THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES

Imaginative, impetuous and wild, Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) can’t wait for her adult life to begin. Whiling away the final days of high school in the lush springtime, Diana tests her limits with sex and drugs as her more conservative friend Maureen (Eva Amurri) watches with concern. But Diana’s aura of invincibility is shattered when a senseless act of violence erupts at school, forever changing the lives of the two best friends. Fifteen years later, a grown Diana (Uma Thurman) is still trying to come to terms with the traumatic events of that fateful day. On the surface, the adult Diana has made a picture perfect life for herself. She’s still living in the sleepy Connecticut suburb she grew up in with her husband Paul, a professor at the local college. Her beautiful young daughter, Emma, is smart and creative, and possesses a fiercely independent streak reminiscent of her mother. But all is not well—as the anniversary of her adolescent trauma approaches, the darkness that Diana has tried to escape closes in. Meanwhile, her husband has become increasingly absent, her daughter has taken to hiding from teachers, and worst of all, Diana’s own grip on reality is starting to falter. Moving seamlessly through both stages of Diana’s evolution, THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES delves deep into the crossroads that we all face—where a simple decision can change the course of everything to come, and where a lifetime can be encapsulated in a single moment. With THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES, Vadim Perelman, director of the acclaimed HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG, has established himself as one of America’s greatest young directors of serious, probing drama.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007)

Distributor: Disney

Cast: Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush and Chow Yun-Fat

Director: Gore Verbinski

Screenwriters: Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio

Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer

Genre: Fantasy adventure

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action/adventure violence and some frightening images

Running time: 168 min.

Release date: May 25, 2007

To understand how important Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is to Disney, its subsidiaries, shareholders and well-wishers, note that the movie’s first scene shows a lineup of bedraggled and resigned prisoners being hanged…for piracy. Sure, Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) hates piracy, especially the brand practiced by mincing troublemaker Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) since the Pirates saga began in 2003. But Disney hates piracy even more, specifically the kind that results in DVDs being hawked on New York street corners hours after a movie premieres in theatres.

But, as the third, and hopefully final, installment of the series begins, Disney’s second-quarter earnings report is not Jack’s problem. Jack’s problem is that he’s dead, killed by the fearsome Kraken at the end of Pirates 2. His supposed demise concluded a sequel that was smothered in plot, a problem that had slim chance of being alleviated here because Pirates 2 and 3 were shot simultaneously.

The story, by returning writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, is not to be passively understood but rather chased down with a net. Capturing this lumbering creature, made of shifting alliances, pirate babble and dialogue-obscuring accents, is nigh impossible. It doesn’t help that the first action sequence involves series newbie Chow Yun-Fat. He plays Sao Feng, a Chinese pirate captain in possession of a map that will lead Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush, having too much fun) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) to Jack, who resides in the limbo of Davy Jones’ locker. After stealing Feng’s map, they sail over the edge of the world where Jack and his beloved Black Pearl occupy a desolate, cracked-earth eternity that Terry Gilliam might have dreamed up.

The movie’s logic isn’t built for clarity but special effects opportunities, of which there are many. In limbo, Jack and the Black Pearl are deposited into the sea by thousands of white rocks that hatch into crabs. To escape limbo, the reunited crew rocks the ship back and forth until it capsizes, which, for some reason, transports them back to the land of the living. Jack’s return could not be better timed. He was the only missing member of the Nine Lords of the Brethren Court, a collective of pirate leaders whose solidarity is the key to defeating Beckett and his multi-tentacled ally Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), who continues to command freaky fishmates on the Flying Dutchman.

The Court’s summit on Shipwreck Island (imagine a meeting between the heads of New York’s mafia crime families) includes a cameo by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. As Captain Teague, keeper of a voluminous listing of proper pirate behavior called the Pirate’s Code, he adds nothing except a meta-nod to Depp’s inspiration for Jack’s half-drunken and slurry mannerisms. Richards makes slightly less of an impression than the feathery Bloom. His romance with Elizabeth, who manages to complete this grimy, pierced and tattooed adventure without acquiring a single smudge on her face, now feels a matter of obligation. Never has so much dialogue resulted in so little character.

And, since there are so many characters that require tending, Elliott and Rossio can’t possibly service them all satisfactorily. In Pirates 2, the mysterious witch Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris), all black lipstick and voodoo portend, was positioned for a role of future importance. In Pirates 3 she fills script needs. Davy Jones requires the softening that only a long-lost lover can provide? Give him Tia. Adventure-gorged moviegoers demand an epic battlefield for the climatic seafaring shootout? Have Tia grow 50 feet tall, turn into thousands of crabs and create an enormous whirlpool in which the ships can slug it out.

This whirlpool battle is admittedly pretty thrilling, and no matter how busy and cacophonous it gets, Verbinski never loses track of the action and even manages to compose some beautiful shots. But it’s sound effects and pixels, signifying nothing. Even Rick Heinrichs’ production design, a feast of detail in the first two movies, has become suffocating under the weight of unlimited funds. Comparatively, every scene on an empty beach feels like a vacation.

The arc of the Pirates trilogy resembles that of The Matrix series, where the success of a stand-alone movie gives way to lumbering, confusing sequels where the taint of inevitability is overcompensated for with lethal doses of plot. Depp, the main reason there’s a trilogy to speak of, has little to do in the finale other than remind us of the risk he took in making Jack a prancing, pickled, high-seas comedian. Indeed, the movie isn’t even satisfied with one Jack. We now have numerous Jacks who pop up in desperately oddball sequences where he hallucinates multiples of himself.

But give Depp a treasure chest worth of credit. He took a project that smacked of greed—a Disney movie based on a Disney theme park ride—and provided an unexpected, lighthearted and supremely welcome streak of anarchy. The tragedy is, the last two films are exactly what we feared the first one would be: corporate entertainment, heavy yet frivolous, trying to buy our love with bloated spectacle.

Waitress

Adrienne Shelly’s warm and joyful blue-collar comedy makes “quirky” a great place to be
****
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Cast: Keri Russell, Nathan Fillion, Cheryl Hines, Adrienne Shelly, Jeremy Sisto and Andy Griffith
Director/Screenwriter: Adrienne Shelly
Producer: Michael Roiff
Genre: Drama comedy
Rating: PG-13 for sexual content, language and thematic elements
Running time: 104 min.
Release date: May 2, 2007 ltd
Calling a movie “quirky” sounds like a putdown or a damning-with-faint-praise, but that’s only because it’s a term often used by critics reacting to insincere and straining movies that overlay mannerism on thin characters just to be cute. What the late Adrienne Shelly’s blue-collar comedy Waitress demonstrates is that, as a writer/director, Shelly understood “quirky” right down to the bone, and that, in her case, the word can be worn as a badge of honor.

Keri Russell gives a deft and winning performance as Jenna, a Southern gal who works as a server in Joe’s Pie Diner but who nurtures a poet’s heart. She expresses herself through novel pie recipes, an art she learned from her similarly inclined mother, and one she retreats to in Mitty-esque detail as both an escape from and a commentary on her disappointing life.

It’s part of Shelly’s cleverness that the movie can be synopsized using the names of the pies from Jenna’s culinary daydreams. The “I Hate My Husband Pie” (unsweetened chocolate mainly) describes Jenna’s bitter marriage to the alternately needy and domineering Earl (Jeremy Sisto) and her thwarted desire for escape. A double-course of Jenna’s “I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie” and “Pregnant Miserable Self-Pitying Loser Pie” address the unwanted complication that may keep her in her bad marriage forever. Then her elderly female gynecologist is replaced by the handsome and amusingly bumbling Dr. Pomater (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion), and “I Can’t Have No Affair Because It’s Wrong and I Don’t Want Earl to Kill Me Pie” is the next item on the menu (“Vanilla custard with banana,” says Jenna in inner monologue. Then desperately: “Hold the banana!”)

Waitress is a real actor’s movie, with each part written with great elan to have its own psychology and even its own dialect. Each player gets to be fully dimensional and has bright and defining moments that crystallize into an affectionate if gently satirical ensemble portrait of a certain kind of working-class Southern-ness. It’s great fun to see Andy Griffith of all people try on a crusty character part; the mind has to reach back almost to the 1950s and his sinister portrayal of a Huey Long-like demagogue in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd to remember Griffith diverging so fully from Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, R.F.D. But every actor, including Shelly herself as Jenna’s geeky waitress pal Dawn, comes off well in this generous bear hug of a film, a sweet movie made bittersweet by Shelly’s murder shortly after editing was completed.

It would be a shame and a crime if that horrific incident were to color people’s responses to Waitress, because there ought to be no place for such a skeleton at this warm and human feast. May the joy inside this movie be Shelly’s lasting testimonial instead.