These waitresses have spunk

Support the girls ably mixes comedy and desperation

Regina Hall of Girls Trip lands a welcome leading role in Support the Girls, a comedy set in a Texas restaurant called Double Whammies. I don’t know if the two Whammies are meant to suggest boobs and butts, but the movie makes no secret of the fact that the scantily clad waitresses of Double Whammies are as much of an attraction as the burgers and brews.

Playing Lisa, the restaurant's manager, Hall functions as an exasperated mother hen who cares about the young women who work for her. Early on, Lisa organizes a car wash to pay for the defense of one of her employees, a young woman who faces legal difficulties after running over her abusive boyfriend.

A bit of sad, self-awareness underlies Hall’s performance. Older than the women who work for her, Lisa knows that she no longer can compete when it comes to turning the heads of her leering customers, a group of men that she keeps in check with a zero-tolerance policy toward harassment.

Setting the story over a single day in Lisa’s hectic life, director Andrew Bujalksi gives us plenty of atmosphere and lots of colorful characters; the spunky Maci (Haley Lu Richardson) and Danielle (Shayna McHayle) make the biggest impressions in an ensemble of cheeky (no pun intended) young actress who compose the movie's impromptu sisterhood.

If Bujalksi had been looking for an alternate title for his movie, he might have tried Lisa’s Very Bad Day. His screenplay follows Lisa through a series of catastrophes — small and large: an attempted burglary at the restaurant, an argument with her boss (James Le Gros) and an incident that suggests irreconcilable differences with her a husband (Lawrence Varnado), a guy who spends his most of his day staring at a computer screen.

Informal and sassy, Support the Girls might have looked like a pilot for a sitcom, but Bujalski obviously feels for these characters. He understands the indignities that lurk in their workplace, as well as the collegial support it takes to keep from surrendering to them.

Some of Double Whammies' customers may want to objectify the restaurant’s waitresses, but Bujalski never does. He keeps them funny without sacrificing their humanity.

Before the computers took over

Yesterday's high tech looks awfully low when seen through a rearview mirror.

In a season full of big-screen bombast and special-effects bloat, it takes more than a bit of counter-programming confidence to release a movie titled Computer Chess. Don't be fooled, though: Director Andrew Bujalski -- a stalwart of the no-budget indie movement known as Mumblecore -- has directed a small comedy about a big subject: the uneasy alliance between humans and digital technology.

Set in the early 1980s, the movie has been photographed mostly in black-and-white using video equipment of the time. In short, no one's going to mistake the images in Computer Chess for 35 mm film.

Audiences should, however, marvel at the performances in Computer Chess. Bujalski's group of no-name actors give spot-on performances as 1980s-style geeks, a catalog of the kinds of people we once thought of as brainy tech types.

The premise: A gathering of A-level computer nerds (the group includes only one woman) assemble for an annual tournament in which programmers pit computer against computer in games of chess. A chess master (played by film critic Gerald Peary) presides over the contest, vowing to take on the winning computer.

Don't get the wrong idea. Bujalski isn't interested in the trumped-up theatrics of a contest. He's interested in reminding us how far technology has come since the Pleistocene days of the 1980s when computers were as big as crates and had yet to become part of everyday life for even the most technologically challenged among us.

Looking at the equipment used in Computer Chess, one can't help but feel a bit of nostalgia for what appear to be outmoded antiques, machines that generate a kind of amused nostalgia for what we once regarded as the cutting edge.

Fair to say that Bujalski has made one of the worst dressed movies of the year -- and that's part of the amusement, as well. The story takes place in a drab hotel that also happens to be playing host to a retreat of people who are engaging in a mixture of anxiety soothing pseudo-therapies and sexual high jinks.

If these are the two poles of human aspiration -- something the movie encourages us to consider -- both come off as stunningly absurd.

Bujalaski allows the humor to arise from situation and character; he doesn't force laughs on us, but seems to understand that a straight-faced presentation of totally plausible people who are deeply immersed in their own worlds constitutes an inevitable pathway to comedy.

I'm not sure that Computer Chess is a movie for all tastes, but that's precisely what it makes it worthwhile. It's a truly idiosyncratic and quietly bizarre piece of work set in the time before we all woke up in a world where too many of us feel naked should we happen to leave home without our cell phones.