Feb 20th, 2008
Cover The Movie
Tinseltown is abuzz. Top designers are working overtime dressing the actresses, and ballots marked with X’s are pouring into the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, all for Sunday’s Academy Awards. Among the categories, Best Picture … Best Original Screenplay … Best Use of Food in a Film …
Oops. They’ve forgotten that last category — again! Don’t they know that a great food scene can be the most powerful part of a movie? Mindful of that, we decided to announce our own awards: The Sauteed Celluloids. Here are our picks from 2007 for Best Food Film:
Kudos to the filmmakers of this animated movie, which follows the culinary aspirations of a rat who manages to triumph in the world’s most demanding food town: Paris.
“Ratatouille” successfully re-creates an authentic restaurant kitchen and hired star chef Thomas Keller to create the most sublime vegetable sculpture ever to grace the silver screen. So, boo to those who think animated films shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture. Bravo and bon appetit!
In which crime doesn’t pay, but the image of a perpetrator’s rose-petal cake is priceless. The elegant trans-Siberian restaurant in the film may serve the most stunning Russian fare in London, with a succession of dishes rivaling any layout in Gourmet magazine — even though the blue-eyed proprietor, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), is really the head of a notorious crime family. This mild-mannered monster is as fastidious at decorating the delicate rose-petal cake for a 100th birthday party as he is masterminding a cover-up of hundreds of bodies.
In one scene, he sweetly offers the naive midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) a spoon of borscht like her papa used to make, but maybe we understand why the duplicitous hero Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) keeps his fork to himself.
Thank goodness this is only a movie. Should a pregnant teen really be eating all that? Few healthful items pass through the lips of Juno (Ellen Page), a pregnant 16-year-old with an otherwise level head on her shoulders. She has decided to deliver the baby into the loving arms of a more age-appropriate, nutritionally knowledgeable mom.
Although the slang-speaking pubescent brags to her best friend that her solicitous stepmom won’t let her eat red M&M’s or stand in front of the microwave, Juno remains, after all, your typical teen, piling cola, fries and chips onto her lunch tray.
“The Bucket List”
Tags: cover, movie