Cook Up a Storm (2017)

This is my completely biased review, but I love this movie. I watched it on a plane to China, and everything, from the story to the characters to the visuals and music, arrested my attention- personally, I like watching food shows, so that was most of the reason I clicked on this drama, but the characters quickly became my favorite part of the movie. My only complaint is that it's too short! It's not that original an idea, and it's not that shocking of an execution, but between the visuals and the characters' interactions, I think you'd be hard-pressed to say this movie moves slowly or isn't interesting. It's definitely worth a watch, even if you're just looking to kill an hour and a half!

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This movie is fast food

The premise of this movie is very simple. East vs. West - whose food can truly be considered best? One of the many East-West dichotomy movies to come out in recent years with the main goal of proving that Eastern culture is just as good or in some aspects superior to Western culture.

So let's get the biggest problem with this movie out of the way first: The writing is absolutely atrocious. So much so that I genuinely had to pause the movie more than once to take a second to take in just how badly written those scenes were. Did anyone try to read this script out loud before subjecting the poor cast to this? It reads as if the writers had about two days to put together one of the most generic, over-the-top and cheesy cooking rivalry movies I've ever seen.
The main two actors are really doing their most to turn this into something, anything at all, but not even the admittedly charming rivalry/ friendship between the two main cooks can save this script from its sheer stupidity.
The worst offenders by far are the flashback scenes that get sprinkled in here and there that are also accompanied by some of the most generic violin pieces that give me "googled royalty free sad music" energy.

But with all that being said, despite the massive script problems and the lacklustre everything else, this movie is extremely entertaining. I wasn't bored once while watching it. The movie gets you to genuinely root for the protagonist, admittedly by using cheap and lazy bad guy stereotypes instead of genuine character development, but it does its job.
The cinematography is also at some points genuinely beautiful. I'm pretty sure half the movie's budget was used up only on the orgasmic food porn scenes that make up about half the movie. They're gorgeous to look at.

This and the charming performance of the main actors make rescue this movie from being simply shit and catapult it into "terrible but I can't stop watching" territory. So basically, this is the McDonald's Combo Meal of movies.

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