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azdak at 10:55pm on 18/09/2004
azdak at 10:55pm on 18/09/2004Late, as ever, to the International Movie Day meme, I have the following two recommendations. The instructions said movies that people on your flist had probably never heard of, and these are sufficiently obscure that even I, as the recommender, have only seen them once (but they're also sufficiently entrancing that a decade or so later I still remember them vividly).
Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1987) is a hilarious Japanese film about food and sex and culture. The plot outline doesn't sound that great - a widow sets up a Ramen noodle bar, aided by a truck driver - but like all great art the plot is just a washing line to hang other things on. A number of scenes have stuck with me, in spite of it being 16 years since I saw the film, but the two I recall most vividly are a Japanese schoolmistress having her efforts to teach her charges how to eat spaghetti politely utterly foiled by a Western businessman who deliberately starts slurping his from straight off the plate; and a woman eating a raw egg being used as a metaphor for orgasm. Also, I remember that the truck driver (Tsutomoto Yakasami, but I had to google that) was extremely charismatic, and that he was still charismatic when I saw him in A Taxing Woman, with the same lead actress, a year later.
The other film is Tomorrow I'll be Scalding Myself With Tea (Jindrich Polak). I happened to catch this on the Beeb late one night about 25 years ago, and I still remember making myself nearly sick with laughter. It's about time travel, and it's like Stanislav Lem with visuals (anyone who's read Pirx the Pilot will know what I mean). Some Nazi sympathisers go back in time to try to help Hitler win WWII, and every temporal paradox that can possibly happen, does. Because the scheme doesn't work the first time, they keep going back, thereby creating more screw-ups, until in the end there are several versions of themselves, trying to bump each other off in their efforts to fix the problem. I have no idea if it's still available anywhere, but if it is, I'd love to know, because I would pay very good money to see this again.
Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1987) is a hilarious Japanese film about food and sex and culture. The plot outline doesn't sound that great - a widow sets up a Ramen noodle bar, aided by a truck driver - but like all great art the plot is just a washing line to hang other things on. A number of scenes have stuck with me, in spite of it being 16 years since I saw the film, but the two I recall most vividly are a Japanese schoolmistress having her efforts to teach her charges how to eat spaghetti politely utterly foiled by a Western businessman who deliberately starts slurping his from straight off the plate; and a woman eating a raw egg being used as a metaphor for orgasm. Also, I remember that the truck driver (Tsutomoto Yakasami, but I had to google that) was extremely charismatic, and that he was still charismatic when I saw him in A Taxing Woman, with the same lead actress, a year later.
The other film is Tomorrow I'll be Scalding Myself With Tea (Jindrich Polak). I happened to catch this on the Beeb late one night about 25 years ago, and I still remember making myself nearly sick with laughter. It's about time travel, and it's like Stanislav Lem with visuals (anyone who's read Pirx the Pilot will know what I mean). Some Nazi sympathisers go back in time to try to help Hitler win WWII, and every temporal paradox that can possibly happen, does. Because the scheme doesn't work the first time, they keep going back, thereby creating more screw-ups, until in the end there are several versions of themselves, trying to bump each other off in their efforts to fix the problem. I have no idea if it's still available anywhere, but if it is, I'd love to know, because I would pay very good money to see this again.