Fantastic!!
The move was 'Los Angeles' all the way and instrumented in such a symphonic manner as it spirally migrated between four contemporary ethnic families. I am still thinking and talking about this movie experience.
Of course, one must live the Los Angeles experience and have eaten with and / or developed friendships with Latino, Black, Vietnamese and White folks. And observed the tugging between the older landed immigrants and their first and second generation children with contemporary Los Angeles pressures of survival.
Most importantly, all these displays of tensions and culture differences are framed within a Thanksgiving Dinner in the foreground. I love movies that remind me that I did not eat my lunch before attending the screening, and my stomach growls to each frying and tossing and baking in dynamic hot color on the screen.
If "American Beauty" was the hidden behavioral secret of suburban United States, then "What's Cooking" is Los Angeles's less sexually graphic approach to urban family, food, culture, love and diversity in choice, and youthful rebellion towards acculturation as well as striving to regain one's own soul and roots.
It opens with a bus ride on the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) which defines Los Angeles and the means where most ethnic residents migrate from home to work. That scene also defines the cultural gap between those that have and those that don't have -- yet live in near proximity to each other by mere sweat, honor and honesty.
We then move to learn about these four established families where the 'thanks' in Thanksgiving is somewhat misplaced and displaced as personal emotional baggage is brought to the dinner table, along with uninvited guests and surprised verbal emotional slips. Dirty linen gets exposed through the lashing of tongues and languages. Layer by symphonic layer with subtitles when needed.
This wonderful movie does not fall victim to its complex plot of multiple families and multiple family members. The movie's spiral rotation between emerging and related situations maintains our understanding of the emotion and humor shared by each family, but with a tasteful cultural twist in each turn of the screw.
The unifying climax is something that anybody who lives in Los Angeles hopes never happens on their own street: the sharp report of a gun shot. We all hear it in the distance all to often, but never on our own street. Not so far.
Nor this diverse, striving family neighborhood until this Thanksgiving Day celebration.
The move was 'Los Angeles' all the way and instrumented in such a symphonic manner as it spirally migrated between four contemporary ethnic families. I am still thinking and talking about this movie experience.
Of course, one must live the Los Angeles experience and have eaten with and / or developed friendships with Latino, Black, Vietnamese and White folks. And observed the tugging between the older landed immigrants and their first and second generation children with contemporary Los Angeles pressures of survival.
Most importantly, all these displays of tensions and culture differences are framed within a Thanksgiving Dinner in the foreground. I love movies that remind me that I did not eat my lunch before attending the screening, and my stomach growls to each frying and tossing and baking in dynamic hot color on the screen.
If "American Beauty" was the hidden behavioral secret of suburban United States, then "What's Cooking" is Los Angeles's less sexually graphic approach to urban family, food, culture, love and diversity in choice, and youthful rebellion towards acculturation as well as striving to regain one's own soul and roots.
It opens with a bus ride on the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) which defines Los Angeles and the means where most ethnic residents migrate from home to work. That scene also defines the cultural gap between those that have and those that don't have -- yet live in near proximity to each other by mere sweat, honor and honesty.
We then move to learn about these four established families where the 'thanks' in Thanksgiving is somewhat misplaced and displaced as personal emotional baggage is brought to the dinner table, along with uninvited guests and surprised verbal emotional slips. Dirty linen gets exposed through the lashing of tongues and languages. Layer by symphonic layer with subtitles when needed.
This wonderful movie does not fall victim to its complex plot of multiple families and multiple family members. The movie's spiral rotation between emerging and related situations maintains our understanding of the emotion and humor shared by each family, but with a tasteful cultural twist in each turn of the screw.
The unifying climax is something that anybody who lives in Los Angeles hopes never happens on their own street: the sharp report of a gun shot. We all hear it in the distance all to often, but never on our own street. Not so far.
Nor this diverse, striving family neighborhood until this Thanksgiving Day celebration.