CHEF (5/5 Stars)

“I get to touch people’s lives with what I do and I love it and I want to share this with you.”

- El Jefe

The science of cooking has to do with the recipe: ingredients, measurements, and timing. The art of cooking has to do with feeding people: presentation, atmosphere, and love. Cooking is the most accessible form of art. Books, movies, and music can nourish the soul but one can live without it. You need to eat. Thus, every meal is an opportunity.

I loved this movie like I love good food. It is a representation of all the good things in life. The story is about Karl Kasper, a chef in a creative rut. He runs a kitchen that has not changed its menu in five years. The owner, played by Dustin Hoffman, insists against innovation. They have had no complaints and are doing well financially. If you went and saw the Rolling Stones he asks, wouldn’t you be mad if they didn’t play “Satisfaction.” Play the hits he recommends. Karl is dejected by this situation. He explains his frustrations in a way that should be instantly accessible to anyone who does art for a living. “Ahi Tuna is a huge crowd pleaser. You put Ahi Tuna on a menu and it will sell out. We all know this. But there are chefs that cook food that they believe in and that people will try because they are open to a new experience and they will end up liking it.” That sentence is a great explanation for this movie. The writer/director/star is Jon Favreau who started out in Hollywood as a writer/actor mostly known for Swingers but then became the big time blockbuster director of such hits as Elf, Iron Man, and Iron Man 2. The man can cook his Ahi Tuna. But this movie, his first writing credit in ten years, is a smaller more personal film that not so many people will see but should be a treat for anyone open to a new experience and I bet they will really like it.

First of all, Jon Favreau did a perfect job of casting by casting himself as Karl Kasper. I can’t think a better actor in this role. Favreau is my ideal notion of what a chef should look like. He’s a big guy but not too out of shape, you know the type of guy who obviously loves food but doesn’t eat terrible junk all day. And it may just be his inner director coming out, but he carries gravitas around him in the way he speaks and acts. At the same time he’s got the focus of a great artist. Just look at that guy make that grilled cheese sandwich for his son. It’s the most important thing in the world to him at that moment. 

You can also see Favreau’s connection to the bigger blockbuster world in the very efficient way the movie is edited and the also in the special effects, which do a very good job of representing the digital cloud of social networking. To be specific, there is a lot of Twitter in this movie and the effects that Favreau uses to portray are perfect. They do what they are supposed to do and nothing else. Something that doesn’t work so well because it is distracting is his Hollywood hookup that allows him to cast huge movie stars in tiny cameo roles. But notice what I just did there. I just said that Robert Downey Jr.’s cameo in this movie was the worst thing because it was distracting. Do I love this movie or what?

Things come to a breaking point with Karl Kasper at his restaurant when a prominent food critic, played by the distinguished and portly Oliver Platt, completely takes apart Karl’s lazy cooking. And here is where Karl earns super great artist points with me. He cares what the food critic says. He cares in general about what his work means to be people. Forced to cook for the critic the same menu by the owner of the restaurant, Kasper quits instead. And while witnessing the acidic live tweeting of the menu cooked by his Soux Chef, he decides to walk into the restaurant he just walked out of and lays down the ultimate criticism of criticism an artist has a right to. The subject is a Chocolate Lava Cake. The critic decries that Kasper didn’t even have the courage to undercook it. Kasper angrily explains that a Chocolate Lava Cake is not undercooked, it is cooked in such a way so the middle is molten, like Lava you Dick! What is Karl saying here? The critic does not know what he is talking about. He doesn’t even know how the art is made. You have no right to criticize what I’m doing if you don’t know how it is supposed to be done. Substitute ‘Chocolate Lava Cake’ for ‘movie’ for ‘painting’ for ‘song’ for ‘architecture’ for anything really.

At the bottom, Karl’s ex-wife, played by Sofia Vergara, hires him as a nanny for their son on her next trip to Miami. In a bistro in Little Havana that serves Cuban sandwiches the real reason for the trip becomes apparent. Sofia wants Karl to open a food truck. He gets to be his own boss. He gets to be creative. (She gets a great food truck for her event planning business.) And at this point the movie makes a pivot. Karl’s son, played by Emjay Anthony, goes along for the ride. The movie becomes not only a great movie about being a great artist but also being a great father. Karl puts his son to work in his food truck. The first thing have to do is clean the truck; the lesson being learned obviously is that doing things the correct way takes work. Love takes work. It takes standards. And it’s worth it. The best moment of the movie is when Karl’s son is about to serve a Cuban sandwich that has been burned. The kid’s reasoning is that the person who will be getting the sandwich is not paying for it. Karl takes him outside the truck and has this dialogue.

“Slow down for a second. Is this boring to you?”

“No, I like it.”

“Yeah well I love it. Everything that’s good that has happened to me in my life came because of that. I might not do everything great in my life. Okay I’m not perfect. I’m not the best husband and I’m sorry if I wasn’t the best father. But I’m good at this. And I want to share this with you. I want to teach you what I learned. I get to touch people’s lives with what I do. And it keeps me going and I love it. And I think if you give it a shot you might love it too.

“Yes, chef.”

“Now, should we have served that sandwich?”

“No, chef.”

“That’s my son. Get back in there. We got hungry people. He’s ready to cook!”

Giving kids work is important for discipline but great parenting involves teaching kids why the work they are doing is worth doing at all and to do that you have to treat your kids as if they were intelligent human beings. You have to trust them with unflinching information about the world. Traditionally, so much of parenting is merely locking your kids in a tower and hoping sensory deprivation will bide the time till they are past the age of impulsive behavior. That won’t work in the 21^st century. Kids will find out anything and everything anyway so it is up to parents to actually do work now and affirmatively teach kids correct things not merely shelter them from bad ones. Hopefully they will figure those things out before they have kids. Most don’t. In “Chef” the son is not treated like a child. The reasoning as Jon Leguizamo, our chef’s soux chef, points out, “You’re kitchen staff. Kitchen staff doesn’t have an age!” Exactly.

God I loved this movie. Try not to see it on an empty stomach and give the best cook you know a big fat kiss afterwards. 

Machete Kills (3/5 Stars)

Back from the Dead with an Unexpectedly Entertaining Third Act

Writer/Director Robert Rodriguez is back with Danny Trejo as Machete, the ex-CIA, ex-FBI, ex-DEA, ex-federale turned illegal immigrant day laborer turned outlaw turned ICE agent. The character Machete by definition works better in two-minute trailers rather than two-hour movies. His main characteristics are looking like Danny Trejo (best described by one critic as, “a man who had a staring contest with the sun and won”) never dying and killing people. He had his start in a fake movie trailer accompanying Rodriguez’s zombie masterpiece “Planet Terror.” (I’m basically the only one who calls that movie a masterpiece and am trying to spread the word). Machete is a man of few words and, given Danny Trejo’s impending old age, works better when he stands still and glares and less when he actually fights people. In the end, what makes, “Machete Kills” ultimately worth seeing is a few other characters namely Michelle Rodriguez’s “She” (pronounced like “Che” of Guevera fame) and the new bad/crazy guy Mel Gibson. Unfortunately the entrances of these two characters come in the movie’s third act. Before that the movie slogs a bit in the territory of so-bad-it’s-bad before ultimately triumphing in a satisfying so-bad-it’s-good ending.

The badness of the first two acts of “Machete Kills” needs a detour into an education in the Grindhouse genre in order to fully explain. For those unacquainted a “Grindhouse” movie are B movies that promise sex and violence and nothing else. By definition these movies can’t be great in the classic sense (say ‘Citizen Kane’) but they can succeed, and some succeed spectacularly, in never being boring. Robert Rodriguez, that very underrated American treasure of a director, specializes in elevating this type of movie from B-level trash into high art (Sin City, Planet Terror). But just because they are not good in the classic sense does not mean that they automatically find themselves within the so-bad-it’s-good genre. Rodriguez doesn’t make bad movies per se. He makes good Grindhouse movies. Let’s use some of Rodriguez’s previous work as the gold standard of this type of movie we can give some guidelines to further elaborate on this tricky area of cinema. 

First the action and plot must move fast. The Grindhouse format is especially conducive to this in that plot holes are usually present. However in a good Grindhouse picture the plot hole should resemble a short cut that propels the story forward faster than it normally would in a regular picture. A great example is the ‘Missing Reel’ in Planet Terror that lands the audience in the middle of a battle thereby skipping the needless part of the enemy actually showing up to the fight. Also given that the plot does not need to make perfect sense, it might as well be sensational. “Machete Kills” involves drug cartels in jungle castles and a nuclear bomb aimed at Washington D.C. That is good so far. Unfortunately “Machete Kills” clocks in at around two hours. There is too much here and later I will give an example of what to cut. These movies really should be no more than 90 minutes.

Second, the action does not have to be realistic but it does have to be novel. In other words, it doesn’t matter how many people die or how gory it is just as long as the way they die is surprising and dare I say, clever. This is basically what makes a great Grindhouse movie fun to watch. The creative love that is put into the violence evidences something more in the maker than simply sadism. This detail is also what separates a great Grindhouse movie (like Raimi’s Evil Dead series) from the torture porn genre (Saw series). In a way that makes “Machete Kills” different from “Machete” is that there is a sizably less amount of cleverness that goes into the action sequences. In “Machete Kills” there are far too many scenes where opposing forces show up across open spaces and fire machine guns at each other. By too many scenes I basically mean more than one. There was only one in “Machete,” and it worked fantastically by itself. I suspect that because this is a sequel Rodriguez may have felt that he had to start off where he left off and started with machine guns instead of going back to the workable formula in “Planet Terror” and “Machete” of hand-to-hand combat than melee weapons than guns and than finally a big ass gun battle. “Machete” has good gags (I especially liked how Machete how defused a bomb in midair while riding it) but went on autopilot a few too many times.

Third a great Grindhouse movie has to like its women characters. By “like” I don’t mean that they have to do nice things or dress conservatively. What I mean is that there has to be more to them than just skimpy clothing and a bad attitude. Or to put it another way: it has to be a role that the actress playing it would obviously enjoy playing or at least find challenging in a professional sense. This is a particularly important guideline given the immense amount of Grindhouse and horror movies that employ their women characters to do nothing but scream and die in terrible ways. Rodriguez in general does well by his actresses, not an easy thing to do given the thin line he is walking in this genre. (Again take a look at Rose McGowan in “Planet Terror”). In “Machete Kills” I think he does well by Lady Gaga and Michelle Rodriguez who have memorable/badass fight scene. He does okay by Amber Heard who could have had more to do. But one character is not treated well and that is the sadistic bordello madame played by Sofia Vergara from TV’s Modern Family. She tries to kill Machete with her Double Ds, a type of machine gun that doubles as a bra (try not to think about where the ammo comes from). The problem is not the Double Ds. The problem is that there really is not much to the character besides that. She has no good lines and is routinely frustrated in not so clever ways in battle. Rodriguez should have just cut the whole subplot. It didn’t work and without it the movie would be the correct length.

In the “Machete” series Rodriguez has done something that is not really necessary according to my made up guidelines but is ultimately interesting to watch and that is his stunt casting. Rodriguez goes out of his way to employ actors/actresses who are unemployable due to career ending scandals. In the first movie he cast Lindsay Lohan (multiple arrests for disorderly conduct) and Steven Seagall (famously awful actor in terrible movies). In this movie we are treated to Charlie Sheen as Carlos Esteves (“Winning!”) and Mel Gibson (stuff I’m not about to write here). Unlike Lindsay and Seagall, Carlos and Mel are actually good actors and they do remarkably well playing the President of the United Stated and Crazy Bad Guy named Voz respectively. Truly Rodriguez is a kindhearted man who is always willing to give the fallen from grace a second chance to redeem themselves in movies that contain ridiculous amounts of violence and bad taste. 

There must be something to say about Rodriguez’s political consciousness. It is present in the ‘Machete’ movies even if they are just throwaway motivations for characters than actual lucid political arguments about illegal immigration and drug war policy. Still it makes an admirer wonder what Rodriguez could do if he actually attempted to make a serious movie about these topics. I’m sure he could do it. I’m also sure he would do it only if he really really wanted to do it. I can’t think of another director who seems to make movies purely for his own enjoyment and the enjoyment of his family (an example is the Spy Kids franchise. Rodriguez is the only filmmaker I know of that would make a feature length film based on the story idea of his five-year-old child.) He seems to be completely divorced from the type of greed that would induce him to make his films more mainstream or the type of awards acclaim that would make him choose more conventional subjects for his art. I like this guy a lot.  

For those of you with keen eyes you may also spy the Crazy Babysitter Twins and Rodriguez’s actual doctor (who looks like he’s lost a good deal of weight). They don’t have much to say in this movie though they were part of the group of characters taken into space on Crazy Bad Guy’s rocket ship in anticipation of the next movie. The title of that one is “Machete Kills Again…IN SPACE.” And yes I am very interested in seeing that as well.