{"id":12352,"date":"2017-12-22T21:00:28","date_gmt":"2017-12-23T03:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=12352"},"modified":"2017-12-21T21:24:55","modified_gmt":"2017-12-22T03:24:55","slug":"tampopo-1985-juzo-itami","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/12352","title":{"rendered":"Tampopo (1985, Juzo Itami)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A hell of a weird, fun flick.  The central story is a sort of Western parody: a couple of truckers come across a lousy ramen place run by a woman named Tampopo and decide to help her improve it, recruiting more experts until she has the best ramen in town, then disappear into the sunset.  But the movie&#8217;s most genius idea was cutting little food-related vignettes into the main film, basically an improvement on the structure and focus of <em>The Kentucky Fried Movie<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image17\/tampopo.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>The first I&#8217;ve seen by Itami, who also made episodic comedy <em>The Funeral<\/em>, and died twenty years ago this week.  Tampopo is Nobuko Miyamoto (Itami&#8217;s wife, star of <em>Sweet Home<\/em>), along with her team: main trucker Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki: <em>Farewell to the Ark<\/em>, <em>Kagemusha<\/em>, <em>Rikyu<\/em>), his sidekick Gun (Ken Watanabe, the most famous Japanese man in Hollywood), broth master Yoshi Kato (a bunch of Shinoda films including <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/11614\">Silence<\/a><\/em>), noodle expert Shohei (Kinz\u00f4 Sakura of Itami&#8217;s <em>A Taxing Woman<\/em>), and hardass interior designer Pisken (Rikiya Yasuoka of some early Miike movies).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve already forgotten half of the incidental sideplots, but the recurring one featured a white-suited gangster (K\u00f4ji Yakusho, the guy from <em>Doppelganger<\/em>, <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/2796\">Tokyo Sonata<\/a><\/em>, <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/4364\">Eureka<\/a><\/em>) and his girl (Fukumi Kuroda of <em>Tales of a Golden Geisha<\/em>) having weird food sex.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A hell of a weird, fun flick. The central story is a sort of Western parody: a couple of truckers come across a lousy ramen place run by a woman named Tampopo and decide to help her improve it, recruiting more experts until she has the best ramen in town, then disappear into the sunset. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,1365,36,1403],"class_list":["post-12352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-cooking","tag-japan","tag-juzo-itami"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12384,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12352\/revisions\/12384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}