Chef

Wrong movie, please check.

amazing

this not the movies chef 2014 this is the India version

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* you D Resh and * your Hindi movie

the only explanation i can think of for this trite mishmash of lifeless clichés is that somehow it's a brilliant parody that went right over my head. There are occasional moments of humor, most of them involving the effortlessly adorable John Leguizamo, but…much of it is so eye-rollingly bad that it's tempting to get on a plane to LA and go down the list of people who need a good slap. Check, cameos by all kinds of people who should know better (exception, the chewing-gum-faced omnipresent Scarlett, who…no expectations of her knowing better, so i guess she's excused), check, happy Latin music at every turn, dimpled kid dancing on Daddy's shoulders, lazy Hispanics who ignore the white man but get in line to help when fellow Espanitch espeakerrr promises them food and beer…just an endless string of weary sighs. Shame on you Jon Favreau, you worked so hard to climb to where you are, and then pee it all away on this drivel? Was there maybe an equivalent of the restaurant boss who said, no, don't show up at the restaurant with all the great food you cooked and show the critic your real magic, that would just end the movie, no, better if you come and bitch the guy out and call him an asshole 10 times. Oh, and we finally get a chance to find out what's the "buzz" about all this new-fangled "social networking" stuffs the kids are all doing now, with what do they call it twitter or something? can someone please explain to me how it works, oh wow, the 10 year old kid is a master of it! please program my VCR! The only surprise was that there wasn't a tearful smiling dog looking into the lights at the end. They even ended with Oye Como Va. Jon Favreau, shame on you; you need to step back from making movies and go run a food truck and think about what you've become. Get rid of all the yes men posse that didn't smack you in the head early enough on, and find some friends who won't let you get away with such crap. p.s. Sofia Vergara's boob job is really sad, looks like she stuffed a pillow in there. Did her head shrink? Her mouth is going to fall right off.

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source: Chef

I'm no foodie but I really enjoyed this road-trip / father-son / buddy movie, written directed by and starring Jon Favreau, based on the recent life and times of a perfectionist chef who struggles to suppress his own innovation to the demands of his conservative paymaster boss. More than this, he gets involved in a spat with the town's number 1 food critic, sees his relationship with his son founder under pressure of work and still pines after his glamorous and super-rich ex-wife. There's not much more to the story than that and I feared for all the anticipated parental-bonding scenes I would see the second I clapped eyes on his flop-haired 10 year old son but I was very pleasantly surprised to be engaged by this lighthearted, fast-moving, feel-good movie, right up to the predictable happy ending for all concerned. With a busy but enjoyable soundtrack of soul and salsa in the background, nice realistic acting by all the leads right down to son Percy and of course lots of scrumptious shots of freshly made food, this movie certainly mixed its ingredients together well, delivering in the end a most palatable dish. Perhaps the star-power cameos were a little unnecessary, maybe the father-son stuff did get a little hokey at times and the wraparound happy ending did seem somewhat forced but on the whole I found this a very watchable and occasionally funny movie which more than whetted my appetite for a decent Saturday night stay-in movie.

Everything about this movie indicates that it was paid for by Twitter as a thinly disguised infomercial for its social networking related platforms. Favreau clearly hired his buddies for a little star power and probably a quick paycheck to give some weight to this blatant advertising vehicle. To their credit, the actors in Chef at least try to act a part, and there is an actual screenplay, which distinguishes it from Adam Sandler movies which are solely designed to insult the audience's intelligence while paying his pals to take vacations. You see the cover and think, "Hey! Sleeper hit! Favreau! Downey, Jr.! Hoffman! Leguizamo! Vergara! Johansson! This sounds fun!" But it's not fun. 75% of the scenes are either talking about or demonstrating Twitter and other social media in typical Hollywood graphical gimmickry (and hyping its impact), or of Jon Favreau noisily eating something. Jon Favreau chomps on kettle corn. Jon Favreau crunches loudly on a grilled cheese sandwich. Jon Favreau chews a sample of slow cooked pork. Jon Favreau moans through a sample of barbecued brisket. Misophonics, beware. Also, Favreau likes to touch the food that he cooks and serves to customers, a lot. He directs close ups of his hands near groping the food as he cooks and plates it. There has to be a health code violation or two in this movie here somewhere. Your villains are typical straw men: Hoffman is the restaurant owner who won't let Favreau stretch his culinary creativity, and the critic is the snarky word smith who doesn't know how to cook what he critiques. Everybody else is a stereotype: the son who knows everything about social networking; the happy-go-lucky Cubano who drops everything for his beloved Chef; the ex-wife is the good friend who helps him every step of the way; the hostess/sommelier/girlfriend is the sexy/hipster/foodie on Yelp that you'll never meet in real life; and Favreau himself, whom I don't need to describe because you can figure it out from the plot summary. Only Downey stands out, but that's because he's playing his typical fast-talking/random-subject-changing-guy/self that everyone knows and loves. And he's in the movie for about eight minutes. It's all just tired and trope-y, just like Chef Casper's Molten Lava Cake. It's the little story where everybody "learns a little something about life and love along the way" crushed under a pile of advertising dreck for the sheer awesome power of social networking (richly undeserved.) Normally I'd have given three stars to this movie because the performances weren't awful and the writing was passable, but I couldn't finish it because of the Twitter crap, so one less star.