This promoted post is an advertisement generated with our self-serve advertisement tool., and for as little as $5.00 you can advertise in this area. Get started ›This is a new ad format that we are currently testing. We often try new types of ads in a limited capacity. If you have feedback, please let us know in the ads subreddit.This area shows new and upcoming links. Vote on links here to help them become popular, and click the forwards and backwards buttons to view more.Enter a keyword or topic to discover new subreddits around your interests. You can access this tool at any time on the /subreddits/ page.Opens on Friday in Manhattan.Directed by David GelbIn Japanese, with English subtitles1 hour 21 minutes; not ratedAn aristocracy of taste guides the philosophy behind Sukiyabashi Jiro, the tiny, sushi-only restaurant in the Ginza shopping district of Tokyo that is spotlighted in David Gelb’s hagiographic debut feature, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” The chef, Jiro Ono, 85 in the film, plainly sees no reason to alter the 10-seat, fixed-menu, basement establishment — much less retire from a profession in which he is widely regarded as a god among men.

Why change a good thing, when, in 2008, Michelin’s inaugural Tokyo guide awarded the eatery three stars — sans toilet? (The rating was reaffirmed in November.)Mr. Ono’s cult of admirers in this 81-minute documentary includes a Japanese food critic, the patiently diligent kitchen workers, an awe-struck former apprentice, dealers in fish and rice, cooing customers, and two sushi-slinging sons fully aware of the paternal burden of excellence.They all yield valuable angles on the master, but despite foodie-baiting close-ups of nigiri sushi brushed with soy sauce, and montages of skillful food prep, the film falls short as a satisfying exploration of craft. Like many other such portraits, it wastes valuable time declaring its subject’s excellence that could be spent fleshing out demonstrations, explanations, context.Mr. Ono’s inspiring dedication is not in doubt: it will come as no surprise that he is a workaholic. Rather more absorbing are his story of fleeing home at 9 (later photos show a young man staring with rock-solid confidence), his parsing of fatty tuna’s simplistic taste and glimpses of his wicked wit.

The question of authorship within restaurants remains tantalizingly, or politely, open; the filmmakers fabricate suspense around the relative merits of Mr. Ono’s eldest son, Yoshikazu, whose managerial role is paramount.Slathered in the Philip Glass iterations that have become a hackneyed substitute for editorial momentum, the documentary is shot with the Red camera, whose look is well suited to the glistening of the exquisitely prepared fish. It sure beats takeout.Made in 1985, but not released in the US until 1987, Tampopo was perhaps the first real foodie movie. Before Babette’s Feast (1987), before Like Water for Chocolate (1992), before Big Night (1996), and long, long before Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) and Chef (2014) there was Tampopo, a sexy comic western about ramen noodles which became an arthouse smash. Nearly thirty years later Janus Films is reviving Tampopo in a 4K restoration that opens today at New York’s Film Forum. The new poster for the film, in which various characters bob in a sea of noodles, is by a wonderful young Brooklyn-based illustrator Ping Zhu whose work may be familiar from the New Yorker and New York Times.The original Japanese poster was also illustrated and by none other than director Juzo Itami himself.

Before he was an actor and director (he had been acting since 1960 but directed his first film, The Funeral, in 1984 at the age of 50), Itami had been an artist and graphic designer. sushi grade tuna searedThere is a museum devoted to Itami in Matsuyama, where he grew up, which features his drawings and posters. sushi bar order crossword clueI love the graphic novel style of his Tampopo poster (which also, quite unusually, features an inset photo of the director).sushi making supplies calgaryTampopoI was given stills and made xeroxes on a “state of the art” copier that actually reduced and enlarged! jiro dreams of sushi bluray download

I built the collage of the characters sitting in the ramen bowl, balancing them to look natural with each other while forming a nice shape to flow into the title etc. and used a Japanese ramen catalog (one of my wife’s food magazines) to find the PERFECT noodles, fishcake and scallions, as well as a typically designed ramen bowl.sushi grade tuna nutrition factsFor Chinese and Japanese films I always insist on utilizing the original foreign title in their characters, both for authenticity and for their graphic beauty. sushi conveyor belt historySo on Tampopo, the lovers were tallest and the kanji was placed above them, completing the vertical movement top to bottom...with the English title bisecting the vertical. healthiest sushi rolls to order

Then I added the steam rising and curving to best accentuated the elements, bringing them together as a whole. Then I added colors to my B/W xerox comp, had the original photos/stills printed on C print paper in sepia and gave that to an excellent hand colorist, Maryanne Shea, to complete the poster.Today I would have done it all in Photoshop and could play with endless variations of colors too.I still like it.Many thanks to Arnie Sawyer and Keiko Kimura for their help. Tampopo starts at Film Forum today with Nobuko Miyamoto—Itami’s widow and Tampopo herself—in person this evening. De Sica and His Dynamic Duo Do What They Do Best: Close-Up on "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow"Master of Perspective: Fritz Lang's "Scarlet Street" Digital Vistas, Stone Wardrobes: Alexander Zeldovich’s "Target" Joel Wanek Introduces His Film "Sun Song"David Gelb went halfway around the globe to make his first feature, a documentary about master chef Jiro Ono, whose 10-seat Tokyo restaurant boasts three Michelin stars.

But in a way, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” which opened in Washington on Friday, is a homecoming. “My parents took me to Japan for the first time when I was 2 years old,” Gelb said by phone from Los Angeles. That was in 1985, when the filmmaker’s father, Peter Gelb, was assistant manager of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Its music director at the time was Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa, and the orchestra performed in Japan frequently. “I would come along with my mom, as well,” the filmmaker said. “So I started eating cucumber rolls when I was 2 years old.” Sukiyabashi Jiro, which has a tiny space in the basement of a Ginza office building, does not serve cucumber or any other kind of roll (“maki” in Japanese). “Real sushi chefs don’t even see that as sushi,” Gelb said. “It’s a whole different category of food.” The restaurant charges about $300 for 20 pieces of nigiri, which balance toppings (usually but not always raw fish) on hand-shaped lumps of delicately flavored rice.

Each of the 20 pieces in a course is different. “It’s just an incredibly satisfying and thrilling sensation to eat a perfectly balanced piece of sushi,” said Gelb, who admitted to a squalid past in which he regularly ate low-grade sushi. “After working on this film, I began to realize that the true art of sushi lies in these high-end restaurants. So now I go maybe once a month, but I pay five times as much.” Like many high-end Japanese businesses, Sukiyabashi Jiro didn’t encourage non-Japanese patrons. “Originally, Jiro didn’t really like foreign customers that much,” Gelb said, “because they didn’t know that much about sushi.” Since Michelin published its first guide to Tokyo eateries in 2008, however, Ono now “loves to show foreigners the potential of sushi,” Gelb said. “If people are willing to come to the restaurant and try sushi his way, he’s always glad to have them.” Sushi made Ono’s way is the essential subject of Gelb’s documentary, which was filmed mostly in Sukiyabashi Jiro.

(There are side trips to a spinoff location and to Tokyo’s massive Tsukiji fish market, as well as to a reunion of Ono’s childhood friends.) Ono and his apprentices, who include middle-aged sons Yoshikazu and Takashi, demonstrate everything from making egg custard to massaging octopus flesh to make it tender. Originally, Gelb planned “a movie about sushi, in all of its different forms.” Then he was introduced to Ono by a Tokyo food critic, Masuhiro Yamamoto. “Everything that I wanted to convey about sushi could easily be presented from Jiro’s perspective,” the director said. The film became more personal when it came to focus on Ono, who was 85 when the movie was shot in 2010, and older son Yoshikazu, who will someday inherit the business. “It’s a human story, set in the world of sushi,” Gelb said. The director never filmed when the restaurant was in operation, although he does include one scene in which Jiro prepares a meal for invited guests. Rather than emphasize the bustle of the restaurant business, Gelb highlights Ono’s craftsmanship.

The depiction of the chef’s work and outlook is surprisingly intimate, especially since it was accomplished through translators. (Gelb described his Japanese as “poor.”) Gelb prepared the translators with the topics and questions to be covered and did pre-interviews with Ono and his staff. “The first few days of the production, I didn’t even bring the camera with me,” Gelb said. “This was just so they could get used to me being around.” The filmmaker also enlisted Yamamoto to ask some of the questions. “I knew that their rapport, and their history together, would bring out more candid answers from Jiro,” Gelb said. “If we missed something,” Gelb added, “we would shoot another interview, until we got it right. That’s something we kind of picked up from Jiro. Keep doing it over and over again until it’s right.” The director owes more than a taste for sushi to his father, now the general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The elder Gelb, who has produced numerous TV shows and documentaries about classical music and musicians, indirectly introduced his son to filmmaking.

And, of course, to classical music. But the use of compositions by Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Philip Glass in “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is not simply a matter of personal taste. “It was all about elevating the elements of the movie to [Ono’s] level as much as possible,” Gelb said. “The way that Philip Glass’s music is repetitive but always building on itself and escalating — Jiro’s work ethic is sort of analogous to that. He is doing the same routine every day and looking for that one step of improvement.” Ono’s “whole ethos is about mastery of simplicity,” Gelb said. “So we don’t use any sort of graphics, or any special effects in the film, beyond speeding things up and slowing them down. It’s just a very simple movie, with elegant camera work and music. We want the film to feel like a movie that Jiro would make, if he were a filmmaker. Just very simple and pretty. But deep at the same time.” So Ono’s sushi is a metaphor for the director’s approach to filmmaking?