Friday, September 8
Tampopo (maps 1, 2)
dir. Juzo Itami, Japan 1985

In this humorous paean to the joys of food, the main story is about trucker Goro who rides into town like a modern Shane to help Tampopo set up the perfect fast-food noodle restaurant. Woven into this main story are a number of smaller stories about the importance of food, ranging from a gangster who mixes hot sex with food to an old lady terrorizing a shopkeeper by compulsive squeezing of his wares.

Talk about a spaghetti western! Tampopo is Juzo Itami's tongue-in-cheek version of an old-fashioned western, with hopeful (and amateur) restaurateur Tsutomu Yamazaki looking to create the perfect bowl of ramen for her customers. She finds help from a drifter in a cowboy hat, and her story is interrupted by bizarre -- and seemingly irrelevant -- subplots, like an old man who gorges on noodles and then chokes on a piece of meat; he is rescured via vacuum cleaner. Dizzyingly hilarious, Tampopo is the ultimate slurp-'em-up; probably the greatest (and least seen) comedy to ever come out of Japan. -Christopher Null, filmcritic.com