Royal Kitchen in Qing Dynasty (2020)

highly misleading description

I only chose the 'spoilers' option to be safe, because I only watched the first 15 minutes.

So, what the review and the summary don't tell you is that the actual English title is "Fatty Princess loses weight for love". Yes, really. Funny how this didn't feature in any of the reviews or the summary.
If you look really closely at the poster, you can see our "Fatty Princess" as a blurry image, top left.

So, we start with one of the leads, not the fatty princess, BTW, on her wedding day, where she informs her husband that she
a) loves another
b) will never consummate, and
c) if he tries to force her, she will badmouth him to the Emperor.

Rather than making me all 'girl-power!' I just felt sorry for the guy, who had just as much choice over the marriage as she did (none) and now has to deal with the fact that, what - his family ends here? No, he can't get kids with a concubine because the wife was supposed to have kids first. Whatever, after what I'm going to describe next put me off to the extent that I dropped it early. Hope you got something out of this, guy.

And now we come to our 'fatty princess' - a fat girl stereotype portrayed by an actress in a fatsuit and wearing fat-face latex. She's fat because she's always eating, and she has her eunuch whipped when she puts on weight. The cook, who says he can't cook anything that will help her lose weight (but he can produce a magical hot soup which will cool you down in summer), tricks her into thinking she's lost weight by fiddling with the scales. Finally, a guard who's secretly in love with her tells her she'll lose weight if she chews everything 100 times.
We have a convenient time-skip of 3 months, in which fatty princess is fatty no more, having discarded her fat-suit and the latex fat-face.
Also, the guard who's always loved her, overhears the Prince she loves saying he only wants to marry her because her family will support him when he makes a bid for the throne, and punches the Prince in the face.

And I was DONE. There's comedy, and then there's this.

Look, there's some pretty images of food being prepared and served. But you can get that on Chef Hua, and not get the fat-shaming.

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It's a nice break from all the palace betrayals & killings

I came looking for Ryan Zhu/Zhu Yuan Bing and got a two for one deal! lol Xie Bin Bin is also staring in this movie!! I'm so thrilled! I love Xie's expressiveness and was looking forward to seeing him again! But I didn't expect that he be casted in a role where he loses his wife/wife to be before he's even won her over two times in the same year! This is apparently the first time and Chang'an Youth was the second with the same actress (Uvin Wang) that his character loses the lady he's initially paired with and the 2nd lady dumps him. Although the character he's playing (Chang Xu/ General Chang) seems harder than the Chang'an Youth's TangTang, it still sucks that he got the short end of the stick again.

Seeing Zhu's character was a momentary distraction, but nicely done. This movie just feels like an interlude, an excerpt from another time and escape from all the betrayals and killings that sometimes dominate period dramas involving palace figureheads. Thanks for the hard work & the subs!

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