I-Wish-I-Could-Get-Those-Two-Hours-Back Pie

In "Waitress," an internally feisty diner maid relies on her skill as a masterful creator of apparently "blissful" pies in order to combat her otherwise depressed life. Married to a weakling of an abusive husband, and working under the management of a snarly rodent of a boss, we find Jenna in the first scene having just peed on a plastic stick. Two pink lines. Blah blah blah. So begins the nine-month-long movie.

In a none-too-complex and "what?" inducing plot line, the film finds some success. Keri Russell is darling. Truly, the inconsistent double-negative (southern?) colloquial speak aside, she gives a sassy and credible performance. Far beyond that, however, the single most redeeming quality of this film is Andy Griffith (Andy Griffith?!) as stodgy Old Joe, who provides not only the true comic relief, but also the only out for our darling protagonist. His desire for orange juice without ice is, without question, the single most investing aspect of the plot.

Small successes aside, the film manages to be wholly depressing without inducing any genuine care for the characters. Jenna's husband Earl, played by Jeremy Cisto (Elton from "Clueless"...I liked him better in the 90's), wreaks through the screen of coors light and hot pockets, while Jenna blankly pacifies his need to control her. The film is awkwardly blatant in illustrating this point. He throws things and then kisses her pregnant belly. He tells her he loves her even though she's "fat." He insists that she promise to love him more than the damn fetus. It's disgusting, and yet, instead of palm-to-the-heart, head-shaking disgust for her situation, I instead found myself shaking my head for the bozo who would call this characterization subtle.

The goings-on in the film just don't make sense. I'm getting annoyed just writing about it. She sleeps with her married OBGYN. Upon seeing the baby, Jenna tells off her husband with zero repercussions. The pie metaphors sprinkled throughout resolve with Jenna and daughter Lulu in their diner-turned-pie shop (paid for with funds from a Saint-Peter's-Gates-bound Andy Griffith!) in the same town where she ditched her worthless husband and the well-intentioned Dr. Lover. It's absurd. Quite frankly, I wish Earl would have killed her.

Waitress Pie:
Day-Old Crust
3 c Moldy Blueberries
1 T My Blood
2 c condensed milk
12 c sugar

...Ah, hell, I don't know what else. I want to explain how hateful it all was, but it's not worth my lack of creativity. The only thing that makes it worse is that now I want a slice of something. Or to slice something period. Either way.

A case for contraceptives pie.

Waitress. This is a film that yanks on your heartstrings. If your heartstrings are easily persuaded by pie creation fantasies emboldened by piano-heavy musical interludes. While it worked in Das Boot, it falls flat here.

We open with an overhead shot of pie after pie after pie after pie after pie being created. We see bananas, we see berries, we see custard, we see crusts. And we see credits. While I'm sure preparing a pie has its virtues, sitting through these credits was boring. When the action begins in earnest, we are further disappointed as we realize we have mistakenly begun watching an adaptation of Steel Magnolias.

The protagonist, Jenna, works in a dinner that serves pies. Her only friends are her two fellow waitresses. They also serve pies. But Jenna makes the best pies. She also makes babies, it turns out. However, there's twist!

The twist is that her husband, Earl, is abusive. He drives up, honks his horn, hits her, and demands that she "make him feel like a man." Making him feel like a man is Southern, I presume, for making her have sex with him. And bake him pies.

So here she is. Doesn't like her husband much. Dreams about baking pies. She's pregnant. And she's utterly miserable. Like Sarah Palin, she decides that though she doesn't want the child, she'll have it anyway. Hey, things could be worse. She could be unwed.

Predictably enough she goes to see her doctor. To make a tediously long story short, she kisses him abruptly and then they have a lot of sex in his office during her check-ups. It's a classic romance in too many ways to count.

Meanwhile, one of her waitress friends marries a stalker named for the state of Oklahoma, the other neglects her invalid husband and starts banging the fry cook. None of this really makes sense, but we go along with it because we're enthralled by the voice over letters to the unborn child. And the pie preparation fantasies. Sort of like the Requiem for a Dream sequences in which they shoot up, except with pies.

Like an artist, Jenna mines her innermost emotions to develop pastries that knock the socks off her diner patrons. Heartbreak pie, I'm doing my gynecologist pie, lonely pie, and -- occasionally -- Chicken Soup for the Waitress' Soul pie.

I hardly have the energy to go on. Jenna then befriends the owner of the diner, a hilarious old man who does hilarious things like pretend to read her horoscope while actually just giving her advice about her predicament. Everyone says he's a mean, obstinate man with a heart of pure coal but we soon realize he's a teddy bear. We'll call him Miss Daisy, for short.

Anyway, she continues the affair with the doctor, then gives birth, then falls in love with the child she despised, then dumps her abusive husband, then finds out that Miss Daisy has conveniently died and left her several hundred thousand dollars, then dumps the doctor. Anyway, none of that really matters -- at least it didn't to me.

Then we see she and her daughter, Lulu, in yellow dresses walking away from the pie shop they built with love, determination, and $200,000 of Miss Daisy's money. Everything turns out real great. Except that instead of feeling satisfied, you feel as though you've been robbed of your time. And perhaps contemplate the similarity between the words pie and die.

Nixon, abbreviated.

Secret Honor. Before the opening credits, Robert Altman beats us over the head with a fictional stick. Using white on black scrolling text, he emphasizes the fic-fic-fictional nature of this character study of Richard Nixon. But not the real Nixon. I mean, he's real, but not as he's portrayed in the film. It is non-non-fiction, based on actual events, but is not actually actual, etc.

Bobby A. was rather presumptuous to think that anyone would care enough about the film to question its accuracy. Its sequence of events from minute one to minute fifteen lopes through a half-decent Nixon stand-in's choppy movement from tape recorder to scotch decanter to scotch bottle to security cameras and back again. Mr. Nixon stutters and awkwardly gestures his way through frantic speech that one might think would hold the viewer's interest. I fell into a multi-minute coma before the image of a gun brought some color back to my face.

Then nothing happened. Again.

I didn't finish it, didn't need to, and wish the gun would have gotten some action before I pressed stop.

Impeached from my DVD player.

Secret Honor. Suspension of disbelief is instantaneously destroyed with the pre-credits disclaimer that this quasi-realistic film has, for the purposes of storytelling, made things up. Occasionally, I expect things to be made up. But I'd prefer to believe that they're real. Especially when they're about real people. Fortunately, if you missed this warning the job will be swiftly accomplished by the actor's poor likeness to Richard Nixon. And his British accent. Actually, he doesn't have a British accent. But he looks British, anyway.

Before the film was prematurely ejected, there were a few things worth noting. It is possible to infer that Richard Nixon, following his disgraced presidency, locked himself away in a house with security cameras, a loaded revolver, and a decanter of brandy.

He also had a tape recorder and microphone. Had we continued watching more than about three minutes past the credit squence, I'm sure that these would have been used as a device with which to normalize Nixon's talking to himself. After all, he's the only character and you might stand to wonder how on God's good earth he'd be able to fill all that time alone.

I do feel slightly ashamed to have given up on this so soon. After all, it's a Robert Altman film. It's about history. And I like history. But the truth of the matter is that if I can't have the product of Aaron Sorkin's drug-addled mind, I'd rather not have representative democracy at all. At least not fictionalized representative democracy.

In high school, teachers used to say on the first day, "As of now, everyone has an 'A.'" While 'Secret Honor' may be subject to that same standard, it rapidly begins to fail. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and suggest that it may be a allegory for it's subject's presidency.

Commited. To Nonsense.

Shock Corridor. From the opening credits, this would-be cult film appears to channel 1940's melodrama, but then descends into something altogether more crass. Our hero, Johnny, seeks the Pulitzer by faking his way toward admittance into a mental hospital by feigning incestuous interest in his sister, played by Kathy, his stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold girlfriend. Particularly exciting inmates... patients?... include the aria singing lard cake, the KKK channeling black man, and the lady "nymphos (doctor-prescribed)," who, while serenading him with a chilly a cappella rendition of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," proceed to maul Johnny on sight. He leaves the scene bloody and bandaged. Please note that said nymphos are the only institutionalized women we see in the film. Extraordinary that there are so many of the lusty bunch.

"My mama fed me bigotry for breakfast and ignorance for supper" is a favorite line. Thank you, Major Lieutenant Colonel Loon. We loved the civil war, too.

Rotten Tomatoes: a 90% approval rating? You're usually so dependable.

B- for Bored on Friday Night. We don't have friends anyway.

There are better ways to win a Pulitzer, Johnny.

Shock Corridor. A romp along the superhighway to insanity, this piece sits on the high altar of films depicting journalistic aspiration. Contemplate a black-and-white Bob Woodward with a stripper girlfriend. The reporter for a generic newspaper decides to admit himself to an insane asylum so that he can investigate the death of patient. All this to win the Pulitzer. While seemingly an air-tight plan, we soon learn that insanity, in fact, is contagious.

However, this plan goes awry when the director decides to abandon plot altogether and instead present a seemingly unending parade of vignettes depicting the insane. There's a man who thinks he's a Confederate officer, and another who is obscenely fat, stuffs gum in his mouth, and sings opera. There's a black Ku Klux Klan member as well as the usual catalogue of catatonic hall-standers, screamers, and even a merciless band of nymphomaniacs who nearly rape our protagonist.

After what seems like hours of treading water with useless character development, we finally return to the task at hand -- attempting to locate the murderer. After suffering through all that needless footage, we are pained to discover that the secret to closing the case is merely asking the three patients who witnessed the murder, "Who did it?" Case closed.

However, it's too late. The journalist has lost his mind. The results likely would have been different had the author allowed him to ask this simple question sooner, instead of dragging both him -- and us -- through unnecessary caricature.

In addition, I was highly distracted by a lack of continuity in the brutal skirmish between the Pulitzer hopeful and a male attendant. The leg of a table appeared askew in one shot, then perpendicular in the next. This lack of attention to detail brings to question the film's Criterion Collection status. Also, there are several scenes of Japan shot in color on what appears to be a home video camera. Given the fact the film takes place almost solely within the walls of an 'institution,' I have no idea why these even exist.

However, there are several memorable quotes and no dearth of questionable language. Nymphos, whores, and impotence included.