Like Water for Chocolate (1993)

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Tita (Lumi Cavazos) was born in the kitchen in 1895 Rio Grande, Mexico. After the death of her father, her mother vows to force her youngest Tita to care for her entire life. Tita grows up in the kitchen with servant Nacha. She falls in love with Pedro Muzquiz but her mother refuses to permit her to marry. Her mother offers older sister Rosaura and Pedro accepts hoping to stay close to Tita. Tita's tears infuse the wedding cake with her sadness.This has a great magically realism. It's a fable of food, family, and passion. The story is fun and fanciful. Lumi Cavazos is a sweet endearing lead. The only drawback is the limited chemistry in the epic romance. It's probably asking too much. They don't have much time together before they have to be Romeo and Juliet. Then they have to be apart. It's submerged passion and Pedro doesn't always come across well.

Engaging drama.Set in Mexico in the early-1900s, the story of a girl and her oppressive, tyrannical mother. In her teens, the girl falls in love with a boy and they want to get married. The mother is determined that the girl will never marry, as she has to look after her. Drama and intrigue follows...Initially a very suffocating movie, as you feel how the girl is oppressed and deprived of her free will by her evil mother. You keep hoping that she will run away, or do something to break free.Then follows a spell of liberty, and probably the most wonderful part of the movie. The shackles have been removed and she can now be herself and follow her dreams and loves.However, just when you thought that was the precursor to a happy ending, the movie loses focus. It suddenly gets quite weird, complete with ghosts, and ultimately becomes a soap opera. The last few scenes are pure soap, and diminish the value of what came before them.Overall - good, but could have been brilliant.

Though I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, Like Water for Chocolate, I thought that the movie was extremely disappointing and reminded me of really terrible and overly-dramatic soap operas. The portrayal of the use of magical realism very realistically in the movie really took away from the experience of watching it. The addition of music could have made or broken this movie, and in this case, I believe it made dramatic and heart- wrenching moments from the book seem laughable. The dramatization of cooking in the movie seemed to be a mindless chore, unrelated to the plot, very much in contrast to the emotional release experienced by Tita while cooking in the novel. I was also quite unable to relate to any of the characters as they were portrayed in the film. They all appeared, to me, very one-sided and unoriginal. The depiction of the Mexican Revolution disgusted me, and should have been taken far more seriously, in my opinion. Laura Esquivel should probably stick to writing novels, not screenplays.

"Like Water For Chocolate"; a book that was later made into a movie. Like Water For Chocolate is about a girl Tita who is the youngest of three children, with an unfair mother. Tita, the rebellious of the three, does not want to follow the family tradition which is -- the youngest girl in the family may not marry, but instead, take care of their mother until she dies. Unfortunately, Tita found love with a man who loved Tita as much as she loved him but married her oldest sister, and before long she found another man to marry who took care of her at the worst time in her life. How does Tita solve the conflict?After watching the movie, I thought that the movie could not quite grasp the person watching the same way the book did with the readers. Each chapter in the book was separated by a recipe which would give the reader a bit of a hint as to what was going to happen next, but since it's a movie, it was very difficult to separate scenes with recipes. The movie was also like a 1:30 hour soap opera. If you like bad acting and drama, this is the movie for you; if you want a quick, easy read and you want to use your imagination to the fullest, I would suggest the book.