Is it really a roundup if there’s only one movie? Just wondering.
Waiting (Rob McKittrick, 2005)
Shenanigan’s is a restaurant much like Bennigan’s and Waiting is a movie much like Caddyshack.
Waiting is a character driven comedy that recounts one evening shift at a chain restaurant, mostly through the eyes of a new guy being trained by the restaurant’s cool guy waiter. The newcomer is mostly silent and like the audience is a witness to the weirdness of working in the restaurant business.
The funniest aspects of this movie come in the interactions between the different social classes within the restaurant. There is the privileged, yet slacking wait staff, the thugs and psychopaths who work in the kitchen, the wannabe gangsta busboys, the professional manager who obviously settled for less, the seductive high school hostess, and the dishwasher who is a sort of Zen psychotherapist who helps the characters see that their problems tend to lie within. And of course the customers.
It’s funny. Silly. Sometimes disgusting. Frighteningly believable. Three stars.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
Now I waited tables for a lot of years, and I’m sure that no self-respecting movie about the subject would leave out the hits of crack during break or the stories of waitresses waking up on some guys’ driveway. Surely those were there, too, right?
Not exactly those stories, but there was alcohol drinkin’, dope smokin’, coke snortin’, and even some nitrous huffin’ from the whipped cream cannisters.