It is said that fortune favours the brave, and true enough - our decision to push on with Saturday night's showing of Waitress, despite the doom-laden weather forecast, paid off in spades. We had a fantastic pie competition - plaudits, congratulations and winners pie plates for Gennifer and Roe - and the movie was - by the barest measure - another tasty delight. See below for photos.
With only the merest inkling of the plotline, I was hoping it would be more than 'just another chickflick'. And for the first 45 minutes, it showed some good signs. Some nice offbeat humour, an interesting construct of moving the plot along with Jenna's wildly named pie creations (for example, "Pregnant Miserable Self Pitying Loser Pie - Lumpy oatmeal with fruitcake mashed in. Flambe, of course…”)
However, after a while the cliches started to show. The crotchety old regular customer with his home-spun philosophy - underneath it all, he's a really perceptive guy. The sassy waitress friend who is obviously having an affair. The incredibly one-dimensional, cartoon-like 'bad husband'. And of course the ugly duckling waitress friend who gets a miraculous makeover, and is really pretty after all. (Yea right, it's the stunning Keri Russell who performs the makeover who is really the drudge...) And altogether too much tonsil hockey between Jenna and her befuddled, spellbound doctor.
But the biggest cliche is Keri Russell's pie-making waitress. Any movie watcher can see she is talented, attractive, perceptive, strong, witty and caring. So why is she the one who has a loser husband, a dead-end job, and cannot summon the willpower to do anything about her situation ? Why, so there will be a storyline for us to be engrossed in, of course.
When putting so many obvious cliches up on the screen, you better entertain me, you better take my mind off the shallowness of these characterisations by giving me an interesting story and a few good emotional flips. Waitress just about manages this, but it's a close run thing. The denoument is entirely predictable - crotchety old guy dies, but leaves a fortune to Jenna for her fresh start - but I have to admit, we got there in a reasonably entertaining way, with a few smirks thrown in.
And I'm noticing a trend in our movies, where I'm discovering that previously unnoticed leading ladies are, well, gorgeous. Last week, Juliette Binoche, this week Keri Russell. Where have you lovely ladies been all my movie-going life ?

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