This charming doc takes its time while focusing on food, but highlights larger lessons that audiences will reflect upon long after leaving the theater.
This charming doc takes its time while focusing on food, but highlights larger lessons that audiences will reflect upon long after leaving the theater.
"How to Cook Your Life" is about the art of cooking. Zen priest of cookery, Edward Brown, demonstrates that food means much more than just nutrition and that cooking is a feast of the senses, as well as an act of love and generosity.
In How to Cook Your Life, Edward Espe Brown endearingly embodies one of Buddhism's guiding principles: a sense of humor about our arrogances and illusions.
A jaunty mix of chanting, baking and spiritual uplift, How to Cook Your Life introduces us to the cooking classes of Edward Espe Brown, a twinkling Zen priest.
How To Cook Your Life is slow and gentle, and it sneaks up on you. It ain't War & Peace, but it is the sort of film you'll think about long after you leave the theatre.
Doris Dorrie's loving portrait of Buddhist priest and chef Edward Espe Brown showcases his message that paying attention to the mundane processes of food production, preparation and consumption can be a gateway to larger spiritual revelations.
Cook and Zen priest Edward Brown is profiled in this documentary by German filmmaker Doris Dörrie (Men), who follows the witty, pleasant Brown as he offers cooking and life lessons in Buddhist retreats in Austria and California.
The Zen priest who dominates the film as its talking head is laid-back to the point of being soporific and engages in speech mannerisms that could make even an adolescent hit the ceiling.
Sure, documentaries are usually slow and uneventful, but they should be informative. Well, Doris Dorrie doesn't have much going on with informing in this picture.There is no clear point as to what this documentary is trying to be. Is it a film about food? Is it about cooking? Is it about religion? Supposedly, a
handful of people are attending some sort of zen class with cooking, but after a brief shot of the day's schedule in the beginning, there is no indication of any schedule being followed. The film bounces around from topic to topic and it also momentarily switches to other people for interviews that seem to be on a tangent from what Chef Edward Brown is talking about.Chef Brown himself is very bland and monotonous in the way he talks. This makes this 90 minute picture extremely boring from beginning to end. He attempts humor from time to time, as he laughs at his own comments, but most, if not all, are very hard to find laughable.How to Cook Your Life does have a message that some will connect with; however, this film just does a bad job at conveying it.
February 4, 2010
Justin Y
Super Reviewer
edward espe brown, the main subject in this movie does an excellent job in making the incredibly interesting subjects of zen, cooking, and zen cooking, as boring and unappealing as possible. he does with through a combination of patronizing parroting of zen cliches and exposing a patheticness of personality. the fact
that he talks about a word a minute also helps in making this lethargic parade of americanized zen platitudes a borefest.
the best parts of this movie are some archive footage of shunryo suzuki, and a couple of shots of a healthy produce in a garden...
favorite lowpoints:
when edward starts crying because something is dirty, when he strangles a piece of cheese, and his stupid "born again buddhist" t-shirt, worn without any sense of irony....
do yourself a favor... and skip it
December 20, 2009
h a
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