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Summary: Best of all food movies...
Review: It contains many short stories, but all is a whole one. Everything is familiar but just unique... I've seen Barbette's Feist and Chocolate, some grate movies what's theme about food and eating, this one is the best. Comic, Dramatic, slightly Erotic.
Rating:
Summary: Unique
Review: I agree with the previous review - this movie is unlike pretty much any other movie I have ever seen. But it all blends together very nicely into a very entertaining work of art. This is my favorite of Mr. Itami's films. Well done!
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Summary: A funny, spicy Japanese spaghetti western. A cult classic
Review: A Japanese setting hosts this very unusual film covering classic spaghetti western themes of good & evil, heros & villians. The mixing bowl of subject material includes food, passion, compassion, and alot more. The film is an adept combination of seemingly disparate themes. It is funny and a bit "spicy" in parts. I found it unlike ANY film I have ever seen. After 10+ years it is still my all-time favorite flick... and a cult classic.
Rating:
Summary: Dandelions, Cowboys and the perfect Ramen
Review: "Tampopo" is one of those rare films that just...works. Every piece of it is perfect, combining to form a more flavorful whole, like a well-made dish of ramen noodles. Itami was inspired for this film, and it is easily one of the best Japanese films ever made.Japanese culture is filled with a love of food. Japanese travel brochures are filled, not with pretty sights and adventures, but with photos of local delicacies and dishes. Food questing is a popular hobby, with each person knowing a local favorite shop, or a master chef. Restaurants also tend to specialize, often serving only one dish such as ramen or udon noodles. "Tampopo" perfectly captured this national obsession, creating a story that is undeniable Japanese. Goro and Tampopo's search for the perfect broth, the most delicious way to cut meat and such is an honest and charming portrayal. There is plenty going on in this film, with the sexual subplot of the gangster and his lover exchanging food and sex, or the young executive fluent in French cuisine. Each vignette forwards the tone. Along with this is the marriage of the samurai and the cowboy in the character of Goro, and the delicate strength of Tampopo herself. You really can't go wrong with this film.
Rating:
Summary: Samurai westerns come full circle
Review: Once, there was a style of filmmaking called "spaghetti western", which consisted largely of remakes of classic Japanese samurai films in a western setting (i.e. The Magnificent Seven is a remake of Seven Samurai). Tampopo turns them into a "noodle western", in which the brave loner helps the kind widow achieve her dreams.
In the meantime, the movie runs through a dazzling cast of oddball characters, and some truly deep insights into our relationship with food. In some ways, it's also reminiscent of Slacker, with the odd random shifts to unrelated scenes and characters (more likely, Slacker models on Tampopo). Regardless, the whole movie is a thing of beauty. It's funny and touching.
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Summary: Indefinable classic, BUT . . .
Review: Obviously, one of the best films ever made, near-impossible to categorise, like the best films (So, what exactly is this `Delicatssen` film about?...)
Only thing is, I can't see why this gets as much attention, when there are similar films such as Koki Mitani's 'Welcome Back Mr. McDonald', which are just as good. Featuring similar characters, and some broadly similar themes, 'Welcome. . .' ('Radio no jikan', or 'Radio Time' in Japanese) is guaranteed to enthrall anybody who enjoyed 'Tampopo'. Check it out, people!
Rating: 
Summary: An utterly charming film....
Review: It has everything... a sort of love story with a subplot, a lot of truly amusing scenes and lines, interesting asides, a little sex, nice camera work and cleanly developed characters. OK, a few little things don't make sense, but so what? Doesn't stop the film's enjoyability (is that a word?) in any way, shape or form. WELL worth renting or even owning. BUt afterward, you really crave some of those noodles!!
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Summary: A jubilee film !
Review: There is not love more sincere than the love for food . This clever statement of Georges Bernard Shaw fits like ring to finger for this exquisite film .
Since a woman will find out her bliss in fine and wonderful noodles making and another supreme japanese dishes , her life will experience a sudden change .
Watch this original film . Powerful and delightful .
Rating:
Summary: Tampopo a Tasty Treat
Review: Juzo Itami's 1987 film Tampopo stands out in my mind as one of the most original films I have ever seen. Taking as its subject food, specifically noodles, Tampopo parodies every genre of film, modern Japanese culture, ancient Japanese culture, American culture, and a score of other things while all the time maintaining a playful comedy and an adherence to its general theme of food. On top of this all, the film even manages to make a rather profound philosophical statement about the ubiquity and centrality of food in human existence, and yet it does so in such a playful manner that the realization emerges only on a subconscious level.
Tampopo establishes its surreal atmosphere immediately by opening in a theatre, where a well-dressed gangster assumes the role of narrator, and ruminates on the idea that at the end of a human life we experience our past as a short film. This idea of a story within a story dominates the film. Rather than running as a unified whole, Tampopo jumps, without transition normally, from one short vignette to another, though the story of Tampopo, a widow struggling to run a successful noodle shop, becomes the central narrative. This disunity produces the effect of finding food everywhere. We find refined connoisseurs in the most unlikely of places: a group of vagabonds decanting French wine and a bumbling businessman with a thorough knowledge of French cuisine. Similarly, we see food playing a role in the most unlikely circumstances: the need to make dinner brings a mother to life for a minute before finally dying; a couple passes an egg back and forth between each other's mouths in a sexual ecstasy until the yolk finally breaks in an orgasmic climax.
Food in Tampopo attains the ability to fulfill all moods. Thus the film makes a point of parodying all genres of film, happily marrying Tampopo's central concerns of cinema and nourishment. Music often clues the viewer in as to which genre each vignette aims. Over the course of the film, we hear the ragtime airs of a Charlie Chaplin style-vaudeville, the dreamy flourishes of a cheesy romance, the carousel music of a children's film, and the dead silence of a stark thriller.
As you can tell, when one discusses Tampopo, you realize the need for lists in order to make the film intelligible. This peculiar need arises from the fact that the film is less a story and more a montage of cliché images arranged and juxtaposed in such a manner to make them all seem ridiculous, but also humorous and in fact a little touching. As I have said before, the glue that binds each of these images together is the food that inspires them. At times food seems like the excuse for a farce, as when two rival noodle houses break into a fight over the quality of each gang's respective noodles. Here food is injected into the story to make the cinematic genre it parodies a joke. Similarly, at the death of the narrator, his loving words of final farewell concern eating wild boar in winter.
Yet at other times in Tampopo, the film depicts food as it is used in real life, but injects a genre instead, and thus makes our use of food seem ridiculous, as when a Japanese class in eating spaghetti is interrupted by the loud slurping of a fat Westerner. Here the joke is not at the expense of cinema, but at the expense of society. This social criticism applies to both the modern time (as in the example I just mentioned), but also goes back to the past, as when an old man in a modern restaurant explains the traditional way to eat, and his austerity in a modern context seems ludicrous. In all these examples of seemingly inappropriate juxtaposition, arbitrarily inserting food into the story puts the subject into an unfamiliar perspective, and thereby makes it ridiculous and funny, but good-natured and light-hearted all the same.
Tampopo is a difficult film to describe, because of its unique originality. So perhaps to express it best, a metaphor is needed. As when the film ends with a baby sucking on its mother's breast, so too is the film full of life, nourishing, and sure to leave a smile on your face and feeling very young.
Rating:
Summary: Dandelions, Cowboys and the perfect Ramen
Review: "Tampopo" is one of those rare films that just...works. Every piece of it is perfect, combining to form a more flavorful whole, like a well-made dish of ramen noodles. Itami was inspired for this film, and it is easily one of the best Japanese films ever made. Japanese culture is filled with a love of food. Japanese travel brochures are filled, not with pretty sights and adventures, but with photos of local delicacies and dishes. Food questing is a popular hobby, with each person knowing a local favorite shop, or a master chef. Restaurants also tend to specialize, often serving only one dish such as ramen or udon noodles. "Tampopo" perfectly captured this national obsession, creating a story that is undeniable Japanese. Goro and Tampopo's search for the perfect broth, the most delicious way to cut meat and such is an honest and charming portrayal. There is plenty going on in this film, with the sexual subplot of the gangster and his lover exchanging food and sex, or the young executive fluent in French cuisine. Each vignette forwards the tone. Along with this is the marriage of the samurai and the cowboy in the character of Goro, and the delicate strength of Tampopo herself. You really can't go wrong with this film.
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