The Chef of South Polar (2009)

#movie #japanese

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1345728/

(Warning: Not much spoilers here I think but I don't guarantee that there are no spoilers.)

If I'm being facetious, I'd say that after my thoughts about the movie Chef (with Jon Favreau) that I mentioned in 1 Second Everyday - Indie Hackers Podcast, which I mentioned inspired me to want to watch Chef again, I accidentally watched this movie instead. Well, that's basically what happened, but it wasn't accidental.

I was searching up Chef and took a glance a bit too far down the line, and saw Chef of South Polar with its 7/10 IMDB rating, which maybe doesn't sound like so notably high of a rating, but given that I stumbled upon it in happenstance and mingling with other incredibly random movies that had the word "Chef" in them, it impressed me enough to at least give the synopsis a read. My attention was snared. A movie about researchers in Antarctica with a focus on the chef that is with them. All this to say, I watched about 30 seconds of Jon Favreau's Chef, decided I didn't need to watch it again, watched just the "1 Second Everyday" clip on YouTube, and then settled in for The Chef of South Polar.

And? It was a good movie. Great movie. I gave it 5/5 on Letterboxd. It was funny and relaxing and had beautiful cinematography, especially of the food^[1]. Just an overall very chill and feel-good movie. It often made me think of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars triology - the characters in that had to go through training in Antarctica to ensure they were psychologically fit to survive on Mars (due to the similar isolation and desertedness that Antarctica and Mars would share). Certainly the characters in the movie had a range of "well-adjustedness" to their conditions (meaning, sometimes not so well-adjusted).

There was also emotion to the movie. There were a couple moments where I felt a wave of emotion (chills), albeit brief. Specifically, the food scene after the protag loses his daughter's tooth and then the others make a meal for him and he cries. The new-ramen scene was also quite cool and a tad bit of emotion too.

There were a lot of hilarious moments - these kind of stand out more as the essence of the movie (but are balanced by the brief but touching emotional parts).

It's not a particularly fast-paced movie and there's not much plot, so it's mostly about enjoying the vibes and seeing how food brings these people together and laughing along with the silly situations they find themselves in.

Oh yeah and also, it being in Japanese, I appreciated it as a little motivator/challenge for my Japanese learning endeavors. It was nice to see myself catch some phrases and vocab words. I was particularly pleased when I was able to read "tanjoubi" (it was in hiragana in the movie. sorry, I don't have Japanese keyboard stuff setup on my laptop right now. I usually do that stuff on mobile.) on the cookies the chef was making and realize it was a birthday party seconds before they expanded on that visually. I'm mostly in a slump regarding Japanese learning recently (I completed 11/12 Genki Volume 1 sections and haven't gone back to it in months) and I'm not saying this movie is at all getting me out of it but it's a good reminder of the fun of language learning and the perks of learning more.