Friday Fuckery: Ramen Girl
Oh hell no. Crazy bugeyes is all decked out in racial drag for this blockbuster straight-to-dvd release:
Who sits like that? GAIJIN FAIL!
Apparently storyline goes: bouncy gaijin girl follows boyfriend to Nippon, gets dumped, comes under sage but stern tutelage of cranky Ramen masters, [insert slapstick comedy and crude culture clash/Engrish jokes here], out-Japs the Japanese with her special tear-infused broth, finally becomes celebrated as glorious shining star of the Orient by all the diffident locals, blahdee booshit blah….
What is this, a watered-down Tampopo rip-off? Oh well, at least her Korean-Japanese love interest (let’s start taking bets on whether they even get it on) is hotness. Now would you rather watch 8 Mile or this? Anybody want to do a viewer’s commentary with me? I’ll bring the Franzia. Anybody?
June 5, 2009 at 9:35 pm
Heh…other than the ramen aspect, why does this remind me of “Tokyo Pop.” But Tokyo Pop had the hotness of Yutaka Tadokoro. I can’t stand Brittany Murphy; so despite Sohee Park looking pretty hot, this is not one I’d rent.
June 5, 2009 at 10:08 pm
i love it. everything you can do i can do better, i can do everything better than you…………..
it doesn’t matter that you’ve been making ramen since lo mein, brittany murphy can do it better. why? because she’s white, and white people can do everything better.
June 6, 2009 at 11:21 am
This movie looks like a remake/ripoff of UDON(2007) http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=PCBC-51095
the plotline is the same, except the main character is changed to white american….well, i guess hollywood ffed up with My Sassy Girl, Infernal Affairs, Dance With Me, The Eye, Bangkok Dangerous, etc so they have to keep trying!!
June 6, 2009 at 7:00 pm
i kinda disagree. sure this is another movie about a white person saving a minority, in his country no less, while doing it (making ramen) better is tiring. i do see some bright spots. a hot white girl falls for a good-looking Asian male. Asian men in the mainstream are few and far between, let alone the love interest. that is to be lauded. the movie also spotlights japanese culture. though most of it is holly-white bull-crap there are some positive things about it.
June 7, 2009 at 5:32 am
wow, i don’t know how i feel about that movie either. first of all, brittany murphy is not hot. she’s part of the skinny coked out crazy hollywood young crowd, so i don’t think she’s the right person for this movie. second, i think hollywood is sorta getting how ramen is so important for asians, we obsess over the best spots and crave it like a drug, so i guess that’s good. and she DOES hook up with a asian dude, which is a +5. but damn, the movie poster is a -40.
And smacker, I’ll give you all those movie remakes, and throw in The Lake House/Il Mare, but you have to admit that Infernal Affair’s American remake was good on its own terms, minus the Mark Walhberg movie save at the end!?
June 8, 2009 at 1:40 am
i have to defend my “brittany murphy is hot” comment. she is. despite being coked out and underweight there’s something about those big brown eyes and pouty lips that puts my mind in the gutter.
she’s hot in the crackhead sorta way.
June 9, 2009 at 4:41 am
I’d also like to add that the guy that leaves her in the trailer looks like a young James Spader. i flashbacked to when i was 8 and being forced to watch pretty in pink by my teenage cousin while that trailer was playing.
June 9, 2009 at 6:25 am
aznheartthrob…oh you WATCHED the remakes did you? mmm…youre one of THOSE asians….are you?…. oh okay then,..so now i know WHO YOU REALLY ARE!! LOL, JK
Yeah, the lake house too,..the funny thing is i had to do a presentation in my Media and visual studies class and i made it about hollywood remakes/cultural imperialism etc, and the majority of the caucasians in the room got so DEFENSIVE, hahaha, even my class tutor, lol, only a few people got what i was getting at….although to be fair, mosty of those guys were minorities…..
June 15, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Eeesh, yeah, the poster looks damn-awful (gotta love those marketing geniuses in Hollywood) and certainly the plot sounds pretty like a rehash of an American learning another culture and becoming more proficient at a certain cultural element than the originating cultural ethnicity themeslves; but there are some hilights like having the Asian guy be the redeeming love interest.
There’s some insight from a QA with the director of this film on a youtube post when I was searching out the writer, Becca Topol:
(original link)
Robert Allan Ackerman, director of “The Ramen Girl,” is a Brooklyn-born, Emmy-nominated theater and TV director and producer who has worked extensively in Japan. Here he tells us how he got stuck into this steaming-hot project.
How did “The Ramen Girl” come about?
Through an e-mail that was sent to me by the writer, named Becca Topol. She had lived in Japan, and she sent me an e-mail saying that she had an idea for a movie about an American girl who becomes a ramen chef.
Why ramen? And how do Western audiences react to the sound of slurping, as ramen is typically eaten?
That was Becca’s idea. She’s a Buddhist, and she was trying to look for a metaphor or some situation in which an American girl was being trained to do something that was so foreign to her. And I think Americans find slurping very offensive, ha ha. They don’t understand it. (But) once they do understand it, they feel liberated, because they can slurp.
What were the challenges you faced?
The biggest challenge that we had was trying to figure out how (Brittany Murphy and Toshiyuki Nishida’s characters) communicated with one another. And then we finally just decided, why don’t they just not understand each other? That’s actually the basis of their relationship.
Was it a conscious decision to cast Tsutomu Yamazaki, star of the classic ramen movie “Tampopo”?
Absolutely. “Tampopo” is one of my favorite movies. The casting of Yamazaki was really deliberate, to have the car door open and out walks the guy from “Tampopo.”
A lot of people are comparing your film with “Lost in Translation” . . .
I would rather not be compared to “Lost in Translation.” I thought that the depiction of the Japanese characters was very stereotypical and kind of racist. I also thought that it had nothing to do with Japan; they could have been on the moon, and the only reason to have Japanese people was to make fun of them.
What is your favorite style of ramen?
Oh! Pork ramen. I can’t think of the word anymore . . . (A staff member reminds him: tonkotsu.)