A woman's quest for the perfect bowl of ramen noodles. Hilarious and profound, my all time favorite food-theme movie.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3654 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-05-22
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, Full length, Import, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 114 minutes

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Customer Reviews

If you love food and Alton Brown...
...you will love this movie for it explores (with hysterical results) why food becomes such an important touchstone in life.

Truck driver Goro and Gun are in search of some good eats and run into a widow who is trying to run a ramen shop. Unfortunately, she's not doing too well so Goro and some unlikely guides offer her some sage advice and help her on her way to becoming a true ramenista. The story is punctuated with some vignettes about the "social aspects" of eating and our behavior with food.


THIS EDITION NOTES: This is a "no-frills" deal with the bear minimum of subtitle options and the movie's original trailer. Although Amazon is listing the zone playability as "unknown" the jacket lists it as ALL ZONES. It played on our ancient Zenith DVD player which can only handle zone 1 DVDs and nothing else. Picture is good, but sound quality is poor. However, its definitely worth the price to see this wonderful movie once again!

Completely concerned with food. Oh, & sex & life too.
This is on my top ten list of the funniest, most delightful movies of all time. The main plot line is a loving satire of the "adult" western of the fifties - "Shane" in particular - where the hero drifts into town, helps the poor widow get her life together and beat the bad guys, then drifts out again. Tampopo, the heroine, must make the best noodle soup in town to overcome the villainous other noodle houses.

But what makes this movie extraordinary are the vignettes, both within the plot-line and outside it, that mingle food, sex, cultural hangups, life and death in hilarious and sometimes very touching combinations.

The movie succeeds not only because of its marvellous material and fine actors but also through excellent direction and cinematography. For example, the scene toward the end where Tampopo & Goro are eating companionably in a restaurant: notice the camera movement from the food to the people; the positions of the actors conveying clearly the ambiguity of the relationship and their attitudes to each other; how at times Goro actually has his back to the camera; the cut to the symbolic passing train, nicely understated; the whole scene is an example of effective simplicity in movie-making.

This movie is ultimately unclassifiable; it is itself, funny, sad (sometimes both at once), shocking, absorbing; but above all funny. I have never seen another film quite like it, and it stays in the memory like the best of Fellini.

Tampopo
This is one of the best food films ever. Ken Watanabe as a Japanese John Wayne and noodle expert is hilarious. The director also has some great moves. I have enjoyed watching it several times to make sure that I haven't missed anything.