Home Video Picks & Passes 10.19.14

Chef (2014) — PICK
Gone With the Wind (1939) — PICK
Sleeping Beauty (1959) — PICK

Quick, what was the last live-action American movie you remember with a moving father-son relationship? I mean, with an actual father, not a father figure, and a boy, not an adult son?

Yeah, I’m stumped, too. That’s how unusual the indie crowd-pleaser Chef is — and why it’s possibly my favorite film of the summer.

Writer-director Jon Favreau stars as Carl, a once-hot chef whose stifling work situation has dulled his creative edge and strained his relationship with his young son, Percy (Emjay Anthony), who lives with Carl’s ex-wife (Sofía Vergara).

So far, it’s a sadly typical broken-family scenario: an absent dad who routinely lets down his loved ones, to the point that Percy isn’t even surprised. We also see Carl’s unsuccessful attempts to make it up to the son through prepackaged consumerist experiences (a day at the amusement park, an afternoon at the movies), which are not what Percy wants.

Then a series of disasters in Carl’s professional life tanks his career, paving the path to personal reinvention and redemption. This is another common movie setup — workaholic who learns to value happiness, creative freedom and family over conventional success — but few movies pull it off with the conviction of Chef, where the creative joy of the filmmakers is reflected in the characters. 

The best scenes are those of Carl and Percy bonding over sharing the things that each of them knows, that are important to each of them: the son shares technology and social media with the father; the father shares restaurant kitchen work with the son. This is what Percy really wants: to be a meaningful part of his dad’s life. The ending is almost too perfect, but the goodwill the movie has earned sells it.

Two classics return to Blu-ray: the Golden Age epic Gone With the Wind and the Disney classic Sleeping Beauty.

Gone With the Wind celebrates its 75th anniversary with a limited edition Blu-ray/DVD set that adds a couple of new extras to the 70th anniversary edition from 2009. Sleeping Beauty returns from the Disney vault in a “Diamond Edition” Blu-ray/DVD release that disappointingly replaces many of the extras from the earlier “Platinum Edition” with marketing tie-ins notably emphasizing Maleficent.

This is a shame, because Sleeping Beauty is the most overtly Christian of all Disney’s fairy tales, whereas this summer’s Maleficent is a nearly Satanic inversion of the original film’s moral universe. Still, any new chance to get Disney’s best fairy tale between Snow White and Beauty and the Beast is welcome.

Caveat Spectator: Chef: Much obscene and crude language, sexual references and limited profanity; brief drug use. Mature viewing. Gone With the Wind: Battlefield violence; romantic complications; racial stereotypes and depictions of slavery. Sleeping Beauty: Animated menace and fantasy violence. Fine family viewing.