The Waiting Game

Yet another film about struggling to make it in the movies, director Ken Liotti's take is at least a little different in focus, centering as it does on a group of aspiring actors who spend their evenings waiting tables. Sort of like a Kevin Smith movie without comic book references, the film's primary protagonists (Will Arnett and Terumi Matthews) are platonic best friends who will inevitably discover that they're perfectly matched. And former Smith costar Dwight Ewell (Chasing Amy) once again fills the ensemble's diversity quotient by being both black and gay. Still, the unfamiliarity of the setting, and the slight shift in focus from the norm (at least we're not watching aspiring directors) gives the film a freshness that keeps it from being dull, and the cast are all at least game, if not entirely likable, notably Daniel Riordan as an egomaniac who puts on an untitled one-man show in which he wears a toga while baking bread and proclaiming himself to be a deity. It's hard to get too concerned about the various couplings that take place between the wanna-bes, and Liotti really should have excised the umpteenth cinematic discussion of impotence in which one guy says it happens to everybody, then denies it ever happened to him. But all in all, he's done a pretty good job of making a personal film that's not too personal, an in-joke that should still manage to appeal to a greater audience beyond the starving actors who will directly relate.