Adrienne Shelly’s weirdly wonderful Waitress is now playing at the Balboa. At first, I thought this might be another misguided foray into Southern stereotypes (as a native of Alabama, movies in which non-Southerners attempt Southern accents always put me on guard), but within the first five minutes of the film I was fully invested in the ride. Keri Russell plays a woman who is impregnated by her maniacally controlling husband. She sees her pregnancy as a trap, and throughout the movie she eschews the warm fuzzy feelings that expectant mothers are supposed to have. There’s a delightfully off-kilter play-like quality to Waitress, reminiscent of the Hal Hartley films that Shelly starred in early in her career. Shelly never had a chance to see her movie’s warm reception at Sundance, as she was murdered in the NYC apartment she used as an office before learning that the film would be screened at the festival. She was 40 years old.