Malty Motion Pictures: Angels' Share

Ken Loach's Scotch Whisky focused film Angels' Share created a stir in the Scotch community when it opened in 2012, but it only spent a nanosecond in US theaters.  Recently, it started streaming on Netflix, and I highly recommend it to any whisky fan.

Angels' Share tells the story of some troubled Scottish youths who get introduced to whisky through a kindly mentor and then plan a heist of a rare cask of Malt Mill - think Trainspotting meets Sideways.  If you're a Ken Loach fan, you'll recognize the portrayal of the working class hero and the share the wealth mentality, but he also nails the whisky subculture.

Longtime whisky writer Charles MacLean plays a whisky expert in the movie and also served as a consultant, which likely explains the films dead on portrayals of distillery tours, novice tastings and a high end auction.  Most lovingly and accurately portrayed is the way the characters develop their knowledge and palates. There's something wonderful about watching a kid who grimaces at his first taste of Springbank develop an appreciation, and quite a nose, for whisky.

The only real flaw is that it perpetuates the myth that a real whiskey expert will know the exact whiskey you're getting from a single sniff or sip, but that's pretty standard in movies (a collector takes a quick nose of the Malt Mill out of an unmarked bottle and immediately realizes what it is).

Angels' Share is a delightful film, and even though I missed it in the theater, I'm guessing it's better to watch at home, since the best way to see it is clearly with glass in hand.

Foodie Film Review: Salt

It was with great excitement that I learned Hollywood had signed on to make a silver screen version of Mark Kulansky's moving history of the world's most common seasoning: Salt, and with Angelina Jolie in the starring role no less.

Kurlansky is one of the nation's foremost food historians, and Salt was his masterpiece. The work traces the history of salt from ancient times to the present and touches on not only its culinary importance but also its central role in economics, commerce, politics and culture.

I was interested to see how Hollywood would interpret a masterwork of such breadth, and I have to say, while the film is creative, it may leave those of us who are familiar with the original work a bit disappointed as it is not exactly faithful to the book. Since salt was the lead character of Kurlansky's work, it is only fitting that mega-starlet Jolie should play the role in the film. (She is certainly saltier than Tom Cruise!). The metaphor gets stretched at times, but the point director Phillip Noyce and writers Kurt Wimmer and Brian Helgeland seem to be making is that salt was not only crucial to commerce and culture, as so thoroughly documented by Kurlansky, but also played an important role in international intrigue.

I have to admit that beyond that, this interpretation of Kurlansky is a bit confounding. While I would expect Hollywood to take some license with any original work, I was surprised at the complete lack of concentration on the culinary aspects of salt. Certainly, the widely loved mineral has a political influence, but it's mostly a food, and I'm not sure where all those fighting scenes came from. I guess as a fan of the book, I was a bit disappointed, but one positive is that even people who haven't read Kurlansky's work will be able to enjoy the film.

This film just hollers for a sequel, which I assume will be based on Kurlansky's other masterwork, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. I just hope the writers can make that film a bit more faithful to the original.

Rent it Now: Take Out - The Anti-Foodie Flick

In this age of Julie and Julia, magical foodie realism and animated rat chefs, it can be refreshing to see a movie that treats food as, well, just food. Take Out, the story of a Chinese immigrant restaurant deliveryman, may be centered on food, but it doesn't have any decadent, food porn shots. In fact, this film is the opposite of food porn. The food often looks unappetizing. Great blocks of frozen shrimp are chipped away at, everything from chicken wings to tostones are thrown in the single deep fat frier, and the same wok used for cooking is used to rinse the mop after the walls are washed down. The restaurant work is gritty and real, but not in that sexy Kitchen Confidential sort of way. Food is but a means to an end, a way for Ming, the undocumented delivery worker, to make enough money to pay back his loan shark for the money it took to smuggle him into the country, or at least to pay enough of it to avoid serious bodily harm. Yet by dropping the artistic device of food as metaphor, Take Out may be a more realistic portrayal of restaurant work than I've seen in any film. There's drudgery, monotony and exhaustion, but also some amount of camaraderie that comes from people working together, just trying to get by, and in the end, there is a glimmer of hope that even under these conditions, people can and do get by and make lives for themselves.

Take Out was a 2004 independent film that met success on the festival circuit (it debuted at Slamdance) but had only a limited release in theaters. It was written, directed and produced by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou. Charles Jang gives an impressively understated performance as bicycle deliveryman Ming Ding. Another wonderful role is that of Big Sister, the no nonsense restaurant owner and counter woman played by Wang-Thye Lee. Remarkably, Lee is not a professional actor. She was cast while working at a take-out Chinese restaurant not unlike the one portrayed in the film (which was shot in an actual restaurant), and the writers met her when they were scouting locations for the film.

Take Out is available on Netflix. Check it out and take a break from the food porn.