Not a still, but too good to ignore (or leave unanimated). Jackie Chan's bumbling private eye finds his lust competing with his hunger, Tex Avery style, in Wong Jing's City Hunter (1993)
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Moon Over Miami is not a great musical. It's not a great food movie either, but it contains enough moments of general culinary weirdness to make it notable, a quality heightened by its lush use of Technicolor shading. Such coloring is, in my opinion, the explanation for the bizarre detail above, in which a jar of pre-made guacamole sauce (pronounced, hilariously, as "gwaca malla") appears in a deep red hue, likely thanks to the fact that the person in charge of the inking had no idea what it was. The odd pronunciation was explained in a recent episode of the linguistics podcast Lexicon Valley, which originally put me on to this cinematic curio; other questions, such as why guacamole is being jarred in the first place, or why the person preparing it describes it as an essential part of her famous hamburger recipe, are a bit harder to answer.
The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)
The guts in question here refer to shiokara, a fermented suspension of salted sea life - commonly squid, skipjack tuna, sea urchin et al - mixed with malted rice, and sometimes kombu, to complete the marine melange. I've never had the stuff, which is favored as both an ingredient, a standalone dish and a companion for sake, but it's reasonable to assume, as this character believes, that it bears some similarity to Burmese shrimp paste (Ngapi), also the salty end product of a process designed to stretch every possible use from traditional seaside staples. This is a film concerned with exploring cross-cultural parallels between a collapsing empire and the country it briefly lorded over, and so the exchange of goods here, between Japanese POWs and a small-scale Burmese merchant-woman, is interesting on both a literal and a symbolic level. Stripped of their arms, freedom and pride, the deprived dregs of the Imperial Army are forced to consider the things which connect them and the people of this foreign land, right down to the use of salted fish guts as a flavoring and a meal base, proving that they may not be so different after all. Spend It All (1972) Some culinary selections from three of Les Blank's wonderfully food-filled films:
"Sergeant my wife is currently taking a course at the continental school of gourmet cooking. Apparently they’ve never heard of the principle that to eat well in this country, one has to have breakfast three times a day. And an English breakfast at that.”
Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972) Foreign food as a nightmarish culinary imposition The Mack (Michael Campus, 1973)
Hibachi for pimps, 1970s style, with some flung noodles for good measure. |
The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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