Tortilla Soup (2001)

Strong and Moving!

Sadly Over-hyped

Pretty Good

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Tortilla Soup is a lively remake of Ang Lee's excellent Eat Drink Man Woman, with much of the plot, dialogue and even shots replicated in a Hispanic cultural context. Seeing this I was reminded of how masterful the original's script was, how it elegantly balanced each of the daughter's strands against the ageing, traditional father. It took its time to reveal their cultural and generational differences - here, within minutes of the movie's opening, the family grievances are immediately aired out. The classic beginning, a wordless sequence of an artist crafting his food, is breezily intercut with each subplot of the daughters' lives. Familiarly, the semi-retired master chef Martin is regularly summoned to the restaurant to save the day, to make cuisine out of burnt mistakes. His entrance is even more theatrical than the original - he enters the back door and is immediately catered to by a throng of assistants, their long metal arms assembling his chef's uniform. It's like Iron Man suiting up for battle, and to Martin the kitchen is the front line. The food he serves may be delicious, as confirmed by the many guests at his dinner table, but what about the photography? Ang Lee and Jong Lin gave us wafts of steam, they gave us glistening closeups of fatty meat, they gave us juice and sauce. They evoked the senses through the screen - what great food movies do to not only worship craftsmanship, but also make the audience salivate. The food in Tortilla Soup is dull by comparison, and the photography closer to that of a TV special. And what is the overall theme of the meals? "Call it something French", Martin proclaims of his improvised mishmash of buttered bread and baked apple. The sous chef then smacks his lips and kisses his hand like an Italian. Are we in Mexico, or are we in Europe? The strength of the original was how it tied food to cultural identity, and how the boom of fast food and canteen lunches drove a wedge between two generations. Mr Chu had a proud exterior, but gained big puppy eyes when he saw how the art of xiaolongbao had been desecrated. Héctor Elizondo has almost none of this vulnerability, although he plays the well-meaning father figure well, with patience and sometimes bemused expressions. His youngest is turned into a vapid generational marker: highlights in her hair, a quick wit, and lines so 'hip' that it seems the writer had an epiphany and then couldn't bare to part with them even when they didn't work. Maria Ripoll, to her credit, has improved on the eldest daughter, who was merely a frigid spinster type, playing off the old schoolteacher trope. But Elizabeth Peña is livelier, more playful, especially in the mirror when she thinks no one is watching her. She hints at the long forgotten sisterly bonds that have faded with age, and when she is caught twirling her hair like a smitten schoolgirl, the quarrels suddenly hurtle back years. Her 'makeover' isn't one sister helping another catch the eye of a man, but two little girls playing dress up, giggling and whispering of crushes. Their kitchen musical show runs along the same lines, and later with this newfound liberation she uses the smashed plate to great effect, and relief. One final note that I see hasn't been mentioned is the language of the film, which threw me a curveball. They all talk in almost perfectly accented English, and at times it sounds like a bad dub. It doesn't help that the dialogue seems to be mixed slightly louder than the rest of the soundtrack. But this is years of conflicting experiences with blockbusters talking. Am I so set in my ways that I can't accept Mexicans without their typecast accent, like how the bumbling Orlando speaks? The film breaks these Hollywood conventions and says, "Yes, these are Mexicans too, and yes, they are as authentic as those wearing sombreros and gobbling down tacos". That is something invaluable.

"Tortilla Soup" is a Chicano adaptation of Ang Lee's "Eat Drink Man Woman" and I enjoyed it just as much if not more, partly because it was nice to see Latino actors and actresses playing Latinos, as they don't always get to do, such as Hector Elizondo, and because they really felt like a family. In the Lee original, I felt the patriarch's gorgeous home meal preparation was the same as his restaurant work, while here I got much more of a sense of a family gathering and eating, as in "What's Cooking."The family announcements at each meal accentuate that eating at home with a parent isn't just an aesthetic experience, but a psychological and sociological one. The audience, including me, really got into the three sisters' romantic and housekeeping travails, with each making their own way in a realistic world, yet reflecting their father's upbringing, each in her sexy own way.Latino and Brazilian music is beautifully used to reflect each family member's romance and the sisters together. But the credits didn't really answer if Elizondo had a stunt double for all that deft slicing and dicing. (originally written 9/9/2001)

i saw this film on star-movie channel accidentally in a boring night,and i have to say that i was totally confused about the meaningless mechanical remaking of ang lee's previous movie,you will never figure out how bloody spoiled the remaking was if you never saw the original one before and in the mean time you are not a Chinese.Tortilla Soup has exactly the same plot with lee's original movie and was pretty much a bad "copy" or "translation",apparently you could merely notice only a few differences between the two versions including cast,languages and locations where the stories taken place etc,but they are not important compared with the losing of the soul which was supposed to be expressed to people!the original movie that was filmed by ang lee was a story about a family in Taipei,and the main idea was to tell people the importance of the family value and also question some of the unhealthy city life styles right there in Taipei from a few aspects.so the plot of that movie was meant to be happened to a specific group of people at a specific time and in a specific place,you know you couldn't just copy it and make the movie replaced with a brand new cast and something else,this is definitely meaningless and stupid even if you liked the plot so much.well i kinda get a good expression to all this stuff,you see it just like you know a person very well and you liked him very much,when someday you found out that the person had become a "walking dead" after taking a plastic surgery,though you could still recognize him.maybe the expression is a little bit weird and creepy,but just that it helps reflect the truth.

Tortillia Souip is a remake of Ang Lee's Yin shi nan nu. The original, even in subtitle form is far superior to this version. To me,it is much like seeing an original Renoir' recreated in a paint by number kit.