Waitress has received plenty of
attention for a reason that has nothing to do with its quality: The
film’s writer, director, and co-star, Adrienne Shelly, was murdered
shortly after the movie wrapped and was submitted to the Sundance
Film Festival. Shelly never got to hear any reaction to Waitress,
never even found out that it was accepted to the festival before she
died.

Happily, there’s no need for critics to
go soft and sentimental because of the tragedy – Waitress is
excellent, a lovely legacy for the former indie It girl. It’s also a
triumph for Keri Russell, the film’s star. Russell plays Jenna, a
Southern diner waitress with a talent for making pies. She’s
miserable with her rotten husband, Earl (Jeremy Sisto), whose
behavior ranges from annoying (honking repeatedly as he’s getting
close when he picks her up) to abusive (casually belittling her and
grabbing her when he’s angry). Jenna’s squirreling money away –
Earl takes her tips every night – and hopes to leave him. But
things get complicated when she finds out she’s pregnant. Since their
relationship isn’t exactly affectionate, Jenna knows it happened the
one night he got her wasted. “I do stupid things when I drink,”
she tells her co-workers. “Like sleep with my husband.”

Waitress is a small movie, but its
characters, its humor, and its warmth have universal appeal. Jenna
decides to have the child, dreaming up pies in an effort to stave off
her unhappiness about the situation. Resulting concoctions include I
Hate My Husband Pie. Or, when she finds herself attracted to her new,
bumbling doctor (Nathan Fillion), the I Can’t Have No Affair Because
Its Wrong and I Don’t Want Earl to Kill Me Pie. Perhaps the most
appealing thing about Jenna is that she doesn’t suffer from
movie-motherhood syndrome, going all gooey over the prospect of a
little bundle. “I’m having the baby and that’s that,” she informs
a perplexed Dr. Pomatter. “It’s not a party.”

Jenna’s storyline is central, but
Shelly beautifully fleshes out the supporting characters as well,
including Becky (Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Cheryl Hines) and Dawn
(Shelly), her fellow lovelorn servers, and Joe (Andy Griffith), the
cranky owner of the diner who comes in regularly to give Jenna hell
with his picky orders and, eventually, the counsel and support that
ultimately leads her to a life-changing decision. They’re all likable
while being far from saccharine, and more important, they all ring
true: Becky has more to her than what threatens to be cliched
Flo-like sass; the slightly dorky Dawn is lonely but not pitiable as
she begins a relationship with someone who initially seems to be a
loser – and even he isn’t drawn as a misunderstood prince, just a
decent person. The sharpest portrait, though, is Griffith’s Joe, a
character that every waitress in neighborhood joints country-wide
will probably recognize. 

Russell is the movie’s biggest surprise
in her first leading big-screen role. Her Jenna is sweet with a side
of tart and subtle all the way through. It’s all in her face, from
Jenna’s mulling-it-over grimace when Earl is begging for sex to her
outright horror when she spots someone else’s screaming kid. Sisto is
also slimily (and sometimes humorously) perfect as the poisonous
husband who isn’t a cardboard monster, but occasionally elicits
moments of sympathy that more acutely demonstrate the tough spot
Jenna’s in. Though full of tiny truths, Waitress’ main message is one
that you can’t help but hope Shelly practiced herself: “This life
will kill you,” Joe advises Jenna. “Make the right choices.”

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com

I love you so much I could just…strangle you

According to the director of 51 Birch
Street, Mike and Mina Block are “hardly people you’d think of
making a documentary about.” He should know: Doug Block is their
son. And he went ahead and made a film about them anyway. Initially
Block was videotaping his parents merely for posterity, but when his
mother died suddenly – and his 83-year-old father then married his
former secretary just as suddenly – he started to piece together a
portrait of a marriage, Capturing the Friedmans-style.

Dad’s
remarriage, while shocking, isn’t the only thing that inspired Block
to turn the story of their 54-year partnership into a movie, though –
Block’s mother may have no longer been around to talk to her son
about her life, but 35 years’ worth of her daily journals, faithfully
kept and openly written, were. 51 Birch Street is engrossing and
uncomfortable, often offering stomach-twisting honesty about the true
feelings behind the couple’s photographed smiles.

Block’s
relationship with his still sprightly father was never very close,
and he doesn’t exactly spill his guts here about the strength  of his
marriage or what, if anything, went on with his new wife, Kitty, 30
years before. But Mina’s ruminations are aching, revealing inner
turmoil and pretense that are scandalous if only because they
occurred  in lives so seemingly ordinary. (Especially interesting are
her insights about being a housewife in the straitjacketed ’50s and
turbulent ’60s.) Block never suspected any unhappiness growing up,
and seeks unknowable answers from his sisters, a friend of Mina’s,
and even a therapist and rabbi (both useless) as the reality sinks
in. The project then becomes autobiography, with Block examining his
own marriage and contentment in a new light. The triumph of 51 Birch
Street is that, as you’re driving home past fast-food joints and
strip malls, you’ll be thinking about your own life as well.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com   

Maybe they wouldn’t beat you up if you took off that stupid helmet

The Flying Scotsman, the Man: Graeme
Obree, a Scottish bike messenger and shopkeeper, husband and father
of one. He and his wife, a nurse, barely make ends meet. Obree
suffers from bipolar disorder, which hit him particularly hard after
the sudden death of his brother in 1994.

The Flying Scotsman, the Legend: An
amateur cyclist who designed and built a bike out of scraps and
washing-machine parts. He used the bike and a revolutionary riding
position to repeatedly break longstanding records. Despite his
success, Obree could not escape his illness and attempted suicide
several times.

The Flying Scotsman, the Movie: A flat,
superficial telling of the inherently interesting story described
above.

Director Douglas Mackinnon’s debut film
about the accomplishments of Obree (Jonny Lee Miller) begins
ominously, showing a hooded character carrying a bike through the
woods and tossing a rope over a tree branch. Cut to a wee Graeme
singing in a choir, a handful of bullies sneering at him from outside
the church. After services, the boy doesn’t get very far before the
other kids surround him and give him a mild thrashing. Graeme’s
old-school Scottish parents are upset, but don’t want to run to the
principal. “You’re just going to have to learn to stand up to
them,” his dad tells him. To help with speedy getaways, Graeme gets
a bicycle for Christmas.

Some 20 years later, in 1993 Glasgow,
Obree is still tooling around town on his bike, delivering packages
lightning-quick – if to the wrong locations – and meeting Malky
(The Lord of the Rings’ Billy Boyd), a fellow courier and cycling
enthusiast. Obree tells Malky of his crazy plan to attempt the break
the world hour record, which had been set by an Italian professional
rider some nine years back. And Obree was going to do it on a bike of
his own design, figuring out the physics of making a more aerodynamic
vehicle and using whatever parts he had available to him. Helping him
with scrap and encouragement was Douglas Baxter (Brian Cox), a
widowed minister who’d stopped at Obree’s struggling bike shop on one
of its final days. Malky becomes his manager, who suffers
humiliations such as “Hey, I know you…you’re the bike messenger!”
when he represents himself as part of a firm and tries to get
meetings with possible sponsors.

It took a trio of screenwriters –
John Brown, Declan Hughes, and Simon Rose – to come up with what’s
ultimately an outline of Obree’s life. Besides living an apparently
stressful hand-to-mouth existence with his wife, Anne (Laura Fraser),
and their barely glimpsed baby, there’s no reason given regarding why
Obree sets such an apparently impossible goal for himself, under
impossible conditions. He fails, he succeeds, he sidesteps the
spotlight, he aims high again – the movie is little but 96 minutes
of career highlights. And the widely reported lows? See Obree alone
on a stairwell at a celebration party. Or looking contemplative as he
sits near a shore, telling a seemingly needlessly concerned Baxter,
“Everyone gets down sometimes.”

One scene nearly conveys the
hopelessness and desperation a manic-depressive may feel: After
beating the world hour record on his second attempt, Obree falls
apart when his achievement is topped about a week later. Somewhat
ridiculously, he’s apparently still dogged by his childhood bullies,
who taunt him — “You think yer better than us?” — when he goes
into their bar to use a phone. Later, Obree’s depressed and alone in
his house, hiding when one of his tormentors knocks on his door. The
dude gives a long, allegedly biting speech of some sort – the
actor’s accent is too thick to decipher much – and Obree crumbles,
holding his mouth as he cries in a desperate attempt to keep the man
from hearing him.

Miller, at least, does well with what
he’s given. (Though, after a string of American flops such as Dracula
2000, Mindhunters, and Melinda and Melinda, it’d be difficult to do
worse.) The Brit carries a respectable Scottish accent and remains
likable despite his character’s obsession with biking (when he
naughtily tells his wife to get on the floor, it’s only to prove a
pedal theory of his) and general stubbornness (when the Union
Cycliste Internationale bans his riding position, he refuses to race
differently, even though it means almost certain disqualification).
Fraser lends hints of the strong woman Obree’s wife was supposed to
be, going through hell whether financially or when dealing with her
husband’s demons, but Anne is used as little more than a cheerleader
here. And Boyd, well, he’s still Pippen, and even if you don’t buy
him as a get-it-done manager type, he’s innocuous enough.

The racing scenes themselves are
naturally exciting, although even here Mackinnon sometimes falters by
just showing Obree zooming around a track, his legs blurred and his
face pained, without any indication of time – he’s sure going fast,
but is it fast enough, or is he failing? And while Obree’s breaking
of the world hour record is shown, many of his later achievements are
related only through newspaper headlines. We don’t get any more
information about his depression, either, except a repeat of the
forest scene and a closeup of happy, then darkened eyes as Obree’s
final crowning closes the film. Regardless of the real man’s
achievements, the filmic Scotsman merely sputters.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com

Do your deathbeds come in king size?

There’s no way around it: Vacancy is
nasty. The premise is about a creepy motel owner, as if there’s any
other kind, who manages a gang of murderers and surreptitiously
shoots snuff films in the rooms. He then sells them, and he also
enjoys them – in fact, he’s watching one of his creations at top
volume when his next targets wander into the lobby at the start of
the movie. But it’s not like the guests don’t get any warning. Each
filthy room comes complete with a VHS collection of the men’s
previous work for the customers’ viewing terror, heavy on women in
nighties getting pulled around by their hair.

Yet…well, if you can excuse its
inherent abhorrence, Vacancy is pretty good, too. Props go to
director Nimrod Antal for maximizing tension while minimizing
gore – are you listening, Eli Roth? –  which makes this most
dangerous game way more palatable. It all begins with a slasher-flick
cliche: Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and David (Luke Wilson), a couple on
the verge of divorce, are on a road trip and realize they’re lost
after David tries a shortcut. Things get worse when he swerves to
avoid a raccoon and screws up the car. Naturally, they’re in the
middle of nowhere, and naturally, it’s the middle of the night. (It
doesn’t help that their honeymoon has long been over: When Amy
repeatedly calls the animal they nearly hit a squirrel, David hisses,
“You know? It was a fucking raccoon.”) So they reluctantly check
in to a deserted motel, cared for by Mason (Frank Whaley), a thin,
long-faced nerdly type with giant glasses and a grudge.

Vacancy is Antal’s first American movie
and only his second feature after his excellent debut, the Hungarian
festival-favorite Kontroll. Like that film, Vacancy is highly
claustrophobic, taking place mainly in the small motel room as well
as a suffocating tunnel system underneath. It’s also efficient: Amy
and David have barely settled in when the phone rings (no one’s
there), there’s banging on the door (no one’s there), the phone rings
again (you guessed it) and the banging resumes (this time on a door
adjoining another room as well as the couple’s own). It’s all
terrifically disturbing and should tense you up good for the rest of
the hunt, in which Amy and David are heavily surveilled and find
themselves seemingly trapped by terrifying, gray-masked killers who
patiently wait to block the pair’s every dodge.

Comparisons to Psycho are inevitable,
but Antal pays homage to Hitchcock beyond the Bates-ian story line.
The credits are dramatic and menacing, large red and white blocked
letters accompanied by an aggressive string soundtrack. The
director’s shots are often elegant, too, such the moment he captures
Amy’s reaction to the car breaking down not by pointing the camera in
her face, but capturing her reflection in the driver’s side mirror.
Though the British Beckinsale occasionally loses her American accent,
she and Wilson are great as a combative couple and even better as
victims – these characters actually sweat, get dirty, and cry
during their ordeal, and you’re frightened for them every minute
(even when they’re just sniping at each other). For a plot that’s so
gleefully disturbing, Vacancy offers a surprising amount of
old-school class.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com

Killing her softly

From the opening moments of Fracture,
we know whodunit. A man witnesses his trophy wife cheating.    He
confronts her. And then he pops a cap in her face. He doesn’t bother
to act innocent when the cops  show up. I shot her, he tells them.
Here’s the weapon. Case closed, it would seem. Or is it?

Of course it isn’t. Ted Crawford
(Anthony Hopkins), the murderous cuckold, has a twinkle in his eye
when it all goes down, and though it first suggests far-gone madness,
really it’s delight that whatever   he’s been scheming has been set
in motion. Crawford staged the shooting as a hostage situation, to
ensure (at least according to movie reality) that the first person
he’d deal with would be Rob Nunally (Billy Burke), a negotiator and
the dude who’s been schtupping Crawford’s woman (Embeth Davidtz). Her
name is Jennifer Crawford, but Nunally only knew her as Mrs. Smith,
because, well, at the time it seemed cute that they didn’t know a
damn thing about each other outside of the hotel bedroom. When
Crawford  shows him Jennifer’s barely breathing body, Nunally attacks
him. Crawford’s arrested and brought to the precinct to give an
official confession, grinning with feathers sticking out of his mouth
all the while.   

On the other side of the law, an ace
assistant district attorney named Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling) is
celebrating his last days serving the public before starting a
position at a prestigious corporate firm. He’s called to take on one
more case, though – Crawford’s – and agrees only because it
promises to be over by lunch. Especially when Crawford asks to
represent himself, in an aw-shucks-it-can’t-be-that-hard kind of way
that leaves everyone agape. Even Beachum urges him to seek counsel,
but isn’t too upset about his next notch coming that much easier.

Fracture plays out like an extended
sweeps-week version of Law & Order – it goes on too long, has
extra-special guests, and delivers a that’s-it? instead of the bang
it so fervently makes you expect. Director Gregory Hoblit, who
fashioned a hit out of similar if stronger material in his feature
debut, 1996’s Primal Fear, may be to blame for the pacing problems
that makes Fracture’s nearly two-hour running time occasionally
drowsy. But as he did with that movie’s Edward Norton, who nabbed  an
Oscar nomination, Hoblit gets terrific performances out of his stars.
Then again, it’d probably be difficult not to: Hopkins’ portrayal of
a callous criminal will inevitably be compared to his Hannibal
Lecter. Crawford isn’t nearly as psychotic, but the actor’s approach
is just as fun to watch – he winks, he smiles, he seizes your
attention with his lined face and expressive blue eyes that suggest
he’s way smarter than you are and is having a great time watching you
try to figure him out. The greener Gosling, himself an Oscar nominee
for last year’s Half Nelson, is equally dazzling as the cocksure
lawyer who’s got as much charm as self-confidence in his ability to
win no matter what the circumstances.

And the circumstances in this case are
certainly stacked against him. The confiscated weapon isn’t the  gun
Crawford shot, and nobody can figure out where that one is.
Regardless, Beachum continues his dig, and even if you don’t figure
out what’s going on before the lawyer does, you’re sure to be
underwhelmed when the aha! moment arrives. Like with so many
thrillers, implausibility is Fracture’s weakness. Unlike so many
thrillers, though, the cat and mouse don’t get any more sensational
than this, so best to watch them play and pretend you’re as dumb as
the characters ultimately turn out to be.

copyright 2007 themoviebabe.com