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| Expect to see black bags that look like black eyes for the entirety of the movie. |
Dear Internet,
I was
hoping it would not come to this, or in the very least not come to it as
quickly. I am not talking about having
to watch "The Ramen Girl." I
knew that eventually I would have to watch that movie. It was on the Backlog, and if I really never
wanted to watch it, I would never have put it on the Backlog in the first
place. What I could not have know prior
is just how bad it is. Even the reviews
online, that I only looked at after viewing the film to prevent any sort of
bias, rate higher than what I think of this atrocity. "The Ramen Girl" is a film that
utterly fails on so many levels that it is amazing that it was made in a movie
at all.
The
plot can be summed up in two sentence. A
blond American travels to Japan to be with her boyfriend. When he dumps her, she decides to learn to be
a ramen chef. That is it. The film does not hide that the plot is
threadbare and simple. What is also
simple is the vast majority of characters presented. There is the titular character, Abby, who has
the mentality of a high-school cheerleader.
The few English speaking characters who are pointlessly added so that there
is more than one character not speaking Japanese. Even the non-moronic characters have moments
of stupidity so that humor can be added to scenes that are supposed to be emotionally
deep and thought provoking but instead become terribly cruel because of it.
On of
these twisted scenes occurs three quarters through the movie. After being told that she needs to add her
emotions into making her ramen in a language she never quite learned through
the course of the story, she makes a trail batch to a group of regulars to the
ramen shop. Each one of the customers
begins to eat the meal and each one is moved to tears. One laments going through life with no
wife. Others cry over not seeing their
hometown and dead dog. One woman tearfully
admits that her husband has not touched her in over 15 years. Even the usually temperamental chef runs out
of the room, supposedly moved by the magic ramen and most likely tearing up
over the thought of his estranged son. What
does the movie do then? The wife of the
chef, who had been the most even-headed and kind character throughout the film,
laughs right out loud. She is supposed
to be laughing happily at how well Abby was able to make a dish that moved
people to tears, but it creates the exact opposite for the scene. It trivializes the problems of the minor
characters, trying them seem pathetic for having problems in their lives, or
even trivializing what their problems are.
When one realizes that the character who misses his hometown has the
same dilemma as the titular character for the first third of the movie, it is
apparent that the movie is not laughing at itself but cruelly mocking its own
characters.
On the
note of cruel mocking, Abby has a moment of intense nastiness late in the
film. She asks the chef who is the man
in the pictures of Paris that the chef cries over. She makes an over exaggerated crying gesture
wiping away fake tears. The chef gets
angry and asks if she had been spying on him, something she does not understand
because she does not know Japanese. When
the chef decides to walk away, Abby screams out victory with "You can dish
it out but you can't take it? Yes! I gotcha." The chef's wife then says that the man in the
photos is their son and he has not talked to his father in five years. The point of this scene is obviously supposed
to illustrate that the chef is human too and has problems of his own, but
because of Abby's immature manner of taunting the chef it just highlights her
own shortcomings and childish behavior.
While it can be argued that this was the actual point of the scene
because the audience learns the troubled relationship between the chef and his
son, it would be wrong because it supposed to recall a previous scene. In an earlier scene, the chef makes a similar
over emphasized crying gesture when he finds Abby calling home in the middle of
her cleaning, saying in Japanese "Mommy...I Want to go home to
America." When he says it, it is
meant to highlight how Abby contradicts herself saying that she wants to learn
how to cook ramen but wants to go back home. He wants her to make a decision about what she
really wants to do. She cannot have it
both ways. Later on, there is a scene where
she wholly decides to make ramen. When Abby
mocks the chef, she is not forcing a decision out of him. She is acting out because of her misplaced
frustration. She is rebelling against
one of the most underlining problems of the movie.
Language
is a one of the most important foundation blocks with inter-cultural communication. One can use mime for
minor things like eating and sleeping, but try to express complex immaterial
thought like the purpose of man in an unforgiving universe through charades. Throughout the entirety of the film, Abby
never goes higher than a two week crash course level of Japanese. She carries around a pocket dictionary for
the majority of the film but seems to never remember anything. The one thing that she says more often than
anything else is "I don't understand." Even the chef points this out. All it does is illustrate how poorly thought
out her decision to stay in a country whose language she does not
understand. And after a year she should
be well past only knowing a few dozen words.
There are a lot of times throughout this film that the audience is the only
ones to fully understand what is going on because of subtitles. Abby, however, is like a dear in the
headlights trying to piece together what people are saying. If she just spent a little more effort in
learning the language, her problems would have been halved instantly, but, no,
that would have reduced conflict. A
conflict in my opinion was unnecessary.
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| That is some new level of incompetent. |
Then there are the
love interests. The first guy from the
starting gate is a jerk of a special sort.
The movie makes this clear and we know this. When he gets a job elsewhere, he drops Abby
high and dry in Tokyo despite her moving there from America. Abby does make a protest, saying that he
wanted her there, but he says back that he never asked her to come. The movie does not say whether he was right
or not, but it is shown throughout the film that Abby acts upon impulse and she
even admits to it. While it does not
excuse him from being a jerk, it does stress the fact that Abby is an
idiot. The romance sub-genre comes back
when Abby starts dating a new guy, a Japanese salaryman who also speaks
English. Eventually he has to go to
Shanghai because of his job, just like the first guy. There is some mention of how he would rather
be a musician than a paper-pusher, but that is only there to make him unhappy
with his current job. Where the problem
with this occurs is in the final scene of the film. One year after Abby leaves Japan, she has her
own shop in New York City. Japanese guy
shows up out of nowhere, says that he got bored of doing the same old same old,
and is now a musician. They get back
together and the movie ends. When I saw
this, all I could think of was "So, when he gets popular he will be out
touring and leave you high and dry for months on end?" Not to mention that how often she goes
through boyfriends, there was a good chance that she would have been taken by
the time he decided to show up again. And
how in the world did he find her? They
were not keeping touch before the one year time skip. She went back home to another country. There is some serious gap of information
going on here.
Then there is the
ramen itself that I take issue with. I
do not mind that it is ramen or that it is used as some sort of plot device to
push character development. The
"Karate Kid" remake was able to show that it is not karate that is
important but that a focus for an individual is important to channel growth by
having no actual karate in it. What I do
not care for the ramen bit is that it takes on some magical, otherworldly aura
that can either make crying adults giggle uncontrollably or others lament their
problems. What is this stuff? Some sort of crazy manna that comes from the
heavens? The movie takes this simple
dish to such lengths it is hysterically bad.
I can understand that good food can affect how people feel. A home-cooked meal can mean more to a person
than a fancy hard to pronounce dish. But
"The Ramen Girl" elevates it to a height that is unreasonable,
especially when it does so to get a laugh and the joke fails. If you take this aspect away, the ramen is a
sign of Abby's growth as an individual. When
she makes some sort of Italian inspired ramen to be judged by the Grand Ramen Poobah,
he says that it needs improvement. A
year later at Abby's restaurant, she feeds the same thing to her
customers. I am not sure if the movie is
saying that New Yorkers will eat anything, which has some truth, that Abby has
striven to improve herself or that Abby's skill stays stagnant. Sure the restaurant is filled to its max
capacity of ten, but there is still the lack of validation from a professional
standard. If the film is trying to allude
that professional standards made by unrealistically and outdated values are
null and void when it comes to what the general public eats then it invalidates
the chef Abby trained under who was trained and taught by those values.
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| Oh, she got better because she took out the peppers, but shows personal growth by keeping the corn? |
On a quick note
since I realize this is now the longest write up I have made, I want to point
out that Abby spends some time just cleaning up the store before even being
allowed to cook. I am not sure if the
movie was trying to make it seem that the chef was not being fair and making
her do menial labor instead of teaching, but I am reminded of old time apprenticeships. For example, blacksmith apprentices would
tend to the shop and do all the annoying tasks for quite a while. They would not even get a chance to work metal
for a year after they started. Abby
should have expected to be working her way from the bottom up, even in a three
room restaurant.
"The Ramen
Girl" is a horrible movie. That
thing that I wanted to not come to quickly at the beginning of this tirade is
awarding a one star review. I do not
like to rate something a one out of five, not because I do not think there are
badly made stories. I do not like to do
so because there has to be something so inherently with its message to make me
think it is worth telling people to avoid it.
It has to be "The Notebook" bad. A film that skewers the meaning of commitment
and love. It has to be a literal "Victory
Can Be Pre-ordered" bad. It has to
be "Twilight" bad. One star,
or horrible, has to be something that can create a ripple effect that affects anything
near it. It is not a bird dropping in a
tree. It is a diseased fish in a output water
pipe that has puss filled boils leaking into the water that goes into your and
everyone else's faucets. "The Ramen
Girl" creates a level of ineptitude that is hard to duplicate. Romances are only there to pad out the
plot. "I don't understand" is a
slogan for this film. I did not even
touch the level of promiscuity that this film displays despite the level of
sophistication that the rest of the film showcases, which makes it seemed aimed
toward 12 year olds. But it is most
likely aimed at idiots, which is something that cannot be fixed.
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| Did I mention that the shop MAGICALLY glows? Or was that just a grease fire? |
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
P.S. Tomorrow is "Starship Troopers," audiobook version.
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