Waiting...Unrated and Raw (Blu-ray)

Deal History

The bitter, vengeful world of waiting tables gets the Clerks treatment in Waiting.... A new employee (John Francis Daley, Freaks and Geeks) gets trained at Shenanigan's, a banal theme restaurant where the bored employees play a game of flaunting their genitals. The staff includes a snarky waiter (Ryan Reynolds, Van Wilder, The Amityville Horror) who lusts after the underage hostess; a waiter suffering from crippling pee-shyness (Robert Patrick Benedict, Threshold); an oracular dishwasher (Chi McBride, Roll Bounce); and a conflicted waiter named Dean (Justin Long, Dodgeball), who's just been offered a promotion to assistant manager--a job that offers more money, but threatens to trap him at Shenanigan's for the rest of his life. Waiting... is a loose shamble of a movie--the only thing resembling a story is Dean's life crisis--but that's part of its charm. It's a tricky thing to depict tedium without being tedious, but Waiting... pulls it off; some jokes smack of forced sitcom writing, but most of the humor feels genuine, as if it came from writer/director Rob McKittrick's personal experience. A future cult film. Also featuring Anna Faris (Lost in Translation), Luis Guzman (The Limey), and rabidly adored stand-up comic Dane Cook as..a cook. --Bret Fetzer