One of the things I appreciate the most about Los Angeles is the sheer amount of opportunities it provides. Whether that's for food, music, shopping, travel, films, whatever, there are plenty of options to try and see/experience things that you can't anywhere else. With the film industry every where over this city, it has been neat to see the different films that roll through the theaters, especially ones that aren't "blockbusters" or deemed potentially successful enough to be distributed nationwide. Cameron and I saw one such film last night:
Chef is Jon Favreau's new film written and directed by him and has an great cast that includes Dustin Hoffman, Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson and Sofia Vergara. Cameron had mentioned wanting to see it earlier this week or last, and we had attempted to see it earlier this week, but we both feel asleep after a breakfast-for-dinner meal Cameron made... We were able to finally see it last night at the Arclight Cienmas, and we both agreed that it was one of the best movies we had seen in a long time. We've seen a few movies since we've been in Los Angeles, but they've been the blockbusters you can see anywhere-
300: Rise of an Empire, Rio 2, Captain America: The Winter Solider, you get the gist.
Chef follows Carl, an award winning chef in a rut who is fired/quits after a difficult review is posted about his food. Jobless, he ends up starting his own food truck.
Now, I'll be the first one to tell you that dramas aren't really my thing. I do enjoy them every now and then, but they're usually not my go-to film genre. I would say without reservation that I would happily own this film and watch it again. It is so good. We really enjoyed the casting and the story line; it was just so well told (people clapped at the end of the film, so I'll take that as validation of my opinion). Cameron had a sense of nostalgia watching it for his time on the BellyBombz truck, and it was fun for me to identify many of the food trucks in Los Angeles that we had eaten ate or I've seen consistently. For me, it was feeling famous-by-association since we could now recognize places and things in the film. It also made us want to eat a lot of food afterwards, and we secretly wished it was a real food truck we could find :[
If it does become a nationwide distribution, I would highly suggest seeing the film- or waiting for it to come to DVD.
