A zesty paean of praise to the greater glories of garlic. This lip-smacking foray into the history, consumption, cultivation and culinary/curative powers of the stinking rose features chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, and a flavorful musical soundtrack.
the shot of steam rising from a hunk of torn bread is the closest thing i've ever seen to god captured on film
love the guy who calls garlic “Italian marijuana”—so true! anyway I recently started taking garlic supplements for my general health & will let you all know how it goes
There are two types of people in the world: those who love garlic and vampires.
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.'
Life without garlic?
Tasteless.
Les Blank’s love letter to the stinky rose.
WARNING: Do not watch this film hungry!
”Why do you like it?”
“Because it gives you a tingly feeling in your mouth.”
Is garlic the most sacred, powerful substance in the world? Les Blank makes a compelling case. My mouth is Niagra Falls right now.
There's a moment after some heavenly meal has been prepared while the most rousing, joyous music is being played, where the camera pans across the kitchen to reveal the band performing the song right there live, diegetically. The two greatest pleasures in life, food and music, right there hand in hand.
We also get Werner Herzog waxing lyrical about Nosferatu, news that garlic built the pyramids and shots of pesto that you could swim in.
I just ate garlic bread - kiss me! Lovers o' the stinking rose, unite!
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?
yes i agree. let’s replace the idea of sharing sections of clementines or oranges with friends as the ultimate form of tenderness with sharing cloves of garlic
I was all set to make a 'why are there no vampires in this movie about garlic, Les Blank? Har Har' joke and then Werner Herzog turns up at the fifteen minute mark, talking about Nosferatu. Well played, Les Blank, Well played.
'Support the people who grow the food we eat'
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?
One of the best films about food ever. It's about cooking with garlic but it's also about the love for it and what garlic has to say about our world. We're shown how different cultures use it to cook and which cultures love it or hate it. It's a smart way to show the differences between people.
I feel like today our meals are a lot less segregated than they were in 1980. Now you can find most ingredients everywhere and people are more open to different varieties of cuisine. The opening shot is of a woman from an Irish family talking about how her mother hated garlic and wouldn't let it be cooked four days before guests came over…
