I’m a big fan of Jon Favreau. He’s a good writer, a good actor, and has a good presence on-screen. In a comic era where most film comedians range from “mostly unfunny” to “completely unfunny”, Favreau actually is quite funny in a natural, undistracting kind of way. But most importantly, the stuff he tends to get involved in always has heart and dignity, and this is doubly true of his own writing (the cult classic Swingers, which launched and defined Vince Vaughn’s entire career, and Couple’s Retreat, a very underrated, critically lambasted film that really deserves an appreciation piece here on Irreviews). In Chef, Favreau plays a talented but stifled chef who destroys his career by getting into a internet flame war with a food critic, and who then returns to his cooking roots, in the process reconnecting with his estranged family and giving his professional life rebirth.

Chef is a basically sweet, enjoyable film that I found a tad long, labored, and unfocused. But I’m willing to admit that my partly negative assessment may have largely been a product of my mood that evening, which was strangely resistant to (and irritated by) the endless musical montage scenes of Jon Favreau cooking fabulous-looking food, montages which dominate the film from beginning to end. My wife loved all the food scenes, and talking about them afterward while walking down Broadway I found myself thinking that if I saw the film again, in a less cantankerous frame of mind, I would probably like them just as much as she did, and the whole film might have struck me quite differently. The story was light but wholesome, and while not super-funny, it did have its moments. The acting is good across the board, and it was especially nice to see Sofia Vergara playing a fairly normal, sane character for a change.

The central roll of Twitter in this movie highlights a general issue that deserves comment. I would like to throw out a challenge to Hollywood. I understand that nowadays all of humanity is attached to these devices which let us instantly communicate every thought our brains produce to the entire world via Twitter or other non-verbal channels, and therefore film might need some way to represent this rather uncinematic phenomenon. But there must be a better way to represent it than to have floating CGI Twitter windows floating over everyone’s heads in the films, and then having them turn into little blue birds that go flapping off with a happy little “tweet, tweet, tweet”. First of all, it’s just fucking creepy. It’s also disgustingly lazy to react to this phenomenon by corrupting the entire art form, turning films into an abstract visual language of group-think baby talk – “happy”, “mad”, “sad”, “eating”! Why do we even have to show people tweeting in films? We don’t show them taking a shit, do we? Or if we do show people tweeting, why does it have to be done as a cloying commercial for Twitter Inc., or as a careless depiction of human beings as an unthinking hive of consuming machines?

Twitter (and Vine) are featured so prominently in the film, one has to wonder if the entire movie was bankrolled by Twitter. Aside from this (which is unlikely to bother most people), Chef is reasonably entertaining film and it’s heart is in the right place. I would recommend it, with the caveat that the film will probably go down best if you really like at least two of the following three things: Jon Favreau, food preparation, Twitter.