![]() ![]() The new change of leadership at Fillmore Graves, Chase Graves (Jason Dohring) Peyton’s (Aly Michalka) continued investigation into the dominatrix murder Harley Johns (Andrew Caldwell) and his fellow zombie truthers and the return of Blaine’s (David Anders) dark side are all major plot lines with long-term consequences. The latest episode of iZombie, “Twenty-Sided, Die”, is one of the most entertaining of the series, as well as one with some big implications for the rest of the season. Major: I’m Sirjay Esclaborne, the human paladin. Ty Burr can be reached at For more on movies, go to /ae /movies/blog.Ravi: I’m Mosco Bandywax of the Murkwood Bandywaxes. "Waitress" is about women whose lives are defined by their regrets - baked in a pie and eaten whole - until they decide they have to live without them. Dawn's a spinster in the making when she gets a suitor in the geeky Ogie (Eddie Jemison ), she initially spurns him as a "stalking elf." Yet many of the characters the actress played during her career eventually came around to what they thought they wanted no part of, and so it is here. Shelly does, though, in her comparatively small role. Everyone in "Waitress" speaks in smart deadpan-ese - the tone Shelly learned from and taught to Hal Hartley - but Russell never cracks and lets us peer into her character's achy-breaky heart. She gives an intensely lik able performance (no more so than when she allows a goony-bird grin to float across Jenna's face), but it's on the thin side. Not surprisingly, Russell appears stunned you can almost hear the gears in the actress' s head whine with the strain of pulling in opposite directions. "Waitress" walks the line between whimsy and the pit. One of the reasons the film works hard to be light is because lines like "I just want to run away - what kind of mother is that?" are so heavy. Shelly is said to have written the script out of the anxieties of being pregnant with her daughter, born in 2003. "Waitress" can afford to be frivolous on the subject - in fact, it's charming and often very funny on the subject - because its worries are so real. But does it have to be an examining table? He's married, she's married and pregnant could it get any worse? Because we're in Shelly-land, where everything's open to consideration, adultery is at least allowed to be put on the table. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion of "Serenity "), the instant attraction both shocks them and turns them on. When "Waitress" introduces Jenna's new, obstetrician a muddled but sensitive dreamboat named Dr. Post-Hartley magical realism verging on cartoonishness is more her niche, with Matthew Irving's cinematography giving each shot a rich, kitschy glow. (In a way, the movie could be read as "The Andy Griffith Show" if anyone had bothered to ask Helen Crump what she thought.)Īs a director, Shelly isn't interested in realism. Old Joe, it turns out, is played by Andy Griffith, and that sly white-haired bear, filling an entire diner booth by himself, is just the grounding principle "Waitress" needs. Jenna works at Old Joe's Pie Diner somewhere in the june - bug South, where her co-workers include the brassy, unhappily married Becky (Cheryl Hines ) and the sweetly nerdy Dawn (Shelly). Pastry is her prose, the daily specials board her diary. Stalled in a marriage to a crude galoot named Earl (Jeremy Sisto ), small-town diner waitress Jenna (Keri Russell ) sighs and folds her emotions into desserts with baroque names and quixotic ingredients: I Hate My Husband pie, I Don't Want Earl's Baby pie, Baby Screaming Its Head Off in the Middle of the Night and Ruining My Life pie. Pies, as it happens, are what the movie's heroine uses for therapy. But ingredients are for transforming in the final meal. Funny, then, that it's built on fears, of motherhood and of making one's own way in the world. The movie is as warm and flaky as a homemade pie, and fashioned with as much love. "Waitress" isn't a great film, but it is great, deep-dish fun, with a generosity of spirit that extends first to the sisters on the screen and in the audience, then to the rest of humanity. Shelly went behind the camera as early as 1997, and one of the smaller tragedies surrounding her appallingly senseless murder last November is that her third feature as writer-director turned out to be the breakthrough. Flame-haired, cute as a button, tossing out one wisecrack after another in that brainiac tweety-bird voice, the actress was a working definition of indie-flick sex appeal for the first half of the '90s. Her first movie, director Hal Hartley's "The Unbelievable Truth" (1989), gave her to us fully formed, a unique, self-possessed creature immediately at home in the pop landscape. ![]() Some of us fell in love with Adrienne Shelly right out of the gate.
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