Not long ago the restaurant was in the doldrums, morale was low, customers were rare. “The penis-showing game became a catalyst for change and improvement,” says a cook named Bishop (Chi McBride). I dunno; to me it seems more like a catalyst for desperate shock value from a filmmaker who is trying to pump energy into a dead scenario.
I can imagine a good film based on the bored lives of retail workers whose sex lives afford them some relief. The 40-Year-Old Virgin is a splendid example, and given the slacker mentality of the waiters in Waiting … Kevin Smith’s Clerks leaps to mind. Both of those films begin with fully seen characters who have personalities, possess problems, and express themselves with distinctive styles.
The characters in Waiting … seem like types, not people. What they do and say isn’t funny because someone real doesn’t seem to be doing or saying it. Everything that the John Belushi character did in Animal House proceeded directly from the core of his innermost being: He crushed beer cans against his forehead because he was a person who needed to, and often did, and enjoyed it, and found that it worked for him. You never got the idea he did it because it might be funny in a movie.
The central character in Waiting … is Monty (Ryan Reynolds), a veteran waiter who justifies his existence in hell by appointing himself its tour guide. He shows the ropes to a new employee named Mitch (John Francis Daley), beginning with the Penis Game and moving on to details about the kitchen, the table rotation, and the cultivation of customers. He also places great importance on the nightly parties where the employees get hammered.
Other staff members include the perpetually snarling Naomi (Alanna Ubach), who could make more money as the dominatrix she was born to play; Dan (David Koechner), the manager who has risen to the precipice of his ability, replacing the Penis Game with the Peter Principle; Serena (Anna Faris), who is way too pretty to be working at Shenaniganz and knows it; and Raddimus (Luis Guzman), the cook, who is a master at dropping food on the floor and seasoning it with snot, spit, and dandruff. The movie has a lesson for us, and it is: Do not get the food handlers mad at you.
The hero of sorts is Dean (Justin Long), who is discouraged to learn that while he’s been making his $70 a day in tips, a high school classmate has become an electrical engineer. When the supercilious classmate leaves him a big tip, he feels worse than when a stiff leaves another waiter $2 on a $63 bill. The problem with the customers in both of those scenarios, and also with the lady customer who is relentlessly bitchy, is that there’s nothing funny about them. They’re mean and cruel and do not elevate their hatefulness to the level of satire but sullenly remain eight-letter words (in the plural form) beginning with a. Even the bitch’s dinner companions are sick of her.
A subplot involves Natasha, the restaurant’s sexy underage receptionist (Vanessa Lengies), who attracts both Monty and Dan the manager. I am trying to imagine how she could have been made funny, but no: The movie deals with her essentially as jailbait, something Monty is wise enough to just barely know and Dan reckless enough to overlook. I was also unable to see the joke involving Calvin (Robert Patrick Benedict), who (a) can’t urinate because he’s uptight that some guy may be trying to steal a glimpse of his jewels, but (b) is a champion at the Penis Game. There is a paradox here, but its solution doesn’t seem promising.
What it comes down to is that Shenaniganz is a rotten place to work and a hazardous place to eat, and the people on both sides of the counter are miserable sods but at least the employees know they are. Watching the movie is like having one of these wretched jobs, with the difference that after work the employees can get wasted but we can only watch. It can actually be fun to work in a restaurant. Most of the waitpeople I have known or encountered have been competent, smart, and, if necessary, amusing. All the restaurant’s a stage, and they but players on it. Customers can be friendly and entertaining. Tips can be OK. Genitals can be employed at the activities for which they were designed. There must be humor here somewhere.
Wasabi
(DIRECTED BY GERARD KRAWCZYK; STARRING JEAN RENO, RYOKO HIROSUE; 2002)
Jean Reno has the weary eyes and unshaven mug of a French Peter Falk, and some of the same sardonic humor, too. He sighs and smokes and slouches his way through thrillers where he sadly kills those who would kill him, and balefully regards women who want to make intimate demands on his time. In good movies (The Crimson Rivers) and bad (Rollerball), in the ambitious (Michelangelo Antonioni’s Beyond the Clouds) and the avaricious (Godzilla), in comedies (Just Visiting) and thrillers (Ronin), he shares with Robert Mitchum the unmistakable quality of having seen it all.
Wasabi is not his worst movie and is far from his best. It is a thriller trapped inside a pop comedy set in Japan, and it gives Reno a chirpy young costar who bounces around him like a puppy on visiting day at the drunk tank. She plays his daughter, and he’s supposed to like her, but sometimes he looks like he hopes she will turn into an aspirin.
The movie begins in Paris, where Reno plays Hubert Fiorentini, a Dirty Harry type who doesn’t merely beat up suspects, but beats up people on the chance that he may suspect them later. During a raid on a nightclub, he makes the mistake of socking the police chief’s son so hard the lad flies down a flight of stairs and ends up in a full-body cast. Hubert is ordered to take a vacation.
He shrugs and thinks to look up an old girlfriend (Carole Bouquet), but then his life takes a dramatic turn. He learns of the death in Japan of a woman he loved years earlier. Arriving for her funeral, he finds she has left him a mysterious key, a daughter he knew nothing about, and $200 million in the bank.
The daughter is named Yumi (Ryoko Hirosue). She is nineteen, has red hair, chooses her wardrobe colors from the Pokémon palate, and bounces crazily through scenes as if life is a music video and they’re filming her right now.
The plot involves Yumi’s plan to hire the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) to get revenge for her mother’s death. If there is a piece of fatherly advice that Hubert the veteran cop could have shared with her, it is that no one related to $200 million should do the least thing to attract the attention of the Yakuza. The plot then unfolds in bewildering alternation between pop comedy and action violence, with Hubert dancing in a video arcade one moment and blasting the bad guys the next.
There is no artistic purpose for this movie. It is product. Luc Besson, who wrote and produced it, has another movie out right now (The Transporter), and indeed has written, produced, or announced sixteen other movies since this one was made in far-ago 2001. Jean Reno does what he can in a thankless dilemma, the film ricochets from humor to violence and back again, and Ryoko Hirosue makes us wonder if she is always like that. If she is, I owe an apology to the Powerpuff Girls. I didn’t know they were based on real life.
Wet Hot American Summer
(DIRECTED BY DAVID WAIN; STARRING JANEANE GAROFALO, DAVID HYDE PIERCE; 2001)
Hello muddah,
Hello fadduh—
Here I am at Wet Hot American Summah.