"Welcome to the Rileys" Relation of a Fan

Isabella Van Dijk is a fan who attended to the Boston Film Festival and watched Welcome to the Rileys!
I went to their site and saw that it was possible for “random” people to attend the festival as well, so my next step was: find someone to
go with me. Eventually I found a friend that was willing to go and we bought the tickets (on the internet) on Monday night.

We took the train, tried not to get lost and when we got there, a sign with “Boston Film Festival” was waiting for us. I still had a little
shred of hope that Kristen would surprisingly still come, but of course that didn’t happen. This story would not have been this way if
that had happened. ;)

The movie was supposed to start at 6.45pm and 10 minutes before that a woman came to say that Melissa Leo would be arriving shortly and a few minutes after that we could go into the auditorium and get seated. Melissa Leo was introduced and the movie could finally START!
When I went in I expected this sentimental movie, but also for it to be a movie that I would have plenty to think about once it was finished, which is basically the purpose of an Indie. ;)

Imagine this: a car on fire on an empty parking lot in the dark. That’s the very first scene of the movie. And then it switches
to the Rileys and it kind of shows the viewers their life after the accident. You don’t know what caused their relationship to be the way
it is until later in the movie, when Kristen is already in the scenes. Doug is cheating on Lois (his wife), but when his mistress dies from
an acute heart attack he has no one to join him on his trip to New Orleans as he has to go on a two day convention. When the convention
gets too much for him on his very first day he decides to enter a random strip joint where he meets the one and only *drum rolls*
Mallory (aka KRISTEN). She offers to give him a personal lap dance and he refuses but when he runs into her again the same night he offers to bring her home. After which they make a deal: he pays her a 100$ every day, for that he can live at her house and he makes a silent vow to himself to help this 16-year old stripper get on her feet again. To make a long story short his wife decides to finally leave the house
(after 4 years of being scared of leaving the house after her daughter’s car crash) and going to New Orleans to see why her husband
isn’t coming home. When she arrives he tries to explain the situation, the whole thing turns out to get out of hand and Mallory gets mad at
Lois and Doug for them wanting her to be their little girl. They get in a huge fight, she runs away and the Rileys go back to Indianapolis.
Two weeks later she calls them with the message that she stopped working at the bar and is leaving for Vegas. For the Kristen-lovers, I can tell you that the camera shots are sometimes, how do I call it… Revealing. With her non-costumes and foul vocabulary, this is Kristen like you’ve never seen her. The amount of times the word f*ck was thrown into a sentence was too much to count, but the overall story was, like I expected, something to think about. As Melissa explained in the Q&A after the movie ended this movie wasn’t about New Orleans, but about the connection these people have to each other and what influence they have on each other’s lives. This movie may be considered unconventional, but it’s these kinds of movies that make you aware of these problems. If we’re talking about the acting in this movie I would say that it’s outstanding. Like I said, it’s Kristen like you’ve never seen her before. She swears, almost shows her private parts, TALKS about them like she talks about random subjects, sobs, is this badass girl throughout the movie, and acts the hell out of the screen.
Playing Bella is one thing, but playing a character like this, must have been so grueling for her. I cannot imagine how the shoots must
have been for her. I have even greater respect for her than before, I can tell you that.
As for the other actors, Melissa and James were also amazing. All the emotions that they wanted to convey were THERE. I have no other words than AMAZING. When everything was done, I was talking to my friend about the movie and we agreed about one thing in particular, this movie was special. It’s not a family movie; it’s just a movie that you need to see. It’s provocative and bold and yet again I repeat myself: go see it. You’ll go out not being able to NOT think about it and what message it conveys. I’d like to say that I really enjoyed myself. I loved the movie and couldn’t stop thinking of all the Kristen fans who would LOVE to see this movie once it comes out in November (in the USA). Once the movie and the Q&A that Melissa gave at the end of the movie was over we went outside of the theater, grabbed a McDonald’s and I know that I thought about how different Kristen would be for me, now that I’ve seen her in this role. She’s such an amazing actress that Bella won’t change for me, but the image of Kristen and what her badass-self dares to play is something definitely worth recognizing as special.