Not exactly a movie but worth checking out is Shota No Sushi. It's a japanese drama that talks about life and the art of making the best sushi in Japan. After seeing the whole series, it definitely makes you think differently about sushi. This may appeal to people who enjoyed Tampopo, especially.





you can usually find a copy on ebay, but be careful because most copies are only available with traditional chinese subtitiles.

Giovanna, if your love of cannibal movies is not, uh, sated, I would refer you to Parents on the list, with Randy Quaid and Marybeth Hurt (1989).

Did they really overlook Mui du du xanh (The Scent of Green Papaya)? One bite of papaya in SE Asia and you will always welcome whatever evokes the memory of it.

Choey wrote:Did they really overlook Mui du du xanh (The Scent of Green Papaya)? One bite of papaya in SE Asia and you will always welcome whatever evokes the memory of it.

I was thinking of this film as well. I mean, the film starts with an old servant teaching a young girl how to use a wok, sauteing gai lan and chicken for dinner. Later you have the young girl picking the green papaya, shredding it with a machete, prodding the glistening white seeds inside ... asking if she can cook the vegetables on her own, hoping to impress the older brother's friend that has come for dinner ... the family selling enough cloth that they can finally buy rice after the father has left with all of their money.

It's really a glaring omission.

rien

There are food scenes in movies, though not food oriented enough to qualify as food movies:

. . . and let me add Ernest Borgnine pouring catchup all over Spencer Tracey's chili in the Bad Rock Diner on that very black day.

I do believe that they missed the New Wave, Dale Bozzio vehicle, Lunchwagon. Dick Van Patten and Rose Marie, former Dick Van Dyke staffer, add support.

http://theonionavclub.com/fttf/index.php?issue=3823

Antonius wrote:the German film Mostly Martha, which managed to irritate me in ways but all in all it had some good things going for it too.Antonius

Frame of reference: My wife likes movies like 'The Hours' and 'The English Patient'. I like movies made from Elmore Leonard books. She brought home 'Mostly Martha', which perfectly portrays the obsessive-complusive tendencies inherent in great chefs. So what the chef was a woman? The problem lays in our gender neutral mother tongue, not in the plot (of which there is not too much).

On the list and my list: Tampopo and Big Night. Pope Of Greenwich Village, too.

There seems to be some threads emerging--those movies very much about what its like to work in restaurants vs those movies which are more about experiencing restaurants (Five Easy Pieces?).

"I eat antipasto twice just because she is so nice...'
Louis Prima

I'm with him.

Steve Drucker wrote:

Antonius wrote:the German film Mostly Martha, which managed to irritate me in ways but all in all it had some good things going for it too.Antonius

Frame of reference: My wife likes movies like 'The Hours' and 'The English Patient'. I like movies made from Elmore Leonard books. She brought home 'Mostly Martha', which perfectly portrays the obsessive-complusive tendencies inherent in great chefs. So what the chef was a woman? The problem lays in our gender neutral mother tongue, not in the plot (of which there is not too much).

With no basis you jump to the conclusion that I was irritated by the fact that the protagonist in the film is a woman and in doing so you are quite wrong. What irritated me was the other chef, the Italian, who is little more than a caricature, displaying various stock personality traits that northern Europeans and their American cousins think are typically Italian. The character of Martha was a strength of the movie for me but not of such stature as to neutralise fully the lingering bad taste of yet another ‘stage Italian’.

Antonius

Two glaring ommissions (from someone who's not much of a movie expert):

Broadway Danny Rose - 1/2 the movie's set in the Carnegie Deli and Mia Farrow plays a VERY thinly veiled version of Anna Rao, of the famous (and infamous) NYC restaurant.

Goodfellas - How could this be off the list?!? Food plays a role in most of the movie. The dinner at Tommy's house with Billy Batts still alive in the trunk--with a special symbolic appearance by Mr. Hammond's favorite condiment; cooking steaks in prison, and the final collapse of Henry Hill as he tries and fails to cook dinner, keep mistresses and deal drugs.

(I apologize btw, if these things have been mentioned by others)

Here's some prime dialogue. Guess.

Wait! I'll wait. But let me tell
you, if this steak was the
middleweight championship, I'd show
you how I'd wait. I'd eat it raw.
I'd drink the blood. I'd eat it
before it came out of the cow --
that's how I'd wait.

A recent, decent "food" movie, Pieces of April, involves a young lady in her crappy NYC apartment trying to prepare Thanksgiving dinner for her visiting family.

http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/m ... _id=278970

JeffB wrote:Here's some prime dialogue. Guess.

Wait! I'll wait. But let me tell
you, if this steak was the
middleweight championship, I'd show
you how I'd wait. I'd eat it raw.
I'd drink the blood. I'd eat it
before it came out of the cow --
that's how I'd wait.

Ha! Would this be the film (maybe even the same scene? It's been a while) which offers the advice that overcooking a steak (especially a dry-aged) "defeats its own purpose?" and which has Joe Pesci's character telling his son that if he puts his hand in his plate one more time, he's going to stab him with a fork?

On a more esoteric but equally brilliant level, Czech director Jan Svankmajer, who combines elements of stop-motion, claymation, puppetry, and live action (all with a dizzying, radical editing technique) is obsessed by the rituals, sounds, and textures which surround food and drink. It permeates his work, almost to the point that in his Prague, people survive solely on flavored beer, schnitzel, and cookies (which, in fact, they might). His Piece de Resistance in this theme is a short, tripartite film called, appropriately, "Food." A bizarre, brilliant film, it examines the social (and socialist) implications of dining, luxury, ritual, and nourishment in his own inimitable manner. Not for the squeamish, though. Thoughts about Svankmajer, Mike G? He's one of my faves, for sure (although his short films are definitely his best work, I did like his full length adaptation of Faust, which, of course, involves a rather bizarre and ingenious scene in a Prague tavern).

Reb

Conspirators of Pleasure, the best of Svankmajer's feature films in my opinion, has an astounding feast scene wherein a man in a chicken costume (papier mache head with umbrella wings) smashes the head of a life-size hay-stuffed doll with a boulder in order to work up an appetite for a thermos of some wretched looking stew. Oh, and there's a postal worker that snorts balls of dough through PVC tubing. A brilliant and indescribable film that relates many forms of sensual pleasure.

Though his Little Otik has less to do with food, it does feature an insatiable tree-stump child that eats neighbors and stray dogs. Based, loosely I assume, on a Czech fairy tale.

rien

As a cyclist, I have to love Breaking Away. As a perversely voracious lover of comestibles, I love the scene in the movie where the father (Paul Dooley) rails against his son's love of foreign/italian/ "ini" food (zucchini, linguini), ultimately demanding, "I want some American food dammit. Bring me some French fries!"

Sal Monilla wrote:As a cyclist, I have to love Breaking Away.

As a cyclist, you will probably also love the great documentary, Sunday in Hell, about the 1976 Paris - Roubaix race; a grueling single-day 261 km race with a long stretch of rutted cobblestones after the mid-point. This running featured a number of cycling legends. This may be the greatest film ever made on cycling ... and I say this with some confidence, having watched many.

The food connection here is tenuous. There is a scene in which the racers calmly eat breakfast, a steak and some eggs, while the voice over tells us that this protein will fuel them throughout the rigors of the day. Yeah, right! These were the days before Gatorade, gels, etcetera. Though it was after the days when racers would light up a cigarette or take a swig of booze before a brutal ascent.

rien

Cyclists and food makes me think about that other great film athlete...Rocky! Chugging 5 raw eggs first thing in the morning and running 7 miles thru the Italian Market of Philadelphia to the top of the stairs of the Art Museum. I got to see the Italian Market in person 6 or 7 years later at the Cook and the Book Weekend that year in Philadelphia.

I am overdue in responding to the question about Jan Svankmajer... I am pretty sure I have seen Alice, Conspirators of Pleasure and Faust, certainly two out of three, but my sum total memory of Svankmajer-- and of the Quay Brothers, while we're at it-- is the vague impression of a creature consisting of a bird's skull and a pair of haircutting scissors scratching at the inside of a secretary desk drawer in a vain attempt to escape. Now that's entertainment!

But I bring this up because the movie I went to last night (referenced in regards to my bad subsequent dining choice in the Lincoln Park thread) was a foodie film-- of the same sort as the Takashi Miike films referenced above, to wit, the hyperviolent, surreally absurdist Asian action movie. This one is Korean, and among its food-related highlights are potstickers as a major clue and, as Roger Ebert describes it in his review, "a scene during which an octopus is definitely harmed during the making of the movie." (Which means, gobbled down alive, tenticles flailing, by the main actor during a sushi bar scene. As in Pink Flamingos, it's a no-cut, he-really-did-it sequence.) It's called Old Boy, read Ebert's review for more of what it's about though I think he gives rather short shrift to how funny (in a nervous laughter kind of way) it is most of the way. And yes, I came out of it hungry for sushi-- preferably dead, however.

Heavyweights (with the origin of Ben Stiller's 'character')... a fat-camp camper's sneaky sneaky tendencies lead to what else....?

I shouldn't say.

It's worth the rental!

Tony Perkis says so.

-----
"The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" has one of the more (most?) gourmand of food scenes... which could be used to describe the whole movie. Gluttony and excess... great movie and NC-17!

HI,

Last night we saw a foreign film, Kitchen Stories. The story revolves around a Swedish efficiency expert who observes a Norwegian bachelor farmer's use of his kitchen. According to the dust jacket:

In the struggle between neutral observation and the need for human interaction, the kitchen becomes a battleground.

Regards,

I didn't see Dinner Rush on the list. It's worth a place in your Netflix queue.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0229340/

A great French movie very much about food, which I somehow forgot to mention in this thread's heyday, will be part of a series of 30s French films (many of which are well worth catching, by the way, and most of which are not on DVD) at Doc Films at U of C over the next few months. It's The Baker's Wife, directed in 1936 by Marcel Pagnol, whose novels Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring were made into arthouse hits in the 80s. Raimu, who was one of those rumpled-beast actors France occasionally produces, plays a village baker whose wife runs off, leaving him too depressed to bake. Which, needless to say, gives the rest of the village a sudden stake in his personal affairs. It's February 26.

http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/calendar/monday.shtml

MikeG, thanks for reviving this thread (I had kind of forgot it existed).

We’ve both seen Pan’s Labyrinth, and I think it bears mentioning that food plays a large though subtle part in this movie as well, most notably in the two grapes that the heroine eats, an act that awakens the evil beast and almost causes her banishment from the golden kingdom. The idea of eating leading to evil and banishment is, of course, kind of a popular theme in Western art (man’s first disobedience and the fruit, etc.).

Sidebar: Many members of this forum read The New Yorker, and the Jan 8 issue has an essay by Denby (“Big Picture”) that I found to be an intriguing commercial/phenomenological analysis of the movement from big screen to teensy weensy screen. My favorite line, "people who like going to movies alone don't necessarily go to be alone. In a marvelous paradox, the people around us both relieve us of isolation and drive us deeper into our own responses." There's an analogy here, I think, to dining alone.

all apologies if these have already been mentioned:


Parents
Trouble Everyday
Delicatessen
Cannibal Ferox
Cannibal Holocaust
Make Them Die Slowly
The Romero Trilogy("Land" was crap imo)
Mondo films

etc

extra special mention to the dinner scenes in Salo and Dead Alive

Some of my favorite movies about food:

Eat, Drink, Man, Women
The Dinner Party
Waitress
Big Night


Any others out there?

Parents (1989)

Another in the cannabalistic vein, with a feel similar to Terry Gilliam's Brazil:

Delicatessen (1991)

nr706 wrote:Another in the cannabalistic vein, with a feel similar to Terry Gilliam's Brazil:

Delicatessen (1991)

Love the note about the film's origins: "Jean-Pierre Jeunet got the idea for the movie in 1988 while vacationing in America. He said after staying in America's hotels he felt the food was so bad that "it tasted like real humans". Then came the idea."

Pixar's next film, due out at the end of the month, is called Ratatouille. It's about a rat who loves cooking. I caught an extended preview on my TiVo. It took a little while to hit its stride, but by the end, I was pretty amused. I'm not a total Pixar fanboy, but I think that when they are good, they are very good.

Various clips including the 9-minute preview can be found here.

125 Foodie Films

That's a great list. It'll be very helpful as I revive my Netflix membership. It looks like the list is from circa 2001 and is somewhat short on documentaries. My first thought for an addition to the list was Chez Schwartz, about the famed Montreal delicatessen. I saw it on my last trip to my hometown, of course, after an early lunch of fatty smoked meat sandwiches.

germuska wrote:Pixar's next film, due out at the end of the month, is called Ratatouille.

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that, in much of its promotional material, they feel like they need to explain how to pronounce rat*a*too*ee?

En re upcoming films: I recently saw, on TV, a preview for what is clearly a remake of Mostly Martha, discussed above: some liked, some didn't (I liked, though I recognize the flaws in the characterization of the Italian chef). I forget what the Hollywood film is called, though it is some inane cooking/food pun if I recall correctly, and I even forget now who is starring in it. What I did take in was that all the charm (and the national identity/ethnicity, needless to say) seemed washed out of the new version, and if you're wondering how I could conclude that from a preview, it was one of those where the entire plot of the movie is revealed, in every important detail.

One sub-genre of food-related films are those in which people are depicted doing the work of food production: I used to show an amazing estended sequence showing tuna fisherman at work (very big fish in small boats; the men work cooperatively almost like cowboys to herd the fish together) from the Italian movie Stomboli in a food history class I taught. I'm also really glad to see that the highly-regarded but almost never seen Killer of Sheep, a film by the African-American director Charles Burnett, has been restored and is now in theatrical release; I'm assuming that means it will end up on DVD soon:
(http://www.killerofsheep.com). The main character, perhaps obviously, works in a slaughterhouse and one of the themes of the movie is the effect that the numbing work has on him and his family. There are other films in this vein, though fewer than one might think, and most of them that come to mind are foreign: American movies don't spend a lot of time showing people at work, unless what they do is glamorous (and being a chef, these days, is considered that).

ToniG wrote:En re upcoming films: I recently saw, on TV, a preview for what is clearly a remake of Mostly Martha

No Reservations