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With ticket prices cresting the two-figure mark, it’s curious to witness the concurrent rise in movies that fixate on the preparation and consumption of gourmet cuisine. What’s the point of ogling the delectable craft-services spreads in Chocolat, Woman On Top, and What’s Cooking? when you can actually eat a perfectly good meal for a pittance more than a ticket? The makers of Tortilla Soup, an all-Hispanic remake of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, are hoping audiences will come for the fried bananas and squash flower soup, and stay for the warmed-over family melodrama. Like all of Lee’s work, Eat Drink is well wrought and superbly acted, but it’s also his most conventional effort to date, overstuffed with draggy subplots that take too much time to resolve. For the remake, these flaws have been transposed with slavish fidelity, though director María Rispoll (Twice Upon A Yesterday) and her screenwriters streamline the plot a little and come away with a better movie than it had any right to be. Hector Elizondo leads a solid cast as a widower and world-class chef who still lives with his three grown-up daughters in Los Angeles, but worries with good reason that he may soon be left with an empty nest. Though the story is flavorless and predictable, it’s also warm, diverting, and emotionally credible, which is more than can be said for the multicultural mush of What’s Cooking? or the lite magic realism of Woman On Top. The food looks great, too, for those fetishists seeking a little foreplay before dinner reservations. [Scott Tobias]
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