It's Difficult NOT To Enjoy This Movie

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The acting in this movie is really good.

I have always enjoyed the show. Some judges are more to my taste than others, however Martha Stewart is a dreadful addition. Her comments are vague, banal, and unworthy when compared to the comments of the other judges. There does not appear to be any real understanding of the nuances of cooking

I give this show a solid rating though I have only become a recent viewer of this. I base it on the following-Ted Allen - the host, is perfect for this type of program.The contestants are real battlers.Foods chosen for this is creative.When the show finally had a "Beat Bobby Flay" Chopped episode, they came up with a field of 12 champs to try to beat him. They had a champs tourney to decide who would challenge him. While the concept was good here, they made one mistake in setting it up. The final episode only started with 3 people and Flay only had to face 1 champ in a final round. They should redo this tourney and have Flay face off with 3 former champs in all 3 courses and see if he can handle all 3 meal courses. This makes Flays victory in the tourney much like a rigged contest. It is much easier to win chopped when you only have to do 1 course. Granted the winner, just like on Flays own series, got to name what they had to make, but the difference between winning 1 course and winning all three is huge.Each regular show starts with an appetizer round, then an entree round, and then a desert round. Each round has a box of ingredients that must be used to make each course. Usually the box creates a challenge that forces the contestant to be creative.Then a panel of judges sample each dish and decides which dish should be chopped. Now if every dish is ever raw, there will be a commercial break where the judges all have to run to the water closet. Usually this does not happen, but then Ted Allen controls the proceedings quite strictly.The show is worth watching just to see how weird the food can be, and how strange the contestants and judges are. It is fun to find judges who like ostrich legs, and eel. Maybe some day the challenge will be to feature beauty mud in a dish. After all, women who use this stuff have been tasting it for years.

Chopped is not exactly the most prominent Reality TV competition. American Idol is having its final season next year, Survivor has been here since 2000 and is going to be at 32 seasons by this time next year, and I have watched Big Brother from the US and Canada editions (not to mention that Canada watches US Big Brother and vice versa). However, Chopped is a different kind of game.On Chopped, you are given 4 ingredients for each meal from a basket and you have to make a dish out of whatever ingredients you pull out of the box, however bizarre they are, in a given amount of time (any other ingredient and machine in the kitchen can also be used). Seems simple enough, right? Well... not really. The show has 3 judges who will eat anything off the plates, critique the dishes, and decide who goes home out of a starting roster of 4 people. The insanity that goes on in the kitchen makes for a scramble that will put avid food fans at the edge of their seats. Really, it's the scrambling to make their dishes that shines in this show because not only does it make it fun, it crowns deserving winners upon deserving winners. I have even seen 1 winner of the show appear again as a judge, so if one of the judges wanted to be in the kitchen, don't count them out.The judges critiques/comments I am mixed on. What judges make notes on while the contestants cook I do find to be positive feedback and helps us, the audience, learn about the ingredients that come out of the basket. But when giving criticism about the dishes, it can sometimes get pretty stupid real quick. Describing desserts too sweet and saying that grilled cheese cannot be a dessert are 2 examples of that and some of the eliminations are, in all honesty, kind of bogus as a result. But a lot of other criticisms are very fair and so unfair eliminations are not too much of a problem. I like Scott Conant, Chris Santos, and Amanda whatsherface especially as judges.My other big problem is that the host is way too easy to make fun of during the cooking portions of the episodes and so it makes the show more laughable at times when it really doesn't need to be as so. However, it doesn't destroy the show entirely as he does a professional job with the eliminations and introductions.All in all, Chopped is a fine choice for people who want to find something different on TV. However, it really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

I really enjoy watching the contestant chefs prepare elegant gourmet dishes from surprise unusual ingredients. For a while, that worked for me. But the more I watched, the more disgusted I became by the judges.Of course, we, the audience, don't see everything that happened, only what the directors splice together for broadcast. And we can't taste the food. We can only hear the comments of the judges and the contestants. And we can only see the scenes cut from the various cameras, scenes provided obviously out of their natural sequence and spliced together to provide a feel for the competition rather than a raw presentation of it.That is what the audience has and it is all the audience can use to judge the program. If the directors have omitted important information that would change our opinion, too bad.The show's host gives the rules at the beginning of the show. Each dish will be judged on presentation, taste, and creativity. But creativity rarely gets the judges' thumbs up. The contest begins with each of four chefs preparing an appetizer. The chef with the "worst" appetizer is chopped and each of the three remaining chefs prepares an entrée. The chef with the "worst" entrée is chopped and each of the two remaining chefs prepares a dessert. The winner is chosen based on all three courses.Given that scenario, a chef who is second worst in both the first and the second rounds should have a nearly impossible task of winning. However, it happens more often than we would expect. The judges' critiques of the first two courses are shown again along with their critiques of the final course, but the judges' interpretation inexplicably changes so that one final contestant, who earlier was deemed by them to be far inferior to the other final contestant, in the final analysis becomes a close competitor and even wins.Worse for me is that chefs whose dishes appear to be quite beautiful and are given only mild negative comments by the judges, are chopped over chefs whose dishes appear to be quite unappealing and are given far more severe negative comments by the judges. In too many cases, judges have chopped chefs, not for any objective flaw, but because of the judges inappropriate subjective criteria, e.g., the absolute quantity (i.e., not the relative quantity of how much of one thing versus another thing was on a plate, but how much in total was on a plate, e.g., one clam was not enough for an appetizer, a sandwich was too much), the sweetness of a dessert (one judge likes things very sweet, another judge doesn't), the sweetness of an appetizer (one judge doesn't like sweet appetizers), the degree to which something should be cooked (some judges prefer rare, some prefer medium, none like well done).Recall the criteria: presentation; taste; and creativity. Portion size is not among the criteria, unless we stretch presentation to cover this, and that would be quite a stretch. Taste, I think, means that it should taste good, that the flavors of the required ingredients shine clearly and are well balanced. Again, it would be a stretch to include in the taste criteria whether an appetizer should or shouldn't be sweet. Of course, any dish, even a dessert, may be too sweet. And that would be factor in taste, along with too bland, too salty, too sour, too bitter. But too sweet is not at all the same as sweet or not sweet. And the degree of doneness (rare, medium, well) clearly does not fit under any of the criteria.There are things that must be cooked to a minimum degree (e.g., chicken and pig). And anything can be overcooked. No, these don't fall under presentation, taste, or creativity. Nor does chef's blood, but getting your blood in the food is also a no-no. As is double-dipping, i.e., tasting the food from a utensil and putting the utensil back into the food. Indeed, sanitary conditions aren't among the criteria. But these are universal rules and properly implied. Things like rare, medium, well are personal preferences and not properly implied.To be fair, if the judges have a standard by which dishes are to be judged, they should inform the contestants beforehand. But they don't. After a while, the show became, for me, an exercise in watching mediocrity win $10,000. I am not entertained by watching mediocre chefs play it safe with their cooking. I see nothing interesting. I learn nothing interesting. For those reasons, I had to chop this program from my schedule.