Waste of time

Really Surprised!

Captivating movie !

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I love Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon and Tim Roth. I also love revenge movies. This one was alot of work, and it was not enjoyable at all. The minute I saw Michael Gambon as this character I wanted him dead. With all his braggadocio I don't see MG's character being afraid or intimidated when presented with a cooked man. I would have been happier if MG's character had been boiled alive. Getting shot was just too easy. Overall this is just a dark, depressing movie. Visually it is beautiful the costumes and lighting are amazing, but sitting through it for two hours was just really not fun. And the pay off just left me cold. You want the audience to go YEAH! Instead I was praying for the end.

This is a fearsome, frightening, full frontal extravaganza from true artist, Peter Greenaway. Michael Gambon plays the 'Thief' as a ghastly, gangland supremo with the largest and foulest gob in cinema. Helen Mirren plays the abused and manhandled 'Wife' and is probably her greatest performance. There are many times when the outrageousness of Gambon's character that it is often only the serenity and grounding that Mirren brings that stops this spilling over into farce. It is a brave and open performance not least in her willingness to partake in the scenes of total nudity. Alan Howard as the 'Lover' is fine and his measured and sober performance also helps. Last but not least is the 'Cook' played by Richard Bohinger as a kindly, understanding and long suffering restaurateur who has seen it all before. Well, he might have but this extraordinary feast of fetid stew of nastiness has to be seen to be believed. Michael Nyman's music is a wondrous ingredient, helping to at once make this more bearable but also still rather sinister. This is a work without parallel and whilst you may have to hold your nose and wince a lot, every scene has a beauty, however horrific the goings on. Perhaps, just perhaps a tad too long, is my only reservation.

When a friend brought the DVD of "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" for me to borrow, he gleefully told me, *you'll see a Dame fully naked." I immediately asked, "Oh yes, would that be Helen Mirren?" to which he told me it was and asked how I had guessed. I said that Helen was famous for doing a revealing movie although I had never seen it and, I must admit, when I began to watch it, I was probably more titillated by the idea of seeing someone famous who I had long been a fan of naked than seeing a movie!However, as the film got under way, it became very apparent that this was no "ordinary" movie (whatever that is). At first, I found myself wondering what on Earth was going on but, as it progressed, I more and more began to feel as though I was at a live performance of a Shakespearian tragedy melodrama. Everything was dramatically overdone and I realised that this was completely intentional. If the naked love-making scenes had been faded out or masked, their impact would have been lost and the same applied to the gory scenes of abject cruelty.I did find myself wondering why Spica's (Gambon) restaurant had any clients at all given the way they were treated by him and his puppet henchmen and women and a number of other anomalies were also puzzling.However, after watching the movie, I thought I'd have a look at what other viewers had to say about it and logged onto IMDb. Amongst the few reviews I read, was one by Minerva Breanne Meybridge which, for me, brilliantly put the whole thing into perspective. Whether Minerva's interpretation is what the producers were aiming for is, of course, open to speculation but, as far as I'm concerned, excellently explains what is, after all, a decidedly bizarre movie.In fact, I would go so far as to say that Minerva's review should almost be mandatory reading before watching the movie.

I have a problem with art-house films like THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER and it's that the directors of such fare are often totally ignorant when it comes to decent film-making. Sure, they obsess over designer costumes and make-up, and they focus intently on the colour palette of their movies, but when it comes to movie-making staples like pace, character, dialogue, and intrigue, they fail.Peter Greenaway is such a director. This controversial 1989 opus is known for its gruesome scenes of cannibalism, yet take away the controversy and there's absolutely nothing here to rate this. The running time is as slow as a snail, and much of it is made up of scenes of the repulsive Michael Gambon character berating his wife and associates.Greenaway's a better director than he is a writer, because the script is terrible. We get the gist of Gambon's character and the situation with his wife in the first ten minutes, yet two hours of non-action go by in which we're bludgeoned over the head with his sheer monotonous brutish nature. The whole film takes place on a cheap-looking set that quickly becomes boring, Helen Mirren spends most of the running time naked and forgets how to act, and luminaries such as Tim Roth and Ciaran Hinds are wasted.Yes, there are a few shocking scenes, yet cannibalism is dealt with in a much more entertaining fashion in both B-movie fare (such as Pete Walker's 1974 FRIGHTMARE) and Hollywood flicks (like RAVENOUS). I'm not against arty films where nothing happens, but there has to be substance to go with the style; Nic Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW is a case in point: one of my favourite films of all time, but hardly action-packed. THE COOK... just wastes a great deal of potential and proves to be another case of The Emperor's New Clothes.