I love Letterboxd

Yesterday, when reading another member’s great observations of Mostly Martha, a chef centric film I quite enjoyed, I noticed he ended with the observation that while good, it wasn’t quite the culinary classic Tampopo, Babette’s Feast ( both of which I consider masterpieces ), Big Night, and Like Water for Chocolate were. I commented on his review that I’ll have to see the latter two, as I loved the former two. I mentioned this to Lise, and she exclaimed ‘you haven’t seen Big Night?!!’ Of course, she had already collected it, and within minutes it was lighting up the screen.

I loved Big Night

Like my beloved Babette’s Feast, Big Night steers towards a comestible climax, but…

A truly remarkable film with tremendous work by all actors involved, and an insightful script about friendship, love, passion, cultural clash, adaptability and ambition, all dressed up as this wonderful feast of a film that gets better and better with every passing minute, until it reaches an unexpected but brilliant climax.

Big Night is without question one of the most underrated / underappreciated / under-seen films I've probably watched, ever? With only a scant amount of ratings on IMDb, and a handful of the people I follow who have seen it, this is a clear example of a film that deserves more love. I stumbled on it totally by accident. I had never heard of this film before a couple…

To eat good food is to be close to God.

I absolutely loved this. I can't remember exactly how it ended up on my Watchlist but it may have had something to do with the comparisons between it and Jon Favreau's Chef when that film came out. I liked Chef quite a bit, but Big Night is even more successful.
Primo and Secondo are two Italian brothers struggling to make a go of their restaurant in America. Primo (Tony Shalhoub) is an artist in the kitchen and will not compromise for ignorant customers who don't understand his food. Secondo, (Stanley Tucci who also directs) has already been seduced by the American Dream and is unaware that he is selling out…

I think I am going to have review the way I watch films about food in future.

To stave off feelings of utter starvation and to stop me from pausing the film every few minutes to look up recipes online, I'm going to stuff my face beforehand and then maybe my bloated state will make for a less interrupted viewing. Because this was practically exactly the same experience I had when I recently watched Chef too.

I literally paused this film for about 20 minutes so I could look at recipes and pictures of timpano. And I've got no chance of ever making that or dragging the kids to somewhere around here that might do that dish, so it was…

Everyone talks about the "food porn" in this movie, and for good reason. The cuisine on display is decadent and scrumptious looking. But I didn't really think there were an excess of shots of the food, or that the food that was shown was so much more delicious looking that the food in other movies.

So getting past the food the question is, "is there anything else in this film worth talking about?". I say yes there is. I found the movie to be a quiet character study about immigrant brothers and about family dynamics. It is a great time capsule film too. The low budget look and feel of this movie doesn't exist anymore. Low budget films today are…