"Away From Her," "Waitress" at BMFI

First, let me say that I love Bryn Mawr Film Institute. My family has a membership, so we get discounted tickets, and they're just about the only place in Delaware County that gets the kinds of movies I like to see - indie movies and, though to a lesser extent, foreign films. Now and then I like to see a blockbuster, but I mostly like to see more thoughtful movies that may have slipped through the ordinary studio process because they're a little too complex to be homogenized.

This week I saw two very different movies, each worth seeing - Waitress and Away from Her.

Waitress, which easily could've fallen into cliches about diners and listless young women, was charming and well-acted. Keri Russell carried the movie, aided by razor sharp quips by late writer and director Adrienne Shelly, who also took a supporting role in the film. Sequences featuring the baking of creatively-named pies were particularly notable, as was a late career performance by Andy Griffith as the ornery owner of the pie diner in the film.

Away from Her, which was excrutiating to watch, is a wonderfully made movie about a woman who develops Alzheimer's and the way her husband copes with her illness as she takes up residence in a nursing home. The lovely Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent are wonderful in the movie, and the young writer and director Sarah Polley makes sure that the movie doesn't strike one false note. It's astounding that such a young writer could capture so wonderfully the complexities of older adulthood. It was also refreshing to see a movie that dealt head-on with the sex lives of older people, something that gets neglected or joked about in most other films. Everything about Away from Her made it a must-see. I'm a believer in seeing movies even though they may unnerve you (Children of Men and An Inconvenient Truth are recent examples), and this is one you definitely want to suck it up and see.

I also just got done reading a wonderful book, The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, a comic tale of a young man who's half white and half Indian living in London. It struck me as similar to the humorous writing style of Zadie Smith, and it kept me riveted throughout. I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a lighter (yet still stimulating) read - for someone else who refuses to stoop to Danielle Steele or James Patterson for their light reading.