This is already on HBO Max so I watched it. I don’t want to give any spoilers but I liked it. I will say, I don’t think it’s a movie that is meant to be taken literally and is more about evoking a feeling. Also if you like food porn, it is probably worth seeing just for that.
Just finished it. It’s a genre film for sure, I enjoyed it.
A fun movie, but with a cast like that I was expecting s’more.
A fun movie, but with a cast like that I was expecting s’more.
I see what you did there.
I had a lukewarm reaction to the movie. It seemed that almost everyone was a horrible person, and I really didn’t care about any of them.
I don’t think you were supposed to except for the survivor.
There is one thing I am unclear about in regards to Tyler, I will ask in spoilers below.
So he knew the plan, that everyone was dying. He was what I would call the foodie equivalent of an Elon Musk fan boy. Then why was he taking pictures of his food? he knew it was against the rules and that there was no point to it anyways.
Tyler is a psychopath. None of his motivations make sense…except, maybe, to his psychopathic host
I enjoyed the film overall, but I don’t think they “stuck the landing”. I was left with a bit of bad taste in my mouth. In the end, you’d expect that those who ended up dead were deserving of their death in one way or another. However:
The star’s assistant? Because she didn’t have student loans? Sure, she was skimming from her boss, but he forgave her.
The star? Because he made a bad movie that wasted two hours of Chef’s time on a day off? C’mon!
Even the rich couple was more clueless than evil. Maybe they deserved to die because he cheated on her and she let him, but really, they should have had something else in their past that made them despicable instead of pitiable.
The rest? OK, the investment bros and the critics were probably a waste of space and breath. so maybe they end up in the fiery end scene.
I don’t think we were supposed to think that.
All the attendees were victims. It’s not a morality play except in the perpetrator’s head.
Some of the violence was too much for me but fortunately there wasn’t a whole lot.
I loved the sendup of rich assholes and the take down of how they ruin everything, even something as universally wonderful as tasty food.
Tyler was a sociopath. Was Slowik really the same? He was outraged that Tyler had brought Margot knowing what would happen. Certainly he was out of his mind, but in his view, he was taking revenge for what he believed were justified reasons.
Just watched the movie, and this is actually what made it good for me. Yes, there were some people who “got what was coming to them” kinda sorta, or at least generally obnoxious people who it feels good to us to watch get it in a movie. But this wasn’t a movie about justice meted out by a vigilante. The chef was killing pretty indiscriminately based on any perceived slight or infraction against him or his art, including an actor who was in a movie he didn’t like, a woman whose parents paid for her private college, a couple who didn’t appreciate his food enough, and a financial benefactor who asked him to make a substitution on his menu. Not to mention the army of staff who all died as well.
I am a little tired of what seems like a recent string of movies and shows that are about “rich people getting what they deserve” (produced and performed by rich people, says Alanis Morissette). It’s one-note and boring. This was a breath of fresh air- it poked fun at wealth and pretension while also turning the lower-class-revenge fantasy on its head. Slowik is unequivocally the bad guy here.
The investor: Look, COVID nearly killed you, I’ve been dumping millions of dollars into this place, I just had an accountant look over the books. You’re a restaurant that seats 12 patrons a night serving intensely local, farm to table ingredients, why for the last 3 years have you been buying and then throwing away a 12 pack of sesame seeded hamburger buns weekly?
Slownik: In case some diner decides to randomly challenge my cooking abilities, I’ll offer to cook them anything they want and they might want a cheeseburger.
Investor: You’re insane, I’m shutting this place down!
Slownik: Prepares a set of angel wings
Hah!
Yes, I was alllllmost able to believe that maybe one of the cooks hand crinkle-cut those fries, but the bun and American cheese were certainly not something that actually would have been in the larder at that restaurant.
I was perplexed by the fact that there was no motivation given whatsoever for the entire staff to willingly kill themselves. I can’t say I actually liked the movie at all. I did want a big juicy burger afterward, though.
The staff live in a dormitory. It was a cult
I thought it was pretty straightforward for anyone familiar with the evolution of fine dining. The world of food is split along the axis of “craftsmen” who are interested in creating inherently delicious culinary experiences that bring straightforward joy to the eater to “artists” who are trying to use the medium of food to interrogate larger themes and to provoke novel experiences in people.
As the world of fine dining has evolved, it’s become more and more unrecognizable from the world of conventional dining and has become a hermetic, self referential bubble of artists who are trying in different ways to push the limits of the kind of artistic experiences food can deliver. Slownik says as much at the start of the meal, that the nutritive benefits of the meal he’s cooking tonight is largely irrelevant, don’t eat, taste. Use the taste experiences to cause you to think.
Slownik in the movie is cast as some kind of genius, in the movie, so far ahead of where other chefs are that he’s simply operating on another plane and that he’s attracted a cadre of devotees who are obsessed with working with him to push the boundaries of just where food can go as an artistic medium.
At the same time, food is also a business and an economic proposition and all artists have to wrestle with the compromises that commerce brings to art. The prices he is forced to charge means that almost everyone he serves is unappreciative of his art and the patrons he’s forced to rely on intrude and compromise his artistic vision and he’s burnt out from being in a place where he can see so clearly just how much further food could be pushed and how nobody can be brought along to experience and appreciate that artistic experience.
And so, over the course of 8 months, he and his team collaborate on figuring out what the ultimate boundary pushing experience could be and how they could perform one big send off to the world that is the culmination of their life’s purpose, not for an appreciative dining public, not for the notoriety or fame as no documentation of it was allowed, but simply so that it could exist in a singular moment in time, untainted, and then fade away. And that the entire team of people he had accumulated were unified in their commitment to the artistic process to such an extent that they would rather participate in one singular crowning moment of artistic perfection than to continue surviving as people who could never reach that peak.
The movie this feels the most twin to is Perfume: Story of a Murderer which I think most people misunderstand and I think is also about interrogating the question of just what can be justified in the name of pure art? Art that doesn’t entertain anyone, isn’t remembered by anyone, and also has a grievous cost to the world. Just how much of a cost is worth it for that art to exist, just for a moment and then disappear forever? It intentionally heightens that question by raising the stakes to an absurd level but it forces to to question well, if this is too far, then what isn’t too far for art that is incredible enough? The question feels very existentialist to me because everything we do ultimately disappears and we are left with nothing at the end of it and yet we pretend that it doesn’t to justify our living our lives and these movies ask, if we strip away everything else, is “art” the only thing we can really justify?
Yes, I realize that. I still didn’t buy it.
Despite your implication, I fully understood the so-called reasoning inside the movie, but it wasn’t realistic in the world of the audience (the audience of me). I never once believed that outside of a brain implant or bad writing, they would do what they did. Satire can be written so over the top as to be beyond absurdity, especially to someone in the field. Obviously your mileage varied.
This is an wxcelllent capsules of the movie.
It wasn’t meant to be. Almost nothing in this movie was realistic.
Absurdity seems to be part of the point.