New DVD Spin: Waitress, Skinwalkers, Drunken Angel

Waitress (Fox)

One of 2007's little independent films that demonstrated honest breakout appeal, this modest dramatic comedy charmer stars Keri Russell as Jenna, a waitress in a Southern roadside pie diner. Despite her "biblically" divine knack for creating new pies, Jenna is miserable, desperate and unhappily pregnant -- all thanks to her abusive, self-absorbed husband Earl (Jeremy Sisto). She takes out her frustrations in her famous "sensual" pies, such as her "I Can't Have No Affair Because It's Wrong And I Don't Want Earl To Kill Me Pie ... vanilla custard with banana. Hold the banana."

Fortunately, the sweet, emotionally open and (dang it all) married new ob-gyn in town (Nathan Fillion) gently offers Jenna more than just the stirrups to help her through her problematic time.

Keri Russell is, perhaps not surprisingly, almost too lovely for her role. Jenna is precision-engineered to tug every het male with a White Knight complex. Yet once again, Russell takes the lead with such natural freshness and skill, expressing an active feeling for delivery and detail, that Waitress reaffirms her longevity in this fickle biz.

The film's tone seesaws, sometimes inelegantly, between the melancholy and the comedic. Earl is written and performed as such a pathological creep that the mood can skew uncomfortably when he's on screen, then chirpy Cheryl Hines and writer-director Adrienne Shelly, as Jenna's co-workers, tilt the balance back toward the film's low-key humor and warm, quirky fruit filling. Two women with whom I watched the movie expressed afterward that making Jenna's already-wedded ob-gyn her love interest threatened to pluck an uneasy note. Andy Griffith's Old Joe, gruff and soft like a stuffed bear, is right on the money as the unexpected Obi-Wan Kenobi character.

The finale, with its saturated candy colors and over-the-rainbow vibe, marks either a deliriously happy ending or else, considering Shelly's propensity for magical realism slyness, a post-crisis hallucination suggesting dire things about the previous delivery room scene. Given Waitress' under-the-crust themes of empowerment and discovering your unknown self and starting fresh at any point in life, we're pretty sure which interpretation she intended. But as with the Earl scenes, the film might have been even more successful if its occasional excesses were dialed back a bit.

Waitress is not a perfectly cut, factory-line Safeway-brand slice. It does, though, serve up a generous deep-dish portion, homemade and heartfelt, that leaves a sweet taste goes down.

Because Waitress' writer-director-co-star Adrienne Shelly was murdered last year -- after Waitress was completed but before it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival -- Fox's DVD features a tribute to her and a message from Russell about a foundation established in Shelly's name to help female filmmakers. Other extras include behind-the-scenes featurettes; an audio commentary by Russell and producer Michael Roiff; three Fox Movie Channel "In Character With" promos with Russell, Cheryl Hines and Nathan Fillion; "Hi! I'm Keri, And I'll Be Your Waitress" all about Russell; and more.

Skinwalkers (Lionsgate)

What's worse than being torn to shreds and eaten alive by two rival factions of werewolves? The acting in Skinwalkers. Oh, and the script. The music's not so great either. And with director James Isaac's previous touted credit being Jason X, well, that tells you something too. Action fans willing to lower the bar to about the level of their skater shoes will probably enjoy the movie's second half with its big chase scene. Completists for Stan Winston's creature designs will have a harder time of it.

The DVD's bonus features include a "making of" featurette, info on the special effects, and a commentary track from director Isaac. Audio options include 6.1 DTS-ES, because, whoa, it's all about the subtle nuances.

Drunken Angel (Criterion)

In this powerful early (1948) noir from the great Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune bursts onto the screen as a volatile, tubercular criminal who strikes up an unlikely relationship with Takashi Shimura's jaded physician. Set in and around the muddy swamps and back alleys of postwar Tokyo, Drunken Angel is an evocative, moody snapshot of a treacherous time and place, featuring one of the most memorably violent climaxes from a director coming into his own as an influential auteur.

Criterion's DVD comes with a new, restored high-definition digital transfer, a new and improved English subtitle translation, plus authoritative extras: an audio commentary featuring Japanese-film scholar Donald Richie, a 30-minute documentary on the making of Drunken Angel, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create, and "Kurosawa and the Censors," a new 25-minute video piece that looks at the challenges Kurosawa faced in making the film. Accompanying the disc is a booklet with an essay by cultural historian Ian Buruma and excerpts from Kurosawa's Something Like an Autobiography.

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Mark Bourne

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