Tampopo

Contrast The Ramen Girl with Jûzô Itami's 1985 masterpiece Tampopo, which is a brilliant, layered comedy. A truck driver happens upon a noodle shop operated by a widow. The widow is not a very good noodle chef but the truck driver agrees to help her improve. Her story is interleaved with other lovely comedic scenes involving food: a gangster gourmet and his beautiful girlfriend make sexual adventure in a hotel out of room service, a matron teaches debutantes to eat western style; executives can't read the French menu they're handed and are shown up by the office boy. Meanwhile, our cowboy truck driver and the noodle-cooking widow go on a quest to learn what how to make her better. They spy on other shops in the neighborhood, sneaking looks at their garbage. They are aided by a very wealthy patron whose life they have saved, not with the Heimlich maneuver, but with a vacuum cleaner. When they find the Ramen Master he's not in a limousine, but in a hobo camp among other epicureans, who wax poetic about the state of the dumpsters of various famous restaurants. In the end, of course, our heroine learns to make excellent ramen, her restaurant is successful, and the truck driver can ride off into the sunset.

The Ramen Girl

An American girl moves to Tokyo because her boyfriend is there, and then he breaks up with her, and then even though she knows no Japanese, she throws herself on the mercy of the man who owns the ramen shop across the street who speaks no English. The Ramen Girl, starring Brittany Murphy with dark circles under her eyes in every scene looking like she's hungover, is a low-rent, 'tweener version of Tampopo, with a few glimpses of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Murphy begs to be taught how to make ramen, and doesn't want to expend the effort in the apprenticeship of cleaning the pots and washing the counters and mucking out the bathrooms. And yet, after a year of this back-and-forth with the noodle shop owner, she is making acceptable ramen, and the Ramen Master comes to visit and pass on her cooking ability. He arrives in a black limosine, and declares that she is good, but still needs work. So, after the neighborhood gives her a parade, she decamps to American to open a raman shop in the shadow of the Empire State Building.