Cook Up a Storm

I've hit that spot in Oh My Baby where everything is obviously about to get very angsty after a (very) brief honeymoon of joy, the thought of Good Casting is not exciting me, and I don't want to catch up to the subbed episodes of Sweet Munchies or High End Crush. And I didn't want to start another new drama as I've already got too many going at once. So I thought I'd do a movie today, as I needed a good long block of cardio anyway.

I decided to go for Cook Up a Storm (Jue zhan shi shen), a Chinese movie from 2017 (93 minutes, 1023 calories). I'd seen one of the scenes a few times and it looked interesting and we all know I love things that feature cooking. 

The nutshell is that a Cantonese street chef (Nicholas Tse) has to compete against a rival 3 star Michelin Chef of Korean/Chinese descent, newly arrived in town from France (Jeong Yong-Hwa). And I didn't realise this until just now, but Jeong Yong-Hwa I know from You're Beautiful, where he played the lovely Kang Shin-Woo back in 2009. I knew he looked familiar, but I wasn't sure from what. So, whoa. That was a surprise. 

But that's not really the story. Sure, that's part of it, but the plot doesn't keep to that simple premise and, indeed, the two soon find a common enemy and team up. Honestly, the movie tries to do a little too much and doesn't exactly succeed. There's the plot about the rich and crooked developers vs. the regular people. There's the thread about the abandoned young boy who grows up to be a chef like the father who abandoned him and him competing against that same (fairly vile) father while trying to seek approval from him. There's another thread about fancy chef losing his sense of taste, which is obviously a fatal blow to a top chef. 

A lot of the plot turns don't necessarily make sense. Like how the crooked rich people are able to shoehorn their contestant into the big showdown or what happens with their threat to tear down the street (they just go away after an impassioned speech?). Why the dad is such a dick. Why he abandoned his kid. Why the one chef loses his sense of taste and why he came back to China when he'd just been promoted in France. How the actual cooking competitions work. How, in the final scene, street chef dude doesn't even serve his dish to the judges, but instead to his dad. 

What does work is the cooking and the food. And the lead chef guy played by Tse (who I also just realised I've seen in one of Stephen Chow's films -- Shaolin Soccer), who carries it, albeit in a stoic manner. I see from his bio on Wikipedia that he is an actual celebrity chef -- and that definitely comes through in this movie, which is probably why he's what carries it. It's all just visually gorgeous and it will definitely make you hungry. It made me miss the back alley restaurants of Shanghai. 

So, I'd say that, yes, I enjoyed the movie. It's not a cohesive film by any means, but if you don't look too hard and just appreciate it as an underdog story with some very pretty cooking scenes, it's satisfying enough.