the shot of steam rising from a hunk of torn bread is the closest thing i've ever seen to god captured on film

Another Blank film to make me hungry into infinity. I believe this was the first of Blank's food docs I saw when I started down that path. I love it and I love garlic. I love garlic more now because of this film. I also might love the film a little more because of my love for garlic, if that even makes sense. I will say that having seen more of his rural Louisiana food films these folks strike me a bit more like professional foodies. Garlic hipsters who might be over-complicating food a bit. The Spanish gypsy who yells angrily when he's not even mad is the best character and I want his sterling silver garlic head necklace.

I'm having garlic and tomatoes for dinner tonight. What about you? Will garlic be incorporated in your next meal? If not, WHY?

63/100

[See also my general overview of Criterion's Les Blank set, if you like.]

I'm not even remotely a foodie, so it's a testament to Blank's sheer zest for his subjects that he succeeds in making garlic interesting to me for nearly an hour. (Probably helps that I grew up less than an hour away from Gilroy and its world-famous garlic festival, so this particular obsession has been floating around my world since childhood.) As ever, there's plenty of retroactive anthropological fascination, too—you can easily ignore what people are saying, should the appeal of intense garlic advocacy start to wane, and focus instead on the era's singular fashion choices. When is feathered hair gonna make a comeback?

I love these Les Blank shorts for just how alive they feel, never really settling into the sort of generic linear style that so many documentaries (food or otherwise) fall prey to. This one in particular feels like spending a day at some outdoor garlic festival, going from booth to booth, sometimes looping back for seconds or wandering off in the middle of someone's spiel. There's no stern narrator or detailed history of garlic here, just a pure celebration. I really love how this ends -- pulling back from the fun to show just where most of the garlic in the film is from. It's not from some organic farm, but rather some large-scale operation, harvested and processed mostly by migrants. There's not a lot of on-screen text here, but the last bit is the most important: 'Support the people who grow the food we eat.'

Les Blank and I share a love of Polka, gap-toothed women, and Garlic, and I remember most vividly my encounters with the latter, especially dining upon Sopa de Ajo peasant soup and roast suckling pig in Segovia at the José María Ruiz Restaurante, eating at the The Stinking Rose in San Francisco, and consuming whole garlic cloves at literally every restaurant I visited in South Korea. Garlic is the most erotic of herbs and Blank understands this fact implicitly.

If I'm being honest, I wasn't really expecting to see Werner Herzog in a documentary about garlic.

Quirky and so #berzerkeley!

Cannot wait to try getting high on garlic

hashtag legalize garlic

This is AMAZING! The art of documentary filmmaking at its finest. I love 💞

These Garlics...are makin me THIRSTY!!! 

You really can make a movie about whatever you want if you’re passionate huh :’)

Movies I want to live inside, ranked:

1) The Lady Eve
2) Magic Mike XXL
3) This movie

For a documentary about garlic, not bad at all.

Les Blank and I share a love of Polka, gap-toothed women, and Garlic, and I remember most vividly my encounters with the latter, especially dining upon Sopa de Ajo peasant soup and roast suckling pig in Segovia at the José María Ruiz Restaurante, eating at the The Stinking Rose in San Francisco, and consuming whole garlic cloves at literally every restaurant I visited in South Korea. Garlic is the most erotic of herbs and Blank understands this fact implicitly.