A different way of telling a story

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It is - a guilty pleasure! - Objectively - it is the same thing over and over and over again. Ramsey builds up a team by breaking them first, which is very simplistic psychology.At first - one gets the impression that he really seeks "the best possible" candidate for a job - but more and more - it degrades into too much a compromise of ratings.So he keeps the controversial ones, kicks the silent ones, no matter the skill - choices are more and more made to even out ethnic expectations than anything. So each group usually has a primary group of white people, at least 1 or two Asians and 1 or 2 black people. You usually get the bossy one, the dizzy one, the silent one, the pretty one and the scapegoat.It becomes too predictable.... .Predictable is what kind of ruins it in the long run. Comparing contests almost always end with a "close win" - rarely do we see a team totally annihilating the other team with a 10 to 0 score or so.It is also very unclear when he gets upset and when not. I know that this is part of "breaking" someone - but it is not transparent enough to start to care.And with the predictability and the lack of care - the show degrades just to a level of ... guilty pleasure.A pleasure for seeing others being yelled at.postscript.: maybe because it is Fox ... but the fixation on the Veterans and the military is cringe worthy at least for a European like me. I think i just saw an episode where Ramsey literally yells over a dozen times that they must "think of the coast guards" - to motivate them - as if that's a big deal. On the other hand - for Americans - maybe it is? All in all - it is a 5/10 - for entertainment that you really do not need your brain for - and a bit of an embarrassment for Ramsey, whom i saw in amazing documentaries where he travels the world in search of new and exciting dishes. Here he primarily acts (not too well) a rather boring role.

Gordon Ramsey really gets paid like beyond ten figures to yell at and bully people. As that is what the show wants you to see. But he also makes Simon Cowell of American Idol out to be a cakewalk and a sweetheart.Ramsey may make the show believable by being a bully and a jerk. But still he just wants the best of the chefs. And wants to chefs to really have stamina on an 80+ work week.If they can turn their nightmares hence the title to the kitchen of their dreams and restaurant to own. I have seen some chefs that are weak that Ramsey at times deserves to get toughened up.And very few chefs that stand up to him. Like the Marine Joseph(think that is his name), as jerky as he was. Nearly causing a fight with Ramsey.Still Ramsey makes Simon look like a cakewalk.

Year after year, this show looks exactly the same with the same "twists," the same band of witless cooks (how can any of these people actually do a good job where they're supposed to wind up if they win?), and the same mistakes, over and over and over... "You've burned the risotto! How can you be so #%$#$ stupid?" Or: "The risotto is soupy and has no salt!" Or "The beef wellington is raw!" And on and on and on, ad nauseum.... I only watch this show because my wife does, but it 's becoming more and more torturous to do so. A good acronym for this show is A-S-S: Always the Same S#@*. Because you're going to hear a cuss word on the show about every 15 seconds; you can set your watch by that. The "goodnight" from Ramsey will always be "P#@$ off." And there will always be terribly overweight cooks dripping sweat into their dishes as predictably as getting bad pizza at Chucke Cheese. Ugly people abound on this show more so than on any other. And it's not just physical. I would swear that every cook was brimming with hatred and bitterness toward all of their fellow human beings if I only watched this show. Being stuck watching this show because of a spouse is in itself "Hell."

I started watching this show several years ago, when it was new (in America) and fell in love with it. It had a good first few seasons, But then it began to parody itself, and seemed to dumb itself down painfully. It became more about 'the characters' then food. The premise becomes hard to take seriously. At this point, each episode is perhaps 30% flashbacks from within the episode itself. It feels like filler--- which is good neither in food nor TV. Now, the announcer explains every five or so minutes that something incredible and brand new and never before done will happen... and the hype gets exhausting.I made the mistake of closing my eyes for a few minutes, just listening to the show as it played. It was laughable without the flashing camera back-and-forth. Loud, dramatic music with pounding drums, Ramsay screaming about "french fries oh god what the HELL is wrong with you oh you donkey NOOOOOOOOOO O Chef NOOOOOOOO (clanging pans) It's RAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWW CHEF! CHef O NOOOOOOOOOOO (louder drums) GET OUT! GET OUT! NOOOOOOOOOO. YOU moron, you can't COOK FRENCH FRIES JUST GET OUUUUUUT!...." Yeah, it gets silly.At a certain point, if Ramsay's letting people who deserve the verbal abuse he's giving them as deep into the series as he does, then the show's not realistic, unless it's not really about cooking. If it's not really about cooking, then it's just 'the Real World', maybe dumber.The season finales are always great big emotional releases... but it's becoming more and more painful to sit through a season to get there.