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Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. Click the Book to read the players telling their stories in their own words. This is the book that UCLA Athletic Director J.D. Morgan tried to ban.


Waitress (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Apparently if you want to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood these days, all you have to do is write a feminist diatribe chick flick and you’re in. This is just another in a growing list of recent films where all the women are wonderful, understanding, and long-suffering while the men are louts.

Jenna (Keri Russell) is the wonderful woman who works as a waitress in a diner in a small town. She’s married to a control freak, unshaven oaf, Earl (Jeremy Sisto), who basically keeps her his emotional prisoner, doing his bidding and not allowed an opinion or thought of her own. I didn’t understand one thing, however. She becomes pregnant and several times the characters comment that it “must have been the night Earl got her drunk.” But if Earl is as hot for her as he comes across in the movie and if she has to do what he wants when he wants, why would he have to get her drunk to have sex?

She meets a newcomer in town, her new doctor, Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion), with whom she begins an affair. Pomatter is married, but that doesn’t seem to matter to him or Jenna. She has two friends, both fellow waitresses, Becky (Cheryl Hines) and Dawn (writer-director Adrienne Shelly, who was brutally murdered by a worker in her New York condo shortly after wrapping this film). Becky is having an affair with their boss, Cal (Lew Temple), who is also married and that doesn’t bother anybody. Apparently to Shelly, marriage is just an inconvenience when it comes to romance. Forget about loyalty and commitment.

The only man who might be a nice guy is Old Joe (Andy Griffith), a cantankerous guy who apparently owns the diner. That wasn’t made clear to me. But he’s always there and he befriends Jenna.

Anyway, this is just a down-the-line feminist theme story. The guys are mostly immoral, selfish jerks, except for one, Ogie, (Eddie Jemison), Dawn’s boyfriend, who personifies Caspar Milquetoast and is doomed to a life of henpecking, constantly saying, "Yes dear; you're wonderful." Need I add that the women are all saintly? This is no comedy, which is the way it is being promoted. The life in which Jenna finds herself trapped is terribly depressing.

The film ends making the staunchly held feminist position that a father is meaningless in bringing up a child. The best way I can describe this rubbish is, Ugh!

June 11, 2007

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