“Chef” may be great comedy and offer visuals of “food porn”,
but it has a lot to say about how people accomplish things in life, both by
doing things themselves or writing about others who do, from a distance.
Jon Favreau stars in his own film, playing the master chef
Carl Casper, divorced but with a devoted 10-year old son Percy (Emjay
Anthony). For years he has been bringing
in customers to a Venice CA restaurant (although the outdoor scenes looked like
Sherman Oaks, and the place itself resembled a big bar-restaurant that I ate at
in West Hollywood just off of Santa Monica in 2012; imdb says that some
shooting was done in Venice). He wants
to experience creative artistry in his cooking, perhaps serving the fictitious
fare from Clive Barker’s Imajica (please not the roe, inside the fish within a
fish, in the Third Dominion!) The owner,
Dustin Hoffman, wants to keep the fare the same because it is good
business. But a food blogger, made very
prominent by the Huffington Post, gives him a snarky review, partly because of
a chocolate lava cake that really is supposed to be mushy in the middle. Casper is not Internet-savvy, but his little
son brings him up to speed on Twitter very quickly. Casper sends a nasty tweet
back to the blogger (John Leguizamo), thinking it is private, but it goes
viral. Soon there is a nasty
confrontation in the restaurant, and the chef loses his job. He has to go on all heart. Overweight with forearms covered with
tattoos, he doesn’t fit the older social stereotypes of commanding appearance,
bit in this film that won’t matter.
The second half of the movie becomes a wonderful road trip.
Carl and his son go to Miami Beach, and get an old friend to give him a food
truck. Carl teaches his son to clean and
set up the truck, and soon the food truck is open on South Beach serving “Cubano”
food, and becomes a big hit. The truck
goes on the road, to Orlando, New Orleans, Austin TX, and back to Los
Angeles. At this point, it’s welt to
comment on the photography in this very professional film: it teases the eye
with all kinds of exotic French and Hispanic dishes with raw sea food, and then
opens up and shows us stunning Cinerama-like shots of the major locations it
visits., including the Lousiana bayous along I-10, and Big Bend (TX) mountains.
(Some of the food shots resemble those
on the blog of NYC classical musician Timo Andres, who often writes about
cooking, too.) See this film in a large
theater with a full wide screen. I saw it in the AMC Shirlington in Arlington,
which presented it in one of the larger auditoriums with a curved wide
screen. That works well here.
I don’t like to play spoiler, but the ending is
important. The blogger shows up at the
truck, first refused service. But then
we learn he has sold his blog for millions (I couldn’t do that with mine) and
wants to put money into a new company with Carl’s Food Trucks all over the
country, probably as a branded franchise. He says the SEC wouldn’t let him do that if
he continued to blog about food. That’s
a very interesting point.
Official site (Open Road) is here.
Will I take a photo of my next meal before consuming it?
Pictures: my own, from Everglades, Fremch Quarter, West Hollywood, Austin.
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