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.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

There are many books that are called classics, some of them even justifiably. For example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I recently reread. Robert Heinlein postulates a revolt at a penal colony, which organizes itself on libertarian principles with the help of a self-aware computer. The wrinkle is that the penal colony is on the Moon, and anyone sent there can't come back because their body has acclimated to the lower gravity.  This includes the guards and administrators. The Moon is hydroponically growing a large chunk of the grain needed in Asia, and literally drop shipping it via catapault back to Earth. The Loonies defend themselves with a superior understanding of their environment and gravity, and by the simple expedient of dropping rocks on Earth via the selfsame catapault. It is well-told, tightly-plotted, with appropriate suspense, including side discussions of Heinlein's alternatives to monogamy. If you haven't read it, make the time. If you have, it's time to re-read it.

    Alas, I read the Tor/Orbit reprint, which suffers from the perennial problem displayed by Tor: there was no human intervention between the optical character recognition of the text and printing the bound volume. This means there are innumerable typoes which would have been avoided by the simple expedient of proofreading. The most annoying example was references to "flat money" instead of "fiat money." (Those pesky "fl" and "fi" ligatures were obviously invented by medieval type designers just to confuse the OCR software.)

Moon

We see too many movies with too many special effects.  But back in 2009 Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey teamed up together in a little character study in a science fiction setting called Moon. It's got a couple of fascinating twists and turns, and is just very cool. Well worth the two hours, and it was high on my personal Hugo shortlist that year and took home the award. Amazing bang for the buck, considering that the movie was made for about the cost of a Big Mac.

Oblivion

Last year's Tom Cruise movie Oblivion has finally made it to viewing at our house. It's very pretty, as are Cruise and co-star Andrea Riseborough. Earth's been invaded. The Moon's been destroyed. Cruise and Riseborough are drone repairmen on Earth, protecting the water desalinization plants while everyone else resettles on Titan. And then a capsule containing hybernation pods reenters the atmosphere, leading us to the discovery of what's been hidden from our heroes. There were no plot twists, only telegrams. There were no revelations, only teases. There were no new ideas, only stolen rehashes. There isn't a single frame in these two hours that isn't completely predictable to anyone who has the slightest familiarity with the Big Book of Summer Blockbuster Sci-Fi Plots.

Taking Chance

By interesting contrast to The Hurt Locker and made in the same timeframe, we have Taking Chance (2009), a little movie starring Kevin Bacon for which he got a best actor award from the Screen Actors. Bacon is on screen for the whole thing playing a Marine colonel who volunteers to escort the body of Chance Phelps, a lance corporal killed in Iraq, home to Wyoming. He takes on the job in the mistaken belief that the kid was from his hometown in Colorado, except that's just where he enlisted. Bacon starts the trip not quite sure what to expect, but is met by respect and caring at every turn, from the airline clerk who upgrades his flight to first class, to the baggage agent who brings him a sleeping bag when he insists on keeping watch overnight, to the pilot who asks a planeful of people to wait so that the colonel and lance corporal can get off first, to the men of the VFW in the small town in Wyoming. Quite a nice, and very moving, little movie, speaking about the direct cost of war and respect for those who pay it.

The Hurt Locker

There was some amusement in these quarters that both James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow were nominated for best director Oscars, and that each of their respective 2009 movies received nine nominations. The amusement, of course, stems from the fact that Ms Bigelow was the third (of five!) Mrs James Cameron. However, now that I've seen her movie, I can unreservedly report that while Avatar is very pretty and a technical tour de force, The Hurt Locker is a much better film. It's the story of a guy who has been defusing bombs in a war zone for so long that he doesn't know anything else. The pain and confusion of the war zone is constant, and we watch the ways in which this team of bomb guys blow off steam and wander through the fog of war.  Deservedly, it won both best director and best picture.