FYI for movie food fans:

Delightful 1985
Japanese food movie ‘Tampopo’ is back in
theaters

SF
Chronicle, November 15, 2016

“Tampopo”: Imagine a foodie
movie structured like a spaghetti Western. That is the delightful approach of
Juzo Itami’s classic 1985 film “Tampopo,” about a mysterious drifter, complete
with Man With No Name cowboy hat, who wanders into the life of a widowed mother
and assembles a team — a sort of magnificent seven — to transform her flailing
ramen shop into something special.

The movie delighted
American audiences in 1987 and created a wave of quirky, lovable Japanese
comedies in international theaters over the next decade, from Itami’s “A Taxing
Woman” to Masayuki Suo’s “Shall We Dance?”

Approaching its 30th
anniversary in U.S. theaters, Janus Films has
restored the film for rerelease.

The drifter is Goro
(Tsutomu Yamazaki), a truck driver who seems to know every two-bit ramen place
in Japan. Riding shotgun is his loyal
partner and fellow foodie Gun (a super-young Ken Watanabe, a quarter of a
century before embarking on an American film career in such films as
“Inception”).

The widow, Tampopo
(Nobuko Miyamoto, Itami’s real-life wife at the time), has assumed the family
business after her husband’s death, and struggles to maintain the business and
find time to raise her young son. Goro sees the potential in Tampopo (the
Japanese word for dandelion) and decides to help her. He recruits an aging ramen
master, a noodle expert, a contractor well-versed in interior design and others
while putting Tampopo through a ramen-making boot
camp.

Part of the charm of
“Tampopo” is Itami’s use of completely unrelated sidebars devoted not only to
love of food, but also love of movies. Most notably, Koji Yakusho has a few
scenes as a mysterious man in a white suit who incorporates food as part of his
erotic passions with his lover (Fukumi Kuroda).

“Tampopo” is an
utter delight, but you also find a lot about how to make good ramen (a special screening took place during last weekend’s San
Francisco Ramen Tasting Competition).