No, really.  Hear me out.  Jon, if you’re reading this–and I assume everyone in Hollywood receives Google alerts for anything containing their name–you outdid yourself with this flick.  Consider this my ode to “Chef.”

So, for the rest of us armpit-scratching plebeians: Never heard of this movie?  That’s a shame.  I think it’s on Netflix now (I have since lost access to someone’s account that I had been piggybacking on for well over a year), so if you’re hooked up to that site, please do a search for “Chef.”  Settle in, get comfortable, and prepare to take yourself on a cinematic odyssey that, after multiple viewings, will transport you back to a time when everything seemed within reach and feel-good endings were the only way to wrap up a story.  And by all of that, I mean the 80s.  I don’t mean a single word of that ironically, either…this is the sort of movie we are in need of, and which we need more of.  I remember watching “The Karate Kid” back at Eagle Ridge Theatre in the mid-80s, and once it wrapped up, I walked out of the cinema feeling empowered, overjoyed, and brimming with hope.  That’s what 80s movies did to you, and that’s what “Chef” eventually did to me, despite my resisting it for so long.  

I want to feel ashamed about admitting this, but why? After all, I’ve revealed a whole lot about my past and my thoughts to you. I haven’t even gotten to the part where I chugged Fireball Whiskey in the handicapped bathroom at my last ESL school.

So about ten years ago, Jon Favreau managed to duck and weave and zig-zag his way through the increasingly-hostile climates of social media, celebrity, entertainment, and popular culture, and somehow make a movie that transcended all of the irony and anger and weariness that was starting to characterize our society.  He made “Chef,” and as a result, “Chef” made me.

…I don’t even know what I mean by that, except to say that, one decade after I first inadvertently stumbled upon this little-known film, it still takes me higher.  

Around 2014, I was living in East Van with one of my ex-boyfriends (who has now, improbably enough, become one of my best friends in the world).  We were poking around for something to watch one day, and we were no strangers to frequenting those pirated streaming sites that I haven’t checked out in quite some time.  Do they still exist?  You know, when you type in “Watch ____ online for free” into your search engine and these janky links come up, most of which are terrible, but one out of ten would yield some successful results.

I don’t know how, or why, we came across “Chef,” but we did.  I wish I had paid more attention to this monumental occasion; had documented and somehow signified the very time and date that we began watching this movie, and written about it on the now-dismantled film-review website to which I regularly contributed.  

I only knew of Jon Favreau from the 90s movie “Swingers,” and that hadn’t made much of an impression on me at the time.  It was real bro stuff, starring Vince Vaughan when he was tolerable, and Jon when he was shorn and trim.  My understanding is that Jon has been immersed in the dreaded Marvel Cinematic Universe, directing and producing and starring in all sorts of rubbish that makes his studio overlords buckets of cash, like “Iron Man” and “Avengers” and some “Spider-Man” drek.  The only reason I know this is because I’m checking out his Wikipedia page right now, and the only things of note that jump out at me are: he is also a 19th-day-of-the-month baby (his in October, mine in December); his middle name is the never-heard-of-it-before Kolia; and he named one of his kids Brighton Rose despite giving his other two the respectable names of Max and Madeleine. Also, based on the tags at the bottom of said Wiki page, he’s apparently a “21st Century Jew.”  Good to know!

“Chef” is all about–you guessed correctly–a chef.  Not just that, but apparently, a really hot chef based out of Los Angeles (named Carl) who works at a restaurant called Gauloises.  This posh restaurant is owned by a fellow named Riva who is played by Dustin Hoffman, and fuck me if Dustin wasn’t slumming it with bottom-shelf gas station gin before each take.  I don’t think Jon was directing Dusty to be a slurring, half-lidded imbecile, but that is exactly how he comes across in every single scene he is in.  It’s remarkable.  I doubt he remembers a single hour of being on the “Chef” set.  After all, I know first-hand how much energy it takes to be a full-time lush, but we can rest assured that, after bumbling through his lines, Dustin’s priorities lay in being a sex pest.  

So ANYWAY, Carl, the hot L.A. chef, is also overweight, looks as though he doesn’t smell great, and is quite over-the-hill.  But in a city full of hot chefs, he’s still the hottest!  Calling in all of his friends to star in this movie as repayment for the favours he has done for them and their careers, Jon’s got Sofia Vergara as his friendly ex-wife, and Scarlett Johanssen as Molly, the sexy young server who willingly and happily bounces all over Carl on her own time.  A particularly excellent scene depicts the indescribable lust and carnal heat radiating from Molly, posing sultrily on the bed and dripping like a tap as she watches Carl make…spaghetti.  

I repeat: Carl is nothing short of a schlub, yet Favreau made sure that Scarlett Johanssen’s character had her young loins throbbing at the very sight of him, while Sofia Vergara’s character married and procreated with him.  This wasn’t simply artistic license and reasonable casting; this was Favreau doing absolutely whatever he wanted to do.  It’s his movie, his money, his script, his vision, and he was going to cast two sizzling female leads as his romantic interests if he felt like it.  At the time of filming, these ladies were two of the most smolderingly alluring women in show business, and yet in this movie, both of them wanted to climb aboard Jon Favreau and nobody else.  Why not?  If I had the clout and pull to finance and make my own movie, I would still have (73-year old) Ace Frehley play my besotten lover, just as I would have done as an eight-year old girl.  

 Speaking of procreating with Sofa Vergara, Favreau somehow found one of the most miserable, unsmiling children I’ve ever seen to star as his son, Percy.  I mean, in the movie, the kid essentially acts as nothing more than a precocious Twitter aficionado and spokesperson, since I have a very strong suspicion that Twitter poured some cash into this project; half of the movie is about Twitter and tweets and birds and chirping and Carl gaining serious social-media traction around the country as he merrily drives his food truck from coast to coast.  But this child looks as though he were rewarded for good grades by having cigarettes put out on his body.  I’m not sure why he was cast, but I suppose he does a decent enough job.  There is no exposition to be had as far as why this tyke is so doggone sorrowful, but we do understand that Carl is doing his best to bond with his son.

…which includes making two of the unhealthiest, most lard-dripping meals that nobody should ever feed a growing child.  For someone who is supposed to be a popular L.A. chef, you would think that Carl understands fresh produce, calorie-counting, appearances, nutrition, and innovation.  You would be entirely wrong.  If he’s not making his kid a dribbling grilled-cheese sandwich that he ends up eating half of anyway, he’s slopping together a greasy-spoon breakfast that I wouldn’t even pay two bucks for in a formerly drunken stupor.  I mean, I get it in a sense: you want your kids to eat.  At least, I think so, anyway.  It’s not like I have kids.  My niece’s favourite food is mac and cheese, but a) she’s three years old, and b) her energy and fitness levels are so beyond the universe, I honestly consider her to be my personal trainer.  

There is no reason for a boy who appears to be around ten years old to be scarfing down these trans-fat-laden disasters, especially when his father is supposed to be a CHEF! who understands food, and for whom a lawsuit or two detailing his neglect and abuse of a minor are precisely what he is trying to dodge.

I guess I haven’t even described what the movie is about, have I?  Okay, well, in sum: Carl is an L.A. chef who is being held back in his attempts at original cuisine at Dustin Hoffman’s restaurant: chocolate lava cakes are not progressive, although they are very delicious.  He gets into a major tiff with a popular food critic, the whole encounter ends up on Twitter, he feels disgraced, his ex-wife magically procures him a food truck, he starts making sandwiches from that food truck, his colleague and his son join him on a cross-country food tour, and when he arrives back in Los Angeles, the food critic decides he wants to partner up and fund his culinary vision.  Then Carl and his ex-wife get remarried.  The end.

It’s just such a great movie!

The first time Charles and I watched it, we scoffed at every single minute.  Groaning, making sarcastic quips, mocking the dialogue, we endured “Chef” right up to its feel-good conclusion, exchanging pithy observations and ridiculing absolutely every element of a movie that was clearly a labour of true love for Jon Favreau.  We declared it The Worst Movie We’ve Ever Seen.  We reminded each other of certain scenes and ideas for days afterwards, snorting with derision each time.  We congratulated ourselves for having such impeccable cinematic taste.

…until we watched it again.  And then, uh, again.  And then one more time for good measure.

Charles and I watched “Chef” together probably five times in just a couple of months.

And each viewing made us soften a little bit, allowing us to access those parts of movie-watching which had long since abandoned us: suspending disbelief, rooting for the main characters, cheering on the protagonist, laughing at forced comedic scenes, feeling great once the end credits were rolling.  We are both of Generation X, the forgotten generation, which is pretty adaptable, pretty unfazed by how things unfold, pretty tired of it all, and which early on adopted Kurt Cobain as its hero. 

…not me, lord no, but many people of my age certainly did.  Nothing was good, earnestness was for the birds, hating everything was cool, and irony was the only theme by which you could live.  You weren’t supposed to outwardly and overtly declare your unwavering dedication to anything except disaffection.  Kurt–-blonde and handsome and talented and famous and rich and a rock star–-still ended up hooked on junk and suicidal, but there you go: if Kurt wasn’t happy, why would any of us be?

Jon Favreau, however, is also of Generation X.  And Jon Favreau quite openly said, “Yeah, I don’t think so” to our generational negativity, and went ahead with his plans and ideas, and one of those plans and ideas was to execute “Chef,”  and the world is a better place for it.  He wanted to make a feel-good movie about a chef with a food truck, and he did, and he cast all of his friends, and the end result is almost anachronistic–it is just so entirely out of place in this century.  It is a movie straight out of the 80s, and I mean that in every positive respect.

Some things that you just have to overlook or ignore:

-Carl was married to a Latin American woman for apparently quite some time, and they had a kid together.  Yet when he goes to Miami and meets up with her father, he doesn’t understand a lick–not one syllable–of Spanish.  In all of their years together, he couldn’t even put together some basic vocabulary?  A humble sentence of salutation or opinion?  A little comprehension of basic interrogatives or pronunciation? I lived in Costa Rica for almost a year and a half, and without even trying, still managed to get to a high-beginner level of espanol just through encounters with taxi drivers and total environmental immersion.  Carl was married to a rich, sexy Colombian woman with whom he raised a son, but yet, when her father is around, he’s frantically looking to his wife for constant translation?  

-His colleague (played by Bobby Cannavale) is apparently suffering from alcohol-use disorder.  This is not sexy, it’s not funny, it’s not something to be depicted comedically, and it’s not always a characteristic of people working in the kitchen.  I hate when alcoholism is seen as something hilarious, because it is the exact opposite.  The drunken / hungover buffoon is a cheap trope, and perpetuates the idea that alcoholics are out-of-control, immoral, low forms of life.

-The scene with Jon Favreau and John Leguizamo (whose character is named Martin, and of course he’s a snappy Latino) singing “Sexual Healing” out loud in the truck as the dour-faced kid shakes his head was inappropriate.  I’m sure almost any other song could have been substituted for that one.  He’s still a little kid, and being trapped in a truck with two grown-ass men singing triumphantly about sex is not a good look.  Granted, it’s one of the best cover versions of the song I’ve yet heard, but this could have been inserted elsewhere.  Are we just witnessing two randy adults bleating in musical form about their lack of erotic encounters?  Keep the kid out of it!

-Worse than that was the “cornstarch on my balls” scene.  It came very, very close to being the sort of thing that calls to mind sting operations and FBI raids.  Percy (the child with serious Gen X face) is silently sitting in the back of the food truck as John Leguizamo (Martin) is driving, and Carl is asleep.  Martin starts grimacing, and then grabs a nearby box of cornstarch, which he proceeds to empty into his pants.  

“What are you doing?” asks the wide-eyed child.

“Ball sweat,” is basically what Martin tells him.  His testicles are itchy due to the high humidity, so he pours cornstarch into his briefs and feels some relief.  Then Carl wakes up, and Percy tells him that Martin is pouring cornstarch into his panties.

“Give me some of that,” says Carl.  He proceeds to dump cornstarch down his own pants to relieve his discomfort, while this haunted-eyed child watches on.  Further to that, Carl offers the waif some cornstarch to dump onto his own balls, which…well, I don’t know too much about how male puberty works, but I’m pretty sure there was very little in the way of balls happening.  Essentially, an adult man was watching his own son dump a cheap food thickener into his crotch area while trapped in a rusty truck speeding down some interstate.

No.  No, no, no, Jon Favreau.  I am certainly no prude–and, once again, I have no kids–but even I know when a scene should have been axed altogether.  If I had been a little girl and watched my mother and aunt relieve their vaginal itching in front of me, I would have dialed three digits on my telephone, and two of those digits would have been “1” and “1.”

…okay, I’m bored with writing about this film.  Jon Favreau, I need to thank you for making a movie that was, well, just a good movie.  I even watched some of “The Chef Show” (a sort of peripheral series on Netflix) and was incredibly impressed with how you could make an impeccable sourdough, and by what a downright adorable dork Sam Raimi actually is.  If you ever need a recipe for Doukhobor borscht, I’m your babushka.    

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