Le Grand Chef
An entertaining, though perhaps not actually good, Korean film about a cooking competition.
In the prologue, two cooks compose exquisite blowfish sashimi platters for a panel of judges. "They're poisoned!" chorused cofax7 and laurashapiro.
rilina, oyceter, and I, more used to the conventions of Asian media, said, "Eh? Why would they--"
The panel of judges proceed to vomit and keel over. Poisoned!
Cut to several years later. A cooking contest offers as prize an ancient knife used by a chef to hack off his own hand during the Japanese occupation of Korea as a protest against the overlords. The grandsons of the chefs seen in the prologue are competing. There is a good chef (handsome, honest, owns a cow he loves like his own little sister) and a bad chef (puffy face, greasy hair, cheater, no cow.) There is also The Girl, who plays even less part in the story than The Girl usually does. Also, she does not actually participate in a romance. She's just there.
It was all fun and games until a stage of the contest required perfect charcoal. It turns out that perfect charcoal is only made by one man... on Death Row! Evil Chef visits and stupidly mocks Death Row Dude. Death Row Dude tries to bite his nose off, but unfortunately fails. Then we see the sepia flashback of tragedy and woe! Once he was a small starving child, abandoned by his destitute mother who was forced to turn to prostitution and being the kept woman of an abusive man. He learned to burn charcoal, which slowly blinded him so he had to wear Coke-bottle glasses. (I flashed back to the pony going blind from coal dust in the YA Agony Awards.) When he tried to stop his mother from being beaten, she turned on him, and then he stabbed her abuser with a charcoaled branch. And then was executed. But he tells the charcoal secret to Team Good Chef before he dies.
For the next contest, they need perfect beef. The hitherto Good Chef kills the cow he loves like a sister! The cow cried! The Girl did not argue against this! There is a random scene of some other guy fisting some other cow. We all boggled.
There is also assisted suicide and Alzheimer's. A guy dresses up in his old Army uniform, bends over, and begs his old Army buddy to beat him. The old Army buddy does. If this was a better, or just better-known movie, a thousand slash fics would have been born.
In the prologue, two cooks compose exquisite blowfish sashimi platters for a panel of judges. "They're poisoned!" chorused cofax7 and laurashapiro.
rilina, oyceter, and I, more used to the conventions of Asian media, said, "Eh? Why would they--"
The panel of judges proceed to vomit and keel over. Poisoned!
Cut to several years later. A cooking contest offers as prize an ancient knife used by a chef to hack off his own hand during the Japanese occupation of Korea as a protest against the overlords. The grandsons of the chefs seen in the prologue are competing. There is a good chef (handsome, honest, owns a cow he loves like his own little sister) and a bad chef (puffy face, greasy hair, cheater, no cow.) There is also The Girl, who plays even less part in the story than The Girl usually does. Also, she does not actually participate in a romance. She's just there.
It was all fun and games until a stage of the contest required perfect charcoal. It turns out that perfect charcoal is only made by one man... on Death Row! Evil Chef visits and stupidly mocks Death Row Dude. Death Row Dude tries to bite his nose off, but unfortunately fails. Then we see the sepia flashback of tragedy and woe! Once he was a small starving child, abandoned by his destitute mother who was forced to turn to prostitution and being the kept woman of an abusive man. He learned to burn charcoal, which slowly blinded him so he had to wear Coke-bottle glasses. (I flashed back to the pony going blind from coal dust in the YA Agony Awards.) When he tried to stop his mother from being beaten, she turned on him, and then he stabbed her abuser with a charcoaled branch. And then was executed. But he tells the charcoal secret to Team Good Chef before he dies.
For the next contest, they need perfect beef. The hitherto Good Chef kills the cow he loves like a sister! The cow cried! The Girl did not argue against this! There is a random scene of some other guy fisting some other cow. We all boggled.
There is also assisted suicide and Alzheimer's. A guy dresses up in his old Army uniform, bends over, and begs his old Army buddy to beat him. The old Army buddy does. If this was a better, or just better-known movie, a thousand slash fics would have been born.