"film" news and stories

Foodies will be watching the Oscars closely this year, as Food, Inc., the film that exposes the industrialization of our food industry, is nominated for best documentary. Director Robert Kenner spoke to Slashfood about activism, big brother and whether his phone line is tapped.

Did you ever get depressed when making the movie? The problems you examine seem so intractable.
RK: On some levels. I went out recently with the editor of Rolling Stone, who was the person who initiated the article that would become Fast Food Nation and that article came out in 1997. This all started only ten years ago, when people started thinking about the industrialization of the food system. It's a brand new thing. These things move really quickly and I think as consumers become more and more conscious of that, we will start to shine the spotlight and realize this is a system that's making us sick and we will change it.

The new movie "Beer Wars" was shown last night to an extremely sympathetic audience at Brooklyn's bar-cum-music venue Bell House.

How can one be "sympathetic" to, um, beer? Well, in this very straightforward good guy versus bad guy documentary, the Big Three (Miller, Coors and Anheuser-Busch/InBev) are set up as the Goliath to the microbrewers' David, including Dogfish Head's charming Sam Calagione.

Of course, the Big Three are now just the Big Two, but that small detail didn't stop this Brooklyn audience from engaging in a rowdy shout-down over the course of the film -- a distinctly one-sided vehicle with a chipper bespectacled narrator. Vintage ads and interviews with "Bad Beer" millionaires in polished boardrooms are interspersed with folksy, homey interviews with Calagione and Rhonda Kallman, the woman behind caffeinated brew MoonShot. Various microbreweries also snagged cameos. (Pennsylvania's Yuengling received rousing cheers).

The most telling parts of the film came when the camera zoomed into the refrigerated aisle of grocery stores and placed big red boxes around beers clearly dear to audience members' hearts. It was with a collective gasp that suds-lovers realized their beloved Stella was connected to Anheuser-Busch.

So did the film's message hit home?

Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert!

Oh Bravo. Let's not kid ourselves: The Elimination Challenge from this week's Top Chef episode was about as Project Runway as it gets. The contestants worked in pairs to create dishes inspired by their favorite movies, and it felt almost like Tom Colicchio was channeling Michael Kors in his criticism ("They talked about vibrant colors -- I didn't see vibrant colors there").

We at Slashfood absolutely love movies and food, whether it's a quiet night in with take-out and a DVD, a date night out in a restaurant followed by a movie, matching food to movies, movies about food, or talking about foods that might come up in movies.

Premiere.com also like food movies, since this year, there are at least three movies that involve it: Keri Russell in Waitress, the Pixar film Ratatouille that has every good foodie clamoring for eggplant, zucchini, and tomatoes, and No Reservations, the movie that came out this past weekend. In honor of these food movies, Premiere.com lists the 20 Most Mouth-watering Movie Moments, which I'm re-printing here (after the jump). Your favorite food movie or food scene in a movie not listed? Tell us!

If, like some of us, you were left wanting by the film adaptation of Fast Food Nation, a new documentary called Our Daily Bread might be more your speed. Created by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Our Daily Bread is composed of long, unblinking scenes shot in industrial greenhouses (above), farms and animal processing plants throughout Europe. There are no interviews or voice-overs and the locations are not identified. The New York Times gives it a glowing review, and also features a related piece with a few quotes from Geyrhalter. Several trailers are available here. For the moment, it appears that screenings of the film in the U.S. are limited to New York City and Chicago. Hopefully that will change soon.