DOCNYC21 REVIEW: Adrienne [2021]

I wasn’t supposed to find her dead. I hadn’t seen any of Adrienne Shelly‘s work at the time of her death, but you couldn’t follow the film world in 2006 without hearing about what happened. The news sites latched onto the assumption of suicide early on only to discover what happened was murder—the culprit found, arrested, and confessed shortly afterwards. And amidst that tragic whirlwind during the final two months of that year, Shelly’s latest film as writer/director/star, Waitress, was in submission at Sundance. It would eventually bow at the…

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REVIEW: The Unbelievable Truth [1990]

“Are you a priest or something?” The satire in Hal Hartley‘s debut The Unbelievable Truth is so over-the-top that you almost have to read it as a straight comedy. He’s constantly repeating dialogue through straight-faced actors, breaking up scenes with unnecessary title cards delineating arbitrary time lapses, and makes his characters so over-wrought that we can’t help but find them endearing in their existential crises. It’s about love and capitalist ambition in the youth of America as the self-indulgence of the materialistic 80s transitions into the apathetic 90s with a…

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REVIEW: Waitress [2007]

“I’m happy enough” I’m not sure whether my wanting to see Waitress was due to its off-kilter humor, shown via its trailer, or because of the horrible tragedy surrounding writer/director/supporting actress Adrienne Shelly. Her murder definitely overshadows the dreamlike comedy she has left behind as her final foray in Hollywood. This is a tale of a poor girl dragging through life, desperately looking for a way out. As far as style goes, I can only think of Edward Scissorhands as having the same hyper-real environment filled with quirky characters and…

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