Movies About Cooking | The Good Family Movie ‘Chef’ | Review
Chef (2014) is a good movie. At times it is a great movie. However, it has two significant flaws which prevent it from being a great movie. This said, the movie is overall a good one, with some lapses of quality.
The movie starts at a good note. Chef of a chic restaurant is expecting the city’s most important food critic. Then the movie takes a darker turn, as the boss’ guidance seems to steer chef in the wrong direction. This said, chef – the main character of the movie – seems able to deal with it. But it turns out that he is not able to deal with it at all. He “loses shit” as the movie’s newspapers put it.
Through that experience of failing, the movie manages to draw in a viewer, who may have faced a similar experience of being put down by someone powerful. In this movie, this is both a food critic and a restaurant owner, both of whom manage to bring down the protagonist both emotionally and professionally. But they are not enjoying putting him down. They are simply doing what’s best in their own interests. This is where Chef transcends its realm of culinary world.
Chef manages to transcend somewhat narrow world of culinary art by bringing out experiences familiar to all of us, old or young, male or female. This is where Chef’s charm seduces you. It allows you to sympathize with the character who has nothing but his job. His family – mother and son – are somewhat estranged from him, until he draws them in into his culinary world. This is when the movie gets real good.
Overall, Chef is a pretty good family movie. But it could have been even better.Jon Favreau who has both written and directed this movie about cooking – not to mention starred in it – has been somewhat overindulgent in keeping too much footage. Part of this footage could have been cut without too much damage to movie’s quality.
Indeed, the movie would have been much better if its length was an hour and forty five minutes, instead of an hour and fifty five minutes. While this observation may sound pedantic, ten minutes of extra length do make a huge difference when one is watching a movie, especially if that movie belongs to a category of movies about cooking. This becomes especially clear when one considers the part of the movie that could have been cut.
The part of the movie that could have been cut down is the one about Twitter. Twitter is made something of a marketing juggernaut. Having a huge following there seems to do miracles for its main character. This is not necessarily true in the real world. Moreover, the magic quality of Twitter seems to be exaggerated. It seems to be exaggerated to the point of being a product placement. This is of course not true, but the movie makes you question that. If you are wondering how we know that, here is the answer: we have watched the movie with Jon Favreau’s commentary, where he said that Twitter has not paid. Also, as far as Twitter as concerned, the movie’s moment where Twitter helps attract a huge crowd has been inspired by something that really happened, so we give kudos to Jon Favreau for using the real-world events of interesting nature.
Overall, Chef is a good family movie about cooking and the place it can take in chef’s life, even though it is R-rated (thanks to its wonderfully charming profanity). But cutting those extraneous ten minutes could have turned it into a really good one, and maybe even a great one. But Jon Favreau should be given credit all the same: the movie is an artistic achievement with strong backbone.
Note About Chef’s Rating: it is more of a PG movie than R-rated one. The censors have been too strict on its use of profanity. We think it is perfectly acceptable for both kids and adults. We all know how much profanity there is on the Internet, not to mention more sinister things. So if you are looking for a good family comedy, Chef may be the movie you’ve been looking for. Both you and your kids would enjoy it, on all levels.
Roman Marshanski is the founder of Humoropedia.com and former Hollywood actor. You can Google his name to see the list of his movies (or you can click on his name above this box to visit his personal website). He wrote thousands of pages of fiction. Some of that fictional writing is screenplays and a lot of it is comedic writing. So he completed two feature film screenplays and many shorter literary works, some of which are comedy. He did most of that writing during his film career as a Hollywood actor. He was the lead actor in Rebecca Cremona's Magdalena. Rebecca Cremona was Steven Spielberg's protege on Munich. So he has a deep understanding of the creative process and can be considered an authority on all things related to humor. Indeed, his screenplays contain a lot of humor. That's where his love for jokes started. Eventually, this love of jokes led Roman to the creation of Humoropedia.com, the wonderful home of funny jokes and witty puns. He thinks humor is something very good. If you also think so, please follow him on X now because he has a sense of humor.
