Seven Days of Grace: Grade F

F
Seven Days of Grace (2006)

Ria Coyne. Director Don E. FauntLeRoy

A thirtyish woman (Coyne) inherits a “ribs” restaurant from her father but did not get the recipe for the secret sauce. Oh, no! She and her girlfriends try to make a go of the restaurant before the landlord forecloses the mortgage. Grace is self-consciously cute and her five girlfriends are ostensibly “characters:” an unreconstructed hippie, a black leather-jacket tough, a dimwit, and so on. This is supposed to be a comedy but the humor escaped me. There is a slightly ironic, postmodern “arch” tone in the dialog that could be construed as funny, except it’s really just mind-numbingly banal. The premise lacks dramatic tension (how hard would it be to buy a cookbook?) and there is no story line. Performances are like a high school theater class, which must be a stylistic device, because professional actors could not really be that bad, but whatever effect it was trying to achieve, it didn’t.