Food for Thought?
I read recently, that mature women were in vogue at the moment in Hollywood, making it cool to be a fortysomething girl. (MILF is the term more commonly used). Heather Graham and Carrie-Anne Moss have a combined age of ninety but you wouldn’t believe it to look at them. Heather’s implike facial features have helped keep her young looking, but her 43 years are surely showing now, even with copious amounts of makeup. She’s still all woman in my book. Then we have Carrie-Anne Moss, The One’s other half. She looks still to be able to fit into her skin tight suit from her days doing The Matrix trilogy. It was also nice seeing Joe Mantegna, as he plays the detective in our edible thriller, but one can’t help picturing Fat Tony from The Simpsons upon hearing his velvet tones. The one constant with Joe’s performance is that he can do Joe better than anyone else. Kevin Dillon was his usual good self but this was never a difficult role for him to take on.
Director Egidio Coccimiglio has remade the cult Korean cinema classic 301, 302, and put a more western flavoured (pun intended) spin on things, with a quirky story and $4 million, he’s cooked up a nice little movie. His use of a high and bright colour palette, was not unlike the one used in Aram Rappaport’s Syrup, and uses it when we are seeing through Amy’s (Graham) eyes, and into her TV cooking show fantasy. She is obsessed with food and does nothing but talk about it all day, and when not talking about it, she’s cooking it, and she also uses it as foreplay with her husband (Dillon).
Saffron (Moss) has gone missing and a detective calls in on her neighbor Amy to ask her some questions, in regard to the disappearance, but he ends up getting told the story through Amy, as she tells of how she meets, then befriends the actress, but the detective is very suspicious. As well he should be.
Amy’s new mysterious neighbor is an actress, who is struggling to get work, thanks to her age, but Saffron has many secrets that she shares with no one. Enter Amy. She pushes her way into Saffron’s life, trying her best to feed her some of her fancy dishes, but for some reason, she refuses to eat anything. Eventually, Amy finds out what has troubled Saffron for years, and they then become very close friends. Amy’s husband has an African Grey parrot which goes missing. We soon learn what happened to the bird, and that opens the doors to something else entirely.
I really enjoyed this movie and think it should be well received, because it’s actually quite interesting, but I liked it for the acting most of all, so it didn’t hurt that it was just plain good as well.
Worthy of a look.
Grade: C+
Nav Qateel, Influx Magazine.
