It takes place in a Mayberry-like Southern landscape and features Andy Griffith himself as a sweet old man with a grumpy façade, so it probably goes without saying that Waitress has the tendency to be a little too syrupy for its own good. But Adrienne Shelly's final film as writer, director, and actress collects its down-home '50s romantic comedy stylings and silly pie-recipe jokes into something that can be genuinely affecting when it tries--and if, through its mawkishness, it reveals Nathan Fillion as too charming to be restricted to his usual genre-picture stomping grounds, then so be it. The film sees the titular greasy-spoon server and master pie-baker, Jenna (Keri Russell), attempting to find a way out of her loveless marriage and dead-end job after discovering she's pregnant; she soon embroils herself in an affair with the new town doctor (Fillion). A lot of goofy Southern stereotypes follow (the silliest and most inconsequential of which a slow-witted, well-meaning stalker (Eddie Jemison) eventually paired up with Shelly's character, a fellow waitress), but credit this film for having the self-awareness to at least attempt to examine what goes into them: even as he is casually abusive in his psychological dominance over his wife, Jenna's hick husband (Jeremy Sisto, never straying too far from "Six Feet Under"'s bipolar Billy) is portrayed as such a pathetic ball of self-loathing that it's impossible to truly demonize him. It's an admirable move that demonstrates the real horror of Jenna's plight without turning it into an overbearing Cinderella scenario--the idea that one shouldn't have to be confronted with some cliché Hell-on-earth to be compelled to break away from an unhealthy/dangerous situation and look for bigger and brighter things.

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Severance appears to have been crafted with the hope that someone out there with press credentials will use the poster-friendly quote "'The Office' meets [some horror film]," and, in order to guarantee that possibility, it mashes together about eight different subgenres of horror to simmer with the dry British humour. As we begin, David Brent manqué Richard (Tim McInnery) leads his merry band of office drones into the woods for a teamwork seminar in Bulgaria; they share a little bickering dialogue before taking a wrong turn into the domain of some Soviet war criminals who bear a grudge against their company, an international weapons developer. Each of the feral boogeymen has a specialized method of dispatching his quarry: there's the one with the machete and Jason Voorhees' steady gait; there's the one who captures his prey for some Hostel-style torture-chamber antics; and there's the would-be rapist destined to receive a violent comeuppance. As the film toggles between various familiar scenarios, it never decides if it wants to be cutely post-modern, unabashedly derivative, or both--it isn't unreasonable to wonder whether treating traditional horror shocks with dry indifference can even be considered an attempt at subversion anymore. Thrown in for good measure are lame jokes about drugs and elevator Muzak, as well as a few allusions to Dr. Strangelove performed with the arbitrariness of an untalented, Kubrick-obsessed film student. Still, the movie manages to hit the occasional bullseye whenever it filters its cinematic knowledge through a cleverer form of c'est la vie sarcasm, resulting in a few indelible concepts (a decapitated head smiling with vindication; a beautifully inappropriate closing line) so hilarious that their individual contexts are best left for viewers to discover on their own.

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Existing in a disturbing crevice between live-action and animation, children's and adult entertainment, pop and exploitation, Anders Morgenthaler's animated opus Princess understands the darkest impulses that drive holier-than-thou crusades. With his porn-queen sister (Stine Fischer Christensen) dead and her sexually-abused daughter Mia (Mira Hilli Møller Hallund) now in his care, missionary priest August (Thure Lindhardt) goes on a one-man war against the sex industry, starting things off by beating the shit out of a random john and planning a firebomb campaign against video-rental joints. It all reeks of catharsis for the moral majority as a man, righteous in his anger and desire for revenge, metes out justice against the scum of the earth. But as August breaks the arm of a sexually aggressive little boy and invites young Mia to pound one thug's crotch into powder with a crowbar, the exhilaration dies and we are forced to contemplate our own destructive itch. (File it alongside Tony Scott's Déjà Vu as a wish-fulfillment fantasy constantly haunted by reality.) Shortly before having his ear forcibly removed, another man comments that August's sister was a small piece in a much larger puzzle; similarly, August's quest can only exist in an infinitesimally small scope: there are too many people to kill and there's too much smut to burn to fully clean up the streets, and it will never erase the fact of any of it. (Furthermore, there's a strong indication that not everyone implicated in this sleazy world deserves to die.) Princess is a film rife with visual and thematic contradictions--with lumpy, Klasky-Czupo-esque characters often placed against lush, Miyazakian backgrounds (while taking irony-free sentimental breaks between murderous rampages) and grainy live-action VHS presentations occasionally popping in to fill in a few narrative gaps. It can only be seen as a means to search every corner, every possibility available to this world of ours--the eternal, ultimately futile attempt to find peace of mind when both the mind and the world are irrevocably tainted.

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Perhaps the most creatively null film since the remake of When a Stranger Calls, Eagle vs Shark doesn't just feel like Napoleon Dynamite, doesn't just owe its existence to Napoleon Dynamite--it practically fucking is Napoleon Dynamite, and God help you if you need another one of those. The only difference, really, is that it takes place in New Zealand and focuses more on the romantic angle: shortly after she is ousted from her job at a fast-food joint, quiet loser Lily (Loren Horsley) falls head over heels for Napoleon clone Jarrod (Jon Heder clone Jemaine Clement), a mealy-mouthed douchebag with a ridiculously over-inflated opinion of himself, an obsession with exacting revenge on his high school bully, and, thrown into the mix for no discernible reason, a nine-year-old daughter (not Abigail Breslin but an incredible simulation). Then come the blank, silent stares and the shitty drawings and the obsession with silly animals, the film's giggling sense of superiority over freaks and geeks tempered only by a final act of kindness intended to make us feel good about the "heroes" and forget that we've been mocking them for the last hour-and-a-half. I invite you to look at any reasonable reading of Jared Hess' depressingly popular film to cull a sight-unseen opinion about this tiny little stupid indie nothing; it would be difficult to care at all were it not for the looming threat that this approach to comedy is quickly becoming a genre unto itself.

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Dante Alighieri (voice of Dermot Mulroney) is a drunken slacker and Virgil (James Cromwell) packs heat in a 21^st-century update of The Inferno populated entirely by puppets crafted from paper--and that's about as far as it goes for cleverness in Sean Meredith's Dante's Inferno, but at least the puppets are well-drawn. Although the concept is daring and the toy theatre action is beautifully choreographed, the intrinsic problem in modernizing the first third of The Divine Comedy is that you're more or less obliged to include various villains and celebrities who've died in the seven centuries since Dante wrote his original masterpiece. All kinds of smug idiocy surrounds the film as a satirical jab against the original work's seriousness (the entryway to Hell is preceded by a "do not back up, severe tire damage" sign; the City of Dis is "a planned community"), but it's the sinners of modern pop culture that truly distract from Alighieri's startlingly complex work, turning it into a parade of indifferent name-checking. We are given a brief preview of the last few circles of Hell with slideshow mugshots of its inhabitants, which soon becomes a literal whirlwind of Nazis, dictators, ex-presidents, and several members of the Rat Pack--and that sequence can stand as a reliable metaphor for the rest of this one-note movie. Dante's Inferno, though, is never worse than when it starts mucking around in modern-day politics: mentioning that Halliburton "has its own building" in the falsifiers' wing; revealing that Dick Cheney is already in the ninth circle; and representing Geryon as a Fox News helicopter. What are they saying, exactly, beyond the fact that these are bad, bad people doing bad, bad things and destined to burn in Hell for it? Call it the malady of modern pseudo-liberal idiots, so consumed with demonizing the ideological enemy (however justifiably) that they don't have anything to say that hasn't been said a thousand times before. Add in a few dopey puns and some tired risqué jokes and you'll find that puppeteering has never been this disgustingly self-satisfied.

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Constructed as a series of dream-like, blue-tinted re-enactments anonymously narrated (and sometimes acted out in silhouette) by the people involved, Zoo--so named for an apparently in-crowd nickname for "zoophile"--documents a small group of individuals gathered together on a ranch in Washington, one of the few states in the union where bestiality is "not illegal," to hang out and share their love for animals; their illusions of solitude are shattered, however, when one of them dies from a perforated colon after having sex with a horse. The zoophiles are portrayed here as fairly "normal," unassuming people, but once the eventual media firestorm falls upon them, contemporary news reports and radio talk shows aren't dismissed wholesale as sensationalist garbage. (For the most part, they're a rationally curious intrusion into a sub-culture only whispered about.) Zoo isn't necessarily sympathetic to its subjects, after all: the zoophiles' sexual interests are hinted to be a by-product of their fear of personal and emotional criticism (rather than vice versa); they find the bond with animals to be the purest relationships available due to their "partners"' inability to see anything but "a good person or a bad person." One interviewee remarks that a horse doesn't care whether a filly or a human is underneath it, forcing us to wonder where this interpretation will draw the line between non-judgmental and simply indiscriminate. Zoo seems to be stalling for time as it interviews "Cop #1" from the re-enactments, yet his story about seeing a dead child reveals itself to be a bold detour from the subject at hand to illustrate the fragility of human beings. For as much as you can laugh at a man for being killed by horse sex, the truth of the matter is that he died in one of the slowest, most painful ways imaginable--doesn't that warrant at least an attempt to figure him out? The film ends with a local animal-rights activist involved in the case contemplating her own non-sexual bond with horses and summarizing her thoughts on zoophilia as a concept: "I'm right at the edge of being able to understand it." And that's what Zoo is really about, a refusal to subscribe to its subjects' black-and-white mindset--the idea that we can come so close to comprehending it while still finding it unforgivably abhorrent.

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Sarcastically described as Rocky for video games, The King of Kong is superficially about how human beings will latch on to any opportunity to acquire fame and admiration--but really it's about how easy it is to laugh at nerds. The documentary follows the subculture of obsessive retro gaming, because there's a shake-up in the works: junior-high science teacher and family man Steve Wiebe is closing the gap on the (world-record) high score for "Donkey Kong" held by pretentious hot-sauce mogul Billy Mitchell. These middle-aged oddballs are given just enough rope to hang themselves: a video game "referee" excitedly explains how he'll watch a video of a possibly record-setting game for hours on end; Wiebe straddles a line of neglect for his family; Mitchell grandstands and has fawning acolytes; and of course there are the inevitable Star Wars references. While it's practically impossible to paint such buffoonery in a favourable light, director Seth Gordon compounds a bullying aspect to it by crudely mocking the outdated nature of their fixation, surrounding their endeavours (and occasional temper tantrums) with Top 40 hits from the games' heyday--tunes that can be found in '80s sports movies and on the "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" soundtrack. A friend of mine reasonably wondered if such a mentality mocked the very idea of a cultural zeitgeist for its inevitable obsolescence; I'd say he's right, except The King of Kong refuses to acknowledge that the so-called golden era of the medium ever had any cultural significance at all--"Pac-Man Fever," it seems, never actually happened and video games themselves are a childish frivolity only enjoyed by the socially inept. (Indeed, Wiebe becomes the hero of the piece mainly because he eventually gets out of the racket altogether--and because Mitchell is such a windbag.) There's no doubt that obsessing over them is unhealthy, but "Donkey Kong" and "Pac-Man" deserve (and receive) a certain amount of attention not only for their iconic status in American pop culture, but also as crucial stepping stones in the evolution of video games as they creep into acceptance as an art form. The King of Kong won't even contemplate the very possibility of that, and it resorts to dorky straw men to justify its stance.

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Perhaps a little too earnest for its own good, Douglas Buck's Sisters takes one of Brian De Palma's most transparent tributes to Hitchcock and almost completely abandons its homage-laden aesthetic, convinced that saddling everyone with even more psychological baggage would somehow expand on the previous film's chilling ideas about identity panic. The basic structure remains the same: attempting to escape the grasp of her controlling psychiatrist ex-husband (Stephen Rea, who wields green syringes often enough that he acquires a weird Herbert West vibe), quiet Angelique (Lou Doillon) takes solace in nice-guy cipher Dylan Wallace (Dallas Roberts), but soon they run afoul of her disturbed twin, Annabelle, with a depressed but dedicated reporter (Chloë Sevigny) not too far behind. Buck and co-writer John Freitas use up all of their creepiest material in the opening scene, which replaces the original's satirical game show with a kid's birthday party that plunges head-first into disturbing surrealism: Rea gamely dressed as a magician; Roberts staring directly at us in a pair of Groucho glasses; and Sevigny--who, it bears mentioning, looks a lot like Margot Kidder here--as a rather sinister party clown. Unfortunately, Sisters never reaches that level of terror again, preoccupied as it is with stale characterizations and motives; a casual reversal of the MacGuffins from the 1973 film is a transparently forced, unnecessary attempt to prove that this remake can stand on its own two feet. You do have to acknowledge the filmmakers' chutzpah in rearranging the third act of the plot so dramatically--ending up where De Palma's version was destined to end up before its classic turnaround--yet they still don't want to stray too far from the generalities of the source material. By trying to increase the "substance" of it, and by giving everyone mental and sexual hang-ups similar to those of its titular siblings, Sisters distances us from the purposely vague, vicarious fears upon which the story was founded.

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Presenting himself to us as an image reflected in a window, Lars von Trier literally begins The Boss of It All with an assurance that the following hundred minutes will be nothing more than a light comedy not worth "a moment's reflection." He then introduces us to pretentious, untalented actor Kristoffer (Jens Albinus), who has been hired by office worker Ravn (Peter Gantzler) to pose as the company's absentee president in delicate negotiations to merge with an Icelandic company. Kristoffer soon learns that there is no president beyond a fictional, faraway entity created by Ravn, the real company head, but once the employees catch wind of the "president"'s sudden appearance, he's forced to continue the illusion. The plot outline just screams "light comedy" (with "comic misunderstanding" being the name of this occasionally funny game), and while von Trier's opening remarks are obviously a transparent challenge, he also questions why we would take him up on it, why we would try to find deeper meaning in something intended to be taken at face value. Emphasizing the arbitrariness of it all, he leaves the cinematography to "Automavision," a computerized shot randomizer that crafts bizarre framing compositions, which in turn lead to off-putting jump cuts. (Meanwhile, Kristoffer is so obsessed with his favourite absurdist playwright that the attempts at homage distract from a convincing performance.) The Boss of It All differs from the why-bother hatred of The Ten, though, because the allegories put the pressure on us to determine a "right" way to look at a film: look too deeply, and you risk missing the point (or giving the filmmaker too much credit). But the obviousness of von Trier's parallel to his dissatisfaction with mediocrity and anti-intellectualism also adds the counterpoint: refuse to look into it at all and you're just wilfully blind. If the only thing it ultimately proves is that von Trier is still a cantankerous, contradictory bastard, then at least The Boss of It All gets us thinking about our expectations as filmgoers--and the responsibility for the quality of art that passes through our eyes.

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Along with ninjas and pirates, Jesus is a popular target of hipster irony because the idea of throwing such a deadly-serious figurehead into a light of silliness, informality, and kitsch seems automatically hilarious--and it may have been, once upon a time, before Jesus bobbleheads, Jesus magic eight-balls, and Dogma's Buddy Christ drove it right into the ground. The joke is so easy, in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if the notion of Jesus as a prosthetic-leg salesman occurred to David Wain before anything else about his anthology The Ten--even the concept itself: ten sketches revolving around the Ten Commandments with vaguely intertwining scenarios and characters. The structure is crafted with such petulance as to suggest that Wain and co-writer Ken Marino read a short review of Kieslowski's Dekalog and flat-out refused to give the matter any further thought--a dismissive attitude that comes naturally to the hipster culture and permeates the entirety of this anthology. "Thou shall not have any other gods before Me" is transformed into the parable of a man who becomes a media darling after an unsuccessful parachute jump leaves him partially, permanently embedded in the ground. Although it can be seen as an equation of mass media obsession with full-blown idolatry, the contextual relation is so self-consciously tenuous--the descriptor "god" is thrown at us as a screaming afterthought--that we're eventually mocked for watching it. (It's a contempt that also fuels a lot of hoary jokes about programming VCRs, inattentive doctors who play golf, and prison rape.) "Did you actually think we were going to make a comedy about the Ten Commandments?" the filmmakers ask rhetorically. (Jesus appears in "Thou shall not use the Lord's name in vain," presumably because His human girlfriend (Gretchen Mol) cries out His name in mid-coitus--which, again, seems somewhat connected but in context is ultimately not.) Narrative convention itself becomes a target, shot at with lazier and mustier arrows: the unreliable narrator of the stories (Paul Rudd) is chastised by his wife (Famke Janssen) for spending too much time narrating; a fireworks show with romantic timing is revealed to be the work of a nearby, hitherto-unseen child; and characters burst into musical numbers for no apparent reason. It's all non-directionally hostile in a way that reminds of Wain's last film, Wet Hot American Summer, which itself rests in such an uncomfortable grey zone between nostalgia and disdain that it becomes an abusive spouse to the '80s teensploitation genre. With these companion pieces of cinematic hate, Wain's point appears to be that movies have gone as far as they can go, so all that remains is formula and cliché; and you're a fool for attempting or expecting anything new.

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