Bad Bad Movie Night: Roscoe's

There is a restuarant in LA (and I think in a couple of other places in the US) called Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles. As you may be able to glean from the name, the main dishes are fried chicken and waffles. What you may not have figured out is that more often than not, those two are eaten together.

My friend Sean, who is white and from Santa Barbara, heard about the restuarant from his brother, who is black. It is an urban phenomenon from what I understand and can be packed all hours of the day and night. Sometime last year we had a fried chicken and waffles night at Sean's house. He has a deep frier and I have a waffle iron. We don't have Roscoe's secret recipies but it was pretty good. You think it sounds gross, but it's not, even with syrup dripped over everything. When Sean and his wife went to LA last year they and my brother went to Roscoe's just to see what the hype was about. They thought it was delicious. I am going to be visiting Brian some time this fall in LA and we are going there for some meal for sure.

Okay, so they have good food. We've established that. Somewhere along the line they decided that their present marketing wasn't good enough. They needed a new scheme.

Marketman A and Marketman B had to come up with something, here's how that meeting went down:

A: What about more commercials?
B: Nah, too pedestrian.

B: Do we have enough billboards?
A: Yep, and they're too lifeless and two dimensional anyway.

A: Hey, what about a 90 minute commercial with tiny snipits of humor and no plot coherence?
B: Yeah, we can call it a movie.
A: There's got to be a few suckers out there who would pay $10 to see something with our name on it!
B: Sure! And then afterwards we could release a DVD and even more suckers would pay to see what the whole deal is with that Chicken and Waffles thing.

(in the voices from the Guinness commercials on TV)
A: Brilliant!
B: Brilliant!

And that's what they did. They made a movie. Interestingly there are no reviews for it yet on imdb, or on Rotten Tomatoes. On NetFlix (where Sean and Heidi got it from) they give it 2 of 5 stars, which is extremely generous, and then on Yahoo Movies two reviews add up to an F, which is a little more in line with my thoughts.

So they rounded up some people with money to produce it and a few actors, some of which are even semi-wellknown. The main problem was with the writing and directing. Not surprisingly these duties were fulfilled by the same man.

The writing was plagued by (as I eluded to before) no plot coherence. There were 50 mini plots going on that were only loosely tied to one another. In some cases they weren't tied with anything at all. The directing was out of control as well. Quick shots from scene to scene only helped with the confusion. Camera angles and closeups that brought nothing to the movie except maybe to fulfill the directors own feelings of being "artistic". Plus, it didn't help that much of the acting was subpar.

I am not a movie maker, but my brother is and will be. One thing that I learned from him is the old saying "You have to kill your babies". What this means is that every writer and director has a million perfect shots and scenes that he wants to put into this movie. The thing is, you just can't. Things don't all work well with each other. You have to cut out some of your beloved scenes, your babies, to make the film work better over all. I can just picture the writing and editing sessions with this guy thinking up all of this hilarious stuff and just throwing it all into the movie and then just slapping the film together. Although, who knows, maybe he didn't have enough material to flesh out the important plot lines to 90 minutes and all of the crap was just filler to hit the time limit.

As for being a 90 minute commercial. There were about 10 shots of the sign post outside the restaurant and maybe 10 shots combined of batter going into waffle irons and chicken being dipped into the frier. Ouch.

The funniest part was a small snipet of one of those side plots. A dudes old gang members came up to him and wondered what he was doing with a job and not hanging out and threatened him by showing a gun one of them had tucked into his pants. As a response the "good guy" started slapping the leader guy and taking the gun out and putting it back into his pants to show him disrespect. This went on for about 45 seconds. Just slapping and taking the gun out, slapping and putting the gun back. The slapstick sound effects really made the scene--not to mention the fact that by this time in the movie the soundtrack had shifted and didn't match up with the video any more.

Sean said afterwards, "Maybe it's a cultural thing." Who knows, maybe it is. I am certainly not up to date on the total of African-American cinema or the culture in general, but I have seen and enjoyed a number of "black" films. To wit:

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
CB4
Friday
and of course In Living Color

Anyway, no matter, a bad movie is a bad movie. I'm not going to give a score, I don't do that, I'm just going to say that you won't be missing anything if you never see this movie, actually you'd be missing an hour and a half of your life if you did watch it. I guess I'd suggest just going to the restaurant one day and eating the tasty food (hopefully I'll have a review of that in a month or so). Give them business that way--at least you'll get something out of the deal as well.