★★★★☆

I probably gave this one star too many, but I don’t have half stars as an option. All in all it is a very well done movie.  Bradley Cooper does his usual phenom acting job and Sienna Miller is just a dream to watch work.

Let me be up front, I don’t watch any of the cooking channels. When I was a little kid I watched quite a bit of Julia Child, not because I cooked, but because we watched a lot of PBS and she was so entertaining. I never thought a movie about cooking would ever interest me. This one did. I found it compelling to watch. If the movie hadn’t been truly an ensemble it would have been much less compelling.

My Issue with Burnt

Where I took issue with it was the massive amount of waste. In order to shoot for the 3 star rating they tossed everything which wasn’t absolutely perfect. What made that more striking is that early on there is a monologue in a fast food joint about making undesirable meat tasty to feed the masses.

You see, we live in an era where we have movements like feedingamerica.org along with many other programs trying to end childhood hunger. We have food pantries begging for donations not to mention homeless shelters and soup kitchens and the only thing which was wrong with the fancy schmansy meal was it wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t burnt to a crisp or cooked in such a way any ordinary person would find fault with it, just wasn’t absolutely perfect.

Personally, I couldn’t get past this fault. Back when Child Hunger Ends Here was running I entered quite a few codes from prepackaged frozen dinners to help in the fight. Yes, I even ate those meals despite all of the health warnings about consuming large quantities of processed food. I’m also aware of various restaurants which ship their left overs to various shelters.

I’m not a tree hugging socks in sandals wearer. I just grew up on a farm and know that America throws out enough food on a daily basis to end all hunger in the country.

Otherwise the movie was well done. They just happened to spin me down an “I can’t believe they did that!” path early on which tainted my opinion.

For more movie rental ideas please see list one and list two.