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Critics Consensus: This charming doc takes its time while focusing on food, but highlights larger lessons that audiences will reflect upon long after leaving the theater.
Critic Consensus: This charming doc takes its time while focusing on food, but highlights larger lessons that audiences will reflect upon long after leaving the theater.
All Critics (25) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (18) | Rotten (7)
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.
An unexpectedly charming and enlightening film.
If you enjoy time spent in the kitchen, you may find some surprising enlightenment in Brown's observations.
Well-intentioned but lethargic.
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.
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.
Salient points about the nature of food and culture are gently made, but the tone of the film is never preachy nor didactic, and the correlations between spiritual teaching and food make for a nice series of lessons learned.
It gives one a good sense of the Zen experience in cooking.
...a charming but somewhat superficial portrait of Edward Espe Brown, Zen priest and cookbook author.
What makes her film fascinating is the idea that this calm, centered man may be about to lose his grip.
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.
... more of a snack than a meal: Zen and the art of culinary simplicity as a temporary spiritual retreat.
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.
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