Food Movies...

There's something magical about watching the rituals and emotions surrounding food preparation immortalized on the big screen. The staccato drum roll of a knife dicing a spring onion and the metamorphic swirl of an egg in a frying pan are images that recur frequently in films ranging from love-stories to action pics, and always establish the sublime talents of the owner of those hands. Magical skill and connectedness to the fabric of the universe are implicit in acts of good cooking.

Even though most of the time cooking is not the focus of stories told in film, it is used a great deal for character development and the exposition of place. Once you see that the food in a place is shit, that place becomes difficult to trust. A person who cooks one thing really well has principles. Anyone who can make an omelet well must be good in bed. People who hate cooking might as well hate dogs. They're just not right. The mafia boss serving a life-sentence in jail for heinous crimes becomes more lovable despite ourselves when we see him using a shiv not to kill guards but to slice garlic in his cell.

The subject of food movies came up tonight over a bite with a friend who, apparently, had not seen Tampopo, which, in my mind, is a fairly essential bit of food-film, so here's a short list that I would recommend to anyone who loves food and cooking. There is a world of movies that casually mention food, but in these, food is the star:

Tampopo: perhaps the quintessential food movie, this 1985 comedy directed by Juzo Itami is an exuberant, joyful journey of cooking well, and, metaphorically, of doing well by being open, present, and focused. I suppose there's something very Buddhist in the light-hearted philosophizing that permeates the entire story-line. You can't cook well without opening yourself in a variety of ways and dedicating time and attention to seeing ingredients and processes beyond what you can learn from the experience of others. This movie does such a good job communicating that journey, that you'll never look at noodles the same way after seeing it. If you decide to watch a single food movie just to try it out, watch this one.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman: This 1994 Taiwanese film, directed by Ang Lee, is the story of old Chu, a master chef who is widowed, and his three strong, unconventional daughters. The tension between tradition and desires is the central theme of the movie, and the ritualistic and opulent dinner Chu prepares for his daughters every Sunday is the centerpiece. It forces them to relate to each other and create something beautiful together regardless of how different their other priorities may become along the way. The camera in this movie loves to cook. The cinematography of food preparation both at Chu's home and at the behemoth restaurant where he works as head chef is so good that it bears watching many times over again. Marvel at the deft hands of Chu in this one.

Chef: This 2014 movie, directed by John Favreau, benefits from an upscale celebrity cast and some very fine cooking for foodies by foodies. It is a feel-good road-movie all the way, with a celebration of the regional cuisines of I-10. It starts constrained by an unpleasant set of social norms in LA, where we can't help but feel that a fall from grace is a positive reflection on the protagonist's character. Punted clear across the country by a predictable chain of events, our hero begins his journey of re-birth in Miami, where at least the music is good and  the grease flows happy and care-free. This one deserves special mention for being practically like a Glenn Miller Orchestra movie. It's very focused on showing the positive side of a personal journey, and treats everything surrounding food and cooking with unambiguous, patronizing adoration.

301/302: This 1995 Korean film directed by Park Chul-soo is a darker tale of justified crime and kindness in a grey world made brighter by food. It's a recurrent theme in Asian film, but 301/302 takes it a step further, perhaps. The height of 90's stylishness in cuisine-fashion, it still manages to beguile with the way a fish is sliced and a chicken fried. It's not a terribly philosophical film, but rather a kind of dark thriller with a lot of good food along the way. Watch it with a sense of humor and be ready to accept that it will work hard at shocking you.

Of course there are many, many more. I leave it here for now, to fulfill a promise of some recommendations.

Let Them Eat Cake, You Retard

Politically incorrect. Catch-phrase fascism rendering the accused guilty of stepping on an atomic word or phrase. This is such a popular way of dehumanizing people, discarding dissonant view through ad-hominem, and avoiding rational discussion altogether.

In the past couple of days there's been quite a brouhaha in the news about the Coca-Cola company tripping all over itself to apologize and avoid law-suits over a vitamin-water bottle-cap with the words "You Retard" printed on the inside, which, unfortunately, was uncapped, seen, and taken as offensive, by an Edmonton family two of whose members, Fiona and Maddy, are afflicted with some level of cognitive developmental impairment that is sometimes disparagingly referred to as "retard" in English.
To the casual observer there is cause for offense, given the use of the word retard and all. Mr. Loate's apology on the positive qualities of his afflicted daughters is good and well. However, the offense taken at the discovery of this word in a bottle-cap by his other daughter, Blake, is ignorant and misinformed in a way that would be more appropriate to Fox News or the Tea Party, yet it gets play in the Huffingtion Post.

Tragic, really. Had the man at least taken the time to understand what he was bitching about, he would have found out a few things very quickly:

1. You cannot in any way defend the intelligence of someone drinking vitamin water. Even if your other two daughters are great, your daughter, Blake, sir, is an idiot.
2. The campaign was pairing one random English word and one random French word. Retard, in this context, could only be the French word, since there is no French word "you". Retard, in French (where the English retard comes from, incidentally) means 'delay'. Nothing more. That you could not be bothered to inform yourself of this, or perhaps that you could and then suppressed the information from your publicity-seeking stunt, makes you an attention-whore of the lowest ilk, sir.
3. If you're going to be such a knee-jerk xenophobe as to try to ban the use in French of words that are spelled the same as offensive words in English, you should return the favor. For instance, is it not equally offensive to use the word bite in English, since in French, the noun bite is slang for  penis?
4. It is a testament to the mind-numbing dis-informed conformity engines that are Twitter and Facebook that these are the principal means that have helped this scandal go venereal in its unadorned, disinformed incarnation.

So I think it goes without any ambiguity that in my estimation the Loate family is a group of disingenuous, or at best quite stupid, opportunistic attention-whores.

What is fascinating is that this sort of home-spun self-perpetuating stupidity is on turbo in social media, but is really not new. The incident reminded me of the popular notion that the French phrase "qu'ils mangent de la brioche", commonly translated as "let them eat cake", (probably falsely) attributed to Marie Antoinette, was descriptive of the callousness of the upper classes in the face of the suffering of the poor (If you want to see great examples of that, look no further than American Republican legislators with free health-care denying healthcare to the poor, etc).

In the first place, the statement was probably originally uttered quotably by Marie Therese, Louis the XIV's wife. It would not have made a lot of sense in Marie Antoinette's time, since there were no recorded peasant famines at that time, and difficult to attribute to her, since Marie Antoinette was only 6 years old when the first accounting of the incident was published. In the second place, the tide of retributive injustice off-handedly accuses Marie Therese of callousness when quoting a fairly reasonable and generous law of her time: that in times of bread-scarcity, the brioche usually reserved for nobles should be shared with peasants. So 'let them eat cake' should more likely be read as don't let them go hungry, or let's share the wealth, if you will.

Repetition is not credibility, we must remember, but the accelerated incubation of durable judgements, however wrong, have essentially made an equally inaccurate issue of the bottle-cap in mere days, where the Marie Antoinette nonsense may have taken a century or two to take root.

In fairness, empty apologies will be made, hypocritical contrition will be theatrically displayed, and the incident will be dead and buried in a week at most. The upsetting thing is seeing that there will be no effort to set a record straight. Rather, faked contrition and compliance to the militant 'sensitivity' of the day will be extracted and every disinformed bystander will nod approvingly as if some form of justice had been served, while a pack of attention-seeking idiots will have had their 15 minutes.