January 22, 2007 -- PARK CITY, Utah - "There were tears mixed with cheers as "Waitress," the final film from murdered actress/director Adrienne Shelly, had its world premiere yesterday at the Sundance Film Festival.
"This is not in any way a screening that is meant to be a wake," the festival's executive director, Geoffrey Gilmore, said in introducing the bittersweet comedy, which he emphasized had been accepted before Shelly's death.
"There's a joie de vivre in this film that I think she'd want us to celebrate."
An emotional Michael Roiff, the movie's producer, said, "She's not here right now, but I know she'd be ecstatic about all you people seeing it here."
Shelly was murdered Nov. 1 in Greenwich Village - before she had been notified that "Waitress," her first film as a director, was to be accepted to the festival, where it played to an overflow crowd at a 2,700-seat auditorium.
In a crime that shocked the city, police said the 40-year-old Shelly was killed by a 19-year-old, undocumented construction worker from Ecuador after the pair got into an argument in her building.
Shelly wrote "Waitress," which was filmed in late 2005 near Los Angeles, when she was pregnant with her daughter.
"I was really scared about the idea of having a baby," Shelly said in the film's publicity notes.
"I was terrified, and I really had never seen that reflected in anything, not in a book or in a movie. It's almost like a sacrilege to say that becoming a mother is scary."
Just about EVERY first-time mother is scared. Not every mother hires an ILLEGAL ALIEN and is strangled after a lengthy bout of shouting at him about how he could get his beaner-ass back home if he didn't shape up.
Any innocent person's death is a tragedy. Dealing with the scum of the earth has it's dangers, and instead of her killing being a lesson and generating the horror and ire necessary to assist in curing one of the country's biggest travesty's, they can't even call her murderer what he was, and continue to pretend that his ilk are nothing more than some poor schmoe who lost his drivers license.
Undocument this.
No comments:
Post a Comment