to convince two struggling TV producer brothers to produce her own TV show. Whatever it costs, she's going to do it. From swan entrances to dog neutering, she is going to introduce the world to Alice. But is the world ready for Alice?

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Plot Keywords:

fictional tv show | lottery winner | cable tv show | telethon | black comedy | 

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Taglines:

Alice is going to be on TV whether you like it or not

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Genres:

Comedy | Drama

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for sexual content, some graphic nudity, language and brief drug use

Details

Official Sites:

Official Facebook Official Site

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

1 May 2015 (USA)

Also Known As:

Bana Hos Geldiniz

Filming Locations:

Whitewater, California, USA

Box Office

Opening Weekend USA:

$38,000, 3 May 2015, Limited Release

Gross USA:

$608,852, 7 June 2015

Company Credits

Production Co:

BRON Studios,Gary Sanchez Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

87 min

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

In the beginning, right before Alice puts the VHS recording of The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986) in the VCR, a VHS cassette labeled "SNL" is shown, referencing (Kristen Wiig)'s career as a cast member on Saturday Night Live (1975).

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Goofs

While Alice is neutering Godzilla, there is clearly no incision.

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Quotes

Alice Klieg: I love your facial expressions.

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Crazy Credits

Some of the closing credits are shown over the red recording indicator of a camcorder.

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Connections

Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: Kristen Wiig/Thomas Middleditch/Josh Groban (2015)

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Soundtracks

Catch A Falling Star
Written by Lee Pockriss & Paul Vance
Performed by Mrs. Miller
Courtesy of EMI Records
Under license from Universal Music Enterprises

User Reviews

A great film !

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