I’m a little OCD about making lists. I am constantly making To-Do lists on a weekly and daily basis and I also just relaly enjoy making all sorts of often arbitrary lists. I’ll make lists of as many songs as I can think of about California, or movies about journalism or favorite restaurants and all other sorts of things like that.
On the way to work this morning, I started trying to compile a mental list of the best movies about food or involving food in a major way. I’ve got a few, but I’m a little stumped. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far, in no ranked order:
1. “Big Night” – Two brothers scheme to save their dying Italian restaurant by throwing a giant fundraising dinner. Hilarity ensues, with some tears and the essential slapstick fights mixed in. Starring Tony Shaloub, Stanley Tucci and Minnie Driver.
2. “Como agua para chocolate”/”Like Water for Chocolate” – A woman’s emotions come out in her cooking, for good and bad.
3. “Chocolat” – Impossibly beautiful Juliette Binoche plays a drifter chocolatier who falls in love with Johnny Depp and creates impossibly unresistable confections.
4. “Tortilla Soup” – From Imdb: Mexican-American master chef and father to three daughters has lost his taste for food but not for life
5. “Soul Food” -When a family’s matriach is hospitalized, her children conspire to create a Sunday dinner for her, in honor of their weekly tradition.
6. “Sideways” -Ok, I guess I’m cheating a little here, but in my life, wine pretty much counts as its own food group. I wish I was kidding there. This is like food porn for wine drinkers, and well, I just kind of love Paul Giamatti.
Hmm…I don’t think I can think of any others. I haven’t seen Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink, Man Woman” or that Sarah Michelle Gellar film that’s pretty much just a copycat of “Como Agua Para Chocolate.”
I also left off “Mystic Pizza,” because I don’t feel the food plays enough of a role to count, and well, the last time we went to Mystic, Connecticut, it was a disaster. I’m still a little bitter, although I did find the most amazing homemade ice cream joint.
Suggestions please?
you love paul giamatti? i love thomas haden church.
…and all movies about food.
If you want to take a palate cleansing (or is that cursing) break from some of the sweeter films, try Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.”
Most of Greenaway’s movies are a bit overwhelming of the senses, thematically and cinematically, but “Cook” is brazen in its indulgence: “Lust, Murder, Dessert”!
Eat Drink Man Woman is basically the Asian version of Tortilla Soup. Both of which are entertaining, even though the subject matter is the same.
Let’s see: Ratatouille, No Reservations (though corny), and there’s a good list of flicks here:
http://www.londonfoodfilmfiesta.co.uk/FILMMA~1/Foodfi~1.htm
and here:
http://www.gastronomica.org/foodfilms.html
It’s been nagging in the back of my head to have a potluck/movie night. Office Space would see us serving pizza shooters, shrimp poppers and extreme fajitas. Chocolat would be a fondue paradise and truffle exravaganza…you get the idea.
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