Review of Love's Kitchen (2011) by Jody W — 14 Jul 2011

Some films are determined to announce, with every frame and fibre of their being, just how rubbish they are. The cobbled-together "Love's Kitchen" lowers expectations from the off by missing out the apostrophe on its own title card; one minor character then drives facefirst into a lorryful of manure, and it's meant to be a tragedy, not a metaphor; then, after we've heard the chef hero give an introductory speech in which he champions "real food, with real heart" and denounces our celebrity-obsessed culture, up pops Gordon Ramsay, playing himself.

Gordon is so dire in his two scenes that director Hacking has him confined to one-shots, saying his (non-sweary) lines almost directly into the camera, lest his woodenness infect the other actors. Alas, this quarantine doesn't work, and we're left to look (and laugh) at a cast looking round at one another and wondering how on earth they've ended up here.

.. Many of the hallmarks of the Rubbish British Film are present: a lot of staring at women's a***s, people doing that "up yours" gesture that was last in general circulation around 1976, a script that mostly consists of the words "bloody" and "hell" in close proximity.

(Chief offender: Petey Bowles as Forlani's father.) Hard, really, to pick a favourite moment, for this is a film that provokes hysterical titters whenever the camera pans across to a sign for the fictional village of "Wooten Dasset" [sic], and with each appearance of Simon Callow as food critic Guy Witherspoon (geddit), whose hit Channel 4 show appears to comprise of no more than him enjoying some tuck before the camera.

Of the leads, Forlani gets a scene in which she uses a stile to demonstrate how limber she is, and utters the line "That is some seriously sexy pudding". Scott's idea of cheffing is to bark "vegetables, now!" and to let his hand double chop some asparagus for him.

The abiding worldview is anti-critic, which is fair enough - except that Hacking then asks us to believe that a single website review can transform a culinary black hole into the hottest spot in, well, Wooten Dusset.

I didn't even know they *had* the Internet in Wooten Dusset.