The Menu (Mark Mylod, Nov. 18, 2022) Movie • Page 6

I really really liked this.

 

This was a lot of fun. I agree with the Chef in regards to smores. Cheeseburger looked okay at the end, but also far better than anything else he served.

I'll definitely be watching this again.

 

Watched this a second time last night and it just gets better with age, like me

Margot smoking Elsa in the face with that paco jet machine never gets old

 

This was good. I didn’t love it, but it kept me guessing.

 

Just finished watching it for the first time. Loved it. Loved the nods at Chef's Table.

 

I had to pause it after the taco reveal. So this is just a remake of Saw?

 

No.

 

It just needed the creative gore. Instead almost everyone dies the same way.

The unholy trinity of Triangle of Sadness-Knives Out 2-The Menu is a bad sign for satire. It is hard to feel the chef's pain when one of the victims is guilty of starring in a movie he did not like and the sentence is mass murder/suicide.

There is always a contradiction in these films that weakens the satire, namely that they are being created by the people who you would think the films are ostensibly criticizing. Instead, the supposed villains are so cartoonishly aloof or despicable that it goes down so easy that no one is really challenged or questioned. After all, you don't want to actually raise class consciousness when you are the ones benefiting from the system. It differs from something like Get Out, which nails some of its lines and moments so well that even the actors portraying the roles didn't get the criticism in the text.

 

No.

 

I wouldn’t have liked this as much if it had more gore. And, the “cartoonish”-ness was, imo, a feature more than a bug (and landed much better here for me than in Glass Onion; haven’t seen the other one). I feel like the point was to be fun more so than lead to any sort of praxis or whatever, and idk, it really succeeded in all the ways I wanted it to!

But yeah, sure, there’s a lot to be said for the limitations of satire and class consciousness within Hollywood.

 

The Menu is also more than just a satire on basic class consciousness. It's a great (and unique) commentary on what happens when class intersects with the arts and the futility of both when things get out of hand. It's the biblical concept of "inherit the world, forfeit your soul" put to film where both the rich people and the geniuses lose and the sole winner is a sex worker who doesn't have all the money and talent everyone else has, but whose saving grace is seeing the emptiness in all the elitist BS from both groups. And it shows at the end with the cheeseburger that some of the best art is accessible to the commoner, not just a commodity for the elite. Heck, Chef sees all that too. He's just too caught up in his final "masterpiece" and obsession with the people he hates to decommit to his despair at the end. It's sad. But also moving and insightful.

I've loved talking about this movie because I feel like most people came away with the sort of surface reading I had expected to come away with, which is that it's a simple "screw the rich" satire, but it felt a lot deeper and more personal for me as an artist and a human.

 

The reason Margot doesn't play along is because the other characters are made too impossibly stupid to sustain suspension of disbelief. Her date continuing to eat and smile after the sous chef shoots himself is the crater of that. When you make the targets of your satire that outlandish, it protects the people who you want audiences to believe you are satirizing because they don't see themselves in that.

Criticism of high culture like this is really easy. People can laugh at art exhibits which seem to most people to be nonsensical but is praised by people with subscriptions to The New Yorker. Anthony Bourdain had already laid out a lot of these same criticisms of foodie culture, and 2021's Pig was able to get the point across much more effectively in a few scenes.

 

I don't think this is supposed to have that kind of suspension of disbelief you were looking for? It's an intentional farce.

 

That's the fallback we always see. It can have a scene where the main villain looks directly at the camera and explains the thesis they want you to come away with but any exploration into the depths or criticisms of that critique are brushed away because it is a genre film.

 

It is farcical, to the detriment of its already uninteresting satire. These familiar politics are the makings of an amusing sketch at UCB, not a 90 minute movie

And it looks like a TV show

 

The cast is solid tho

 

Fair enough, I guess? This was one of my favorite movies of 2022, but so were a couple multiversal genre flicks, lol. Clearly I often have more fun with genre flicks on average than you do! I genuinely appreciate your appreciation of cinema as an art form and your desire for it to be better where possible; I just didn't butt up against the same critiques you have with this one and don't particularly agree when reflecting back.

 

I ...really don't see where you're coming from with this one.

 

That's the fun part about talking about movies.

 

Pig is a great movie. Actually thought of it while watching this multiple times. I think to your point, for me it's a matter of comparing layered meaning in a subtle package (Pig) versus layered meaning in a less subtle package (The Menu). Love both films, but I'd engage with them differently.

 

They are very different movies doing different things, but any time two movies come out so close to each other with very similar scenes or premise, there is an inevitable comparison. What makes the scene in Pig so moving is how close the chef is to breaking down; he talks so weakly and he tries to laugh to cover up his eyes welling up and his voice cracking. It touches on something that is more universal than foodie culture, which is reaching what seems like a professional high but being spiritually empty inside. Many of us can relate to that suffering in silence, or numbing the pain with various vices and compartmentalizing part of our lives.

 

Yeah, that scene is an absolute masterclass in writing, directing, and acting. One of my favorite scenes of the last few years for sure.

 

Someone on here said the actor performed terribly in that scene and I couldn’t believe it

 

I don’t think you’re supposed to feel bad for the chef. I think the point is what happens when something that’s a basic need becomes a job and your ego gets out of hand and you end up catering to the worst people in society