Critic's Grade: B-

For 20 years most US media supported Richard Nixon,even though everyone
knew him to be a rat.The same mysterious process must be at work with the movie Ratatouille.
Every professional critic declared this rat to be a work of genius and the simple reality is that it is not.
Maybe the collosal budget was spent sending movie critics to Paris,what the public got is a realistic depiction of rat life in the sewers of Paris.
Once you decide that the rat can read English and French and is the greatest chef of all time,you have invited us into the land of fantasy,so what is the obsession with a realistic recreation of how a family of rats lives in the Paris sewers?
Embedded in the sountrack is the actual sounds of Paris sewers,created at great expense.This might seem trivial were it not related to the whole Eurodisney fiasco.
Eurodisney should have been built im sunny Spain.It ended up where it is because the wives of Disney execs wanted to live in 5 star luxury hotels in Paris,while the park was built.
In order to bullet proof themselves against critics,the only interesting character is a food critic,named EGO,played by Peter O'Toole,who goes on at great lenghth about how evil and parasitical critics are.
Who exactly is the hero here,Remy the rat or Linguini,the fake chef?
Linguini works in the kitchen of a Paris restaurant and is clueless about food or hygenie.In this sense he is like the characters who appear on American Idol having no skill,no talent,no knowledge-but expecting-demanding -to be treated as if they were stars.
Linguini is not the simple fool he apears to be,he is the illegitimate son of Gusteau,the late famous chef.Now there is a great tradition in romatic historical novels of the hero being the illegitimate child of Royalty,but being the bastard of a chef is not quite the same as the bastard of Henry 8th.
There may be a more offensive image than your food being prepared by some idiot with a rat yanking his hair,but I have not seen it.

All Reviews by Fred Landis
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