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| Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs |
Everything related to food, its cooking and tasting is trendy these days. Culinary correctness is in good taste. Foodstuffs, crockery and cooking accessories are the latest fad. For example, Japanese Shiki knives encrusted with turquoise are even more popular than women’s designer bags and purses. “Cooking is to contemporary literature what sex was in the 60s and 70s. In other words, a pastime worth stopping a story for in order to share something with readers (Cooked Books, The New Yorker)
Movies about food fill the mainstream gap for “family viewing”. Instead of surrealistic and eccentric La Grande Bouffe, Delicatessen and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, today we can enjoy Rataouille and Julie & Julia, which are happy-ending fairy-tales for adults. Last year we had a marvelous harvest of “culinary movies” shot everywhere from Germany to China.
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| Soul Kitchen |
Soul Kitchen Germany
Soul Kitchen is a 2009 German comedy film directed by Fatih Akin. It received impetuous reviews from film critics – both enthusiastic and humiliating ones. This ironic and sometimes hilarious film tells the story of Zinos Kazantsakis, a German of Greek descent, who owns the Soul Kitchen restaurant in Hamburg that has simple food on its menu. His business runs of sorts. Zinos hires a fiery and knife-throwing chef named Shayn, who brings dramatic changes to the restaurant. First, regulars that are accustomed to schnitzel and curry wurst are shocked by the new haute cuisine, but by and by they learn to cherish good food. Sometimes it reminds of No Reservations, a 2007 American romantic drama film starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. It offers everything, including scenes for ladies when a shabby kitchen is transformed into a gleaming place and scenes for guys with obvious elements of pornography and dark humor. The tagline is “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans”.
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| Eat, Pray, Love is a film based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel |
It’s Complicated USA
This film starring Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin is a comedy about love, divorce and everything in between. Last year Streep also starred in Julie & Julia, which turned out to be a more large-scale culinary bestseller. Jane (Streep) is the mother of three grown kids, owns a thriving Santa Barbara bakery/restaurant and has - after a decade of divorce - an amicable relationship with her ex-husband and attorney Jake (Baldwin). Caught in the middle of their renewed romance is Adam (Martin), an architect hired to remodel Jane’s kitchen. The whole complicated story is spiced up with cooking and stylish interiors. The episode when Streep makes croissants for Martin was once used in Jet Lag, a 2002 film in which Jean Reno cooked for Juliette Binoche in an empty kitchen.
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| Kung fu Chefs |
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs USA
This animated cartoon film is probably the most delicious thing since macaroni and cheese was invented. Inspired by the beloved children’s book, the film focuses on a town where food falls from the sky like rain. Flint Lockwood thinks he´s a genius. But none of the things he invented are things that make sense or are useful. When the community he lives in is in the throes of an economic crisis because a sardine cannery, the main source of income for many local residents, is shut down, Flint decides to try his latest invention – a machine that can turn water into food. But something goes wrong and the machine ends up in the atmosphere. Later it starts raining food and chaos ensues. The cartoon is very positive and perfectly depicts the subject of “smart food consumption”. Though this film is much simpler than Ratatouille, it is still an edible and mouth-watering animation.
Kung fu Chefs China
A colorful cocktail of action, comedy, tear-jerking emotions and kung fu. This film is shot in the nostalgic style of Chinese action movies of the 1980s, which were spectacular, ironic and dynamic. No shooting and no explosions, only improvised materials and everything available – tablets, stools, rusty knives and parsley. In this film you will see incredibly beautiful episodes of “cook kung fu”, for example eviscerating a pig’s carcass or making noodles lightning fast. The movie, starring Sammo Hung Kam-Bo as a sensei cook Wong Bing-Yi, is a true gift for lovers of this genre.
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| It’s Complicated |
To be continued…
This August we should expect another opening of a “culinary film”. Based upon the bestselling memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love – starring Julia Roberts, James Franco and Javier Bardem - proves that there really is more than one way to let yourself go and see the world. Liz Gilbert had everything a modern woman is supposed to dream of having yet like so many others, she found herself lost, confused, and searching for what she really wanted in life. Newly divorced and at a crossroads, Gilbert steps out of her comfort zone, risking everything to change her life, embarking on a journey around the world that becomes a quest for self-discovery. In her travels, she discovers the true pleasure of nourishment by eating in Italy; the power of prayer in India, and, finally and unexpectedly, the inner peace and balance of true love in Bali.
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