Who Made the Potatoe Salad? (2006)

Perfectly adorable

Good start, but then it gets ruined

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This is definitely one of the worst movies I have ever seen. OK They spell potato with an 'e' and that bugged me from the off, but even ignoring that, the performances, script and direction are so below par, I would not have been surprised if this had been a drama school production. However, if the actors and director were to submit this, they would fail and have to resit the examination. It is to be hoped they don't try again.Not even funny when it's not supposed to be, just absolutely woeful. A romcom devoid of romance, absent of any comedy.Why is this not in the bottom 100 films?

This movie was painful to watch. The comedic scenes were at times awkward and never, not even one time, funny. All this movie has time was perpetuate stereotypes, and waste 90 minutes of my life. Steer clear of this at all costs. I wasn't expecting fine cinema, or Oscar worthy performances. I was expecting a bad b movie. Those types of movies are funny to me at times but this wasn't even that. It wasn't cheesy it was just offensive, horrible, badly written, and just flat out worthless. If you paid me, I would never watch this again. Please please burn this movie, and I hope to never see a copy of it again. My goodness.

Jaleel is a wonderful, handsome romantic comedy lead. This movie was so enjoyable(especially on Thanksgiving Day, which is one of the big funny scenes), that my family and I watched it several times during the holiday, and cracked up. I know there are cuss words, "N" words, and all, but in the context of the material, it is familiar and just downright funny. As a matter of fact, this movie makes great entertainment when people come by and want to have a drink, popcorn, and laugh. The acting was great. The soundtrack is really "off the chain"... I loved it. Would like to purchase a CD with the music on it. It's all original music. The scene with Jaleel alone at the train station could really be a music video because the vocalist is hot. I think it's among some of the best work I've scene Clifton Powell do, and he and Ella Joyce have great chemistry. Ella seems to be the voice of calm and reason in this film and she is great also, along with Reynaldo Rey. It's great to see him in a film. I will watch everything this director does. I like his films. Who Made The Potatoe Salad is entertaining.

Okay, to start, we've got a decent if overused basic concept: straight-laced boyfriend/girlfriend/fiancé/whatever goes to meet significant other's kooky/crazy/dysfunctional family, and humor (assumedly) ensues. Unfortunately, not here, for the most part anyway, basically because the writer (also the director in this case) has no clue how to structure a comedy (or even knows what's funny, for that matter).First off, Jaleel White's character spends pretty much the entire film either being a) utterly inept, and/or b)obnoxious and annoying, not unlike the character he played on TV (and for which he will most likely go to his grave being remembered for unless he stays away from roles like this one). Also, as a protagonist, he's almost entirely inactive during the bulk of the action, basically just sitting around and acting as a punching bag (literal and metaphorical) for nearly everyone else in the movie. When he occasionally does take some kind of action (such as a more or less entirely unmotivated peewee football game, and later the climactic bungled staged burglary), he flubs it egregiously, and usually because of his own ego. Thus it becomes really, really hard to sympathize with or even like the character, which is pretty important in light romantic comedy. As an audience member, I kept wondering why in the world does his fiancée say she loves him and only find happiness with him, when the closest he can come to being charming is a half-assed paraphrasing of dialogue from 'Jerry Maguire' (this before he proposes to her)? I mean, what a freakin' lame-o.Second big mistake: why reveal that White's character is a cop the minute he's introduced to her parents? Look, you've got a potentially really funny set-up, with Clifton Powell as a cop-hating former Black Panther and his future son-in-law as a policeman wanting to impress the old man favorably, so right out of the gate there's a terrific source of comic tension, where you could have White's character running around for the bulk of the film trying to conceal his job from Powell and getting into all kinds of trouble as a result (there are some hints as to how this might have developed in White's initial interactions with the character of June Bug, but that's quickly and inexplicably defused - good job, 'Coke'). Instead, first thing that comes out when he meets his fiancée's parents is that he's a cop - no warning from the fiancée that, "You know, uh, by the way, my dad's a former Black Panther and he hates policemen, so maybe you shouldn't mention that to him, okay?" And then the father's reaction to this is so implausibly and overtly negative that it goes way, way beyond any kind of risibility into outright unpleasantness, not to mention complete unbelievability.Which is another of this film's greater weaknesses: all kinds of baffling incidents of "What the..?!" implausibilities. Like the fact that White's character, a uniformed beat cop, has his own desk at the police station and apparently is allowed to just kick back there whenever and yack with his fellow officers who also apparently have nothing better to do. Or that June Bug cannot recognize fellow gangstas as friendly until they're within five yards of him. Or that the guys with whom Powell and White are playing dominoes in the park would make such outrageously crude and grotesquely sexist remarks about Powell's wife and daughter when it's obvious to even the biggest idiot that they're just that: his wife and daughter. I could go on and on, but my point is that if your story is set in something at least resembling the real world and, more importantly, we're expected to have some kind of emotional involvement with the characters, then there has to be some level of believability as well as psychological consistency to said characters. That just ain't the case here.As for Urkel's boner, let's just say that there's nothing quite so disturbing as a Jaleel White sex-dream followed by a Clifton Powell wake-up call.