“La Grande Bouffe” (1973) With food, there comes the question of when you’ve had too much food, and few films have dealt with greed and gluttony with such focus as Marco Ferrari’s once-controversial arthouse hit “La Grande Bouffe.” The problem being, it doesn’t have much else on its mind beyond that. The story, which sees four old friends (Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret, Michel Piccoli and Ugo Tognazzi) – a , a magistrate, a pilot and a TV producer — who gather together in a villa with three prostitutes for a feast at which they intend to eat themselves to death. If it sounds on the page like a bleak version of a Todd Phillips, that might not actually be far from the truth: it’s a rude, crude, scatalogical picture involved with consumption, pleasure and what happens at the other side. And there is a certain artfulness to it, like an old master painting of a Bacchic feast, and you feel just as bloated and empty as our main characters. But it’s also unpleasantly nihilistic, deeply dated and pretty much one-note.

If you enjoy that note more than we did, you might find something more to it, but otherwise, there’s nothing here that Bunuel, among others, hadn’t just done better. “The Hundred-Foot Journey” (2014) Swedish middlebrow king Lasse Hallstrom had already had one gigantic, inexplicably Oscar-nominated culinary-themed picture with the sickly “Chocolat,” but returned to the foodie genre in a more pleasurable way with last year’s “The Hundred-Foot Journey.” where to buy jellied eelsBased on a best-selling novel, and uniting heavyweights Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey as producers, the film follows an Indian family, led by grieving patriarch Om Puri, who open an Indian restaurant in a rural French village, directly opposite an acclaimed Michelin-starred place run by the fierce Mallory (Helen Mirren). sushi los angeles japantown

Suspicion and antipathy eventually turns into friendship and love, but while you can predict virtually every beat in the story, and Hallstrom’s direction doesn’t exactly elevate it, Steven Knight’s screenplay is finely judged and engaging. The performances across the board, particularly from Mirren (of course) are terrific, and it’s the relatively rare foodie movie with some kind of insight into cooking, particularly into the way that multiculturalism can blend and improve the culinary arts. where can i buy sushi grade fish in san joseYou won’t enjoy it as much as your parents will, but it’s still a pretty good time.sushezi sushi maker youtube “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” [2011]The meticulous craft of preparing sushi goes well beyond the comparatively simple act of just, well, making food and ventures into an area where art and the culinary experience collide. food delivery barrhaven ottawa

This is the overlap captured in David Gelb’s terrific, immersive “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a look at the painstaking work and sense of ingenuity that goes into creating the perfect piece of sushi, as well as the doggedly determined culinary minds that are drawn to the form. The Jiro of the title is one Jiro Ono, an 85-year old man whose Michelin-rated restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, (which has only ten seats available at any given time) has continued to redefine the parameters for innovation in the realm of Japanese cuisine. sushi grade tuna san joseThe film also takes a look at Jiro’s two sons, who have inherited their father’s passion for making sushi, and it also takes time to examine the generational gap inherent in each groups’ respective understanding of just exactly how it’s done. sushi grade ahi tuna recipe

Gelb’s film is a quietly mesmerizing look at a man who has more or less devoted his entire life to the perfection of one thing, and the emotional and psychological costs of his pursuit. Jiro is a perfectionist, sometimes alarmingly so, whose attention to detail – be it the particular placement of a piece of fish upon a bed of rice, or something as seemingly trivial as where a placemat is set – is unerring and frequently teetering on the knife’s edge between obsession and madness. “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is a must-see for those who are captured by the intersection of food and art. "Julie & Julia" (2009)Desperately uncool from the second it was announced, Nora Ephron‘s goodnatured, parallel-storyline Sunday roast of a film is actually (whisper it) a pretty good time at the movies. And not just for Meryl Streep delivering an eminently impersonatable version of Julia Child (just try to think about this film for two seconds without trilling "I’m Julia Child" in that tipsy-sounding, sing-song voice).

The much-maligned Amy Adams sections are not bad either, with Adams typically winning and the food scenes shot with a luscious eye. But, oh who are we kidding, Streep’s portrayal of Child as eccentric, indomitable matron owns the film, and her scenes with Stanley Tucci (with whom she was reuniting after "The Devil Wears Prada") suggest they should be contractually obliged to appear in at least one movie together every couple of years. It’s a little subtler in its ultimate moral than it’s been given credit for — yes it’s an inspirational story of Following Your Dream / Being True To Yourself. But it’s also groundedly pragmatic about the fact that the road to success is potholed with failure, and it even dedicates a monologue to the great "secret" behind French cooking: simply add four times as much butter as you think a human artery can physically withstand. "Like Water For Chocolate" (1992) Not to be confused with the insufferably twee Lasse Hallstrom Best Picture nominee "Chocolat," Alfonso Arau‘s earlier Spanish-language movie has, despite being in the magic realist tradition, a darker, richer and less sickly aftertaste.

The story of a Tita (Lumi Cavazos), a young girl in revolutionary Mexico who is condemned by a family tradition to remain single, caring for her mother all her life, the romantic melodrama revolves around her forbidden love for Pedro, who marries her sister just so he can be closer to Tita. Soapish twists abound, affairs and abductions and phantom pregnancies, but Tita’s special "gift" is that her emotions work their way into the food she prepares. So the wedding cake she makes for her sister’s wedding to her lover is baked with her tears in the mix and causes all the guests to weep and pine for their true loves, while the quails in rose petal sauce, made with the roses that were a gift from Pedro, become a wildly arousing aphrodisiac. It’s a beguiling mix of fanciful and grounded, far better than Arau’s English-language follow-up "A Walk In the Clouds" perhaps because the idea of food being closely allied to emotion is actually one it doesn’t require a massive suspension of disbelief to swallow.