There have been iconic movie scenes made out
of just about any household activity.
Helen Parr made vacuuming exciting and cinematic
with her stretchy arms and the fact that her
husband could lift the whole couch for her
to vacuum under without looking up from his
newspaper.
A number of filmmakers have made beautiful
and memorable sequences out of cooking.
There have been movie scenes where prisoners
show us that they’ve spent their stint in
jail learning how to cook, and scenes of grown
men being terrified of the lobsters crawling
around the kitchen.
These are the top 10 movie cooking scenes
in cinema history.
Matilda
This adaptation of Roald Dahl’s literary
classic is one of the most enjoyable and timeless
kids’ movies ever made.
It is entertaining for audiences of all ages,
thanks to great performances from a cast that
includes Danny DeVito, who also directed it,
and Rhea Pearlman, and of course, leading
lady Mara Wilson.
There are many memorable food scenes in the
movie, including the pancake scene and the
chocolate cake scene.
The latter is both funny and excruciating,
as Bruce Bogtrotter is forced to eat an inordinate
amount of cake as punishment – and if that
doesn’t sound like much of a punishment,
then you haven’t seen how much cake he has
to eat.
But one of the food preparation scenes stands
out above all the rest, because of its contributions
to the plot.
The scene in which Matilda makes herself some
Cheerios is great because it’s not just
a fun moment – it’s also an important
part of the story.
This is the scene where she discovers her
telekinetic powers.
And she doesn’t use those powers to fight
crime or exact revenge on her enemies (although
she does get to that a little later) – as
a lot of foodies might do, she uses those
powers to make herself a bowl of cereal.
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Raging Bull
When Martin Scorsese makes a biopic of somebody,
he does not sensationalize them or make a
celebration of them that washes over all of
their flaws and all the bad times in favor
of a glitzy tribute.
Instead, what Scorsese does is find out what
his subject’s biggest flaws are – like
Henry Hill’s infidelities and drug addiction
or Jordan Belfort’s greed and corruption,
for example – and he capitalizes on them
to deliver a poignant and honest character
study of a true-life figure.
The director has given us some of his greatest
masterpieces that way.
He also uses everyday situations to bring
out the worst in his characters.
In this scene of his acclaimed black and white
biopic of boxer Jake LaMotta, the guy having
a steak cooked for him by his wife devolves
into a vicious act of domestic violence.
Scorsese shows us just how terrible this guy
is from how violent he becomes as a result
of an argument about how long a steak should
remain in the pan.
And that’s just the beginning.
This is where is all starts.
It gets a whole lot worse from there.
This steak scene is the beginning of his downfall.
This is the End
As satisfying as it is to watch Danny McBride
get a dozen pans on the go, cooking all kinds
of bacon and eggs and pancakes and steak,
it’s also horrifying.
You can’t help crying out, “NOOO!!!”
The problem is that while McBride’s intentions
are lovely and he just wants to make breakfast
for all his friends, he’s actually screwing
them all over.
What he doesn’t realize, because he spent
the night too drunk and drugged up at a party
he wasn’t invited to, is that the world
has ended.
The apocalypse has begun and all the other
guys, who are still asleep, rationed out all
their food before they went to bed to make
sure it would last them for months.
And now, McBride is cooking it all so it won’t
last them for a single day.
McBride’s introduction is one of the funniest
scenes in the movie as he thinks the guys
are all still drunk and high when they try
to tell him that the world has ended.
He has a bite of bacon and they try to force
him to spit it out, so he spitefully sprays
bacon bits all over the breakfast table.
Moments later, they’re playing soccer with
a man’s decapitated head.
It’s a hilariously dark movie.
Hannibal
Sir Anthony Hopkins managed to take home the
Academy Award for Best Actor in Silence of
the Lambs for his first performance as the
infamous serial killer Hannibal “the Cannibal”
Lecter, the psychotic psychiatrist turned
bloodthirsty killer, with just under twenty
minutes of combined screen time.
The movie was a huge hit, both with critics
and with audiences, and so the studio would
have been crazy not to bring him back to the
role in various sequels and prequels.
This one casts Julianne Moore as the cop chasing
him and one particularly disturbing scene
revolves around cooking.
Dr. Lecter is a truly talented cook with a
real eye for cuisine.
He knows all of the greatest cooking techniques
and how to do them properly.
He knows the perfect wine to pair all of his
foods with.
In this scene, he cuts off the top of a man’s
head while he is still alive and conscious,
and then he cooks up slices of his brain on
a hotplate.
It’s really horrifying to watch, but there
is something hauntingly beautiful about it.
It’s a far cry from eating a census worker’s
liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti,
but nothing gets between Hannibal Lecter and
his delectable human flesh.
Back to the Future Part II
This movie’s view of the society of the
future is not exactly how that future panned
out.
In the 2015 of this movie’s timeline, there
are flying cars stopping at red lights in
the middle of the sky and interchangeable
views outside of windows.
Some of the technologies in the fictional
2015 were available in the real 2015, like
video conferencing and the ability to watch
a few TV channels at once.
There is one thing in the fictional 2015 that
hadn’t quite been perfected by our 2015.
It may be a long time off, but people enjoy
fast food enough for the technology to be
on its way.
In the dinner scene, Lorraine takes a little
pocket pizza, puts it into an oven, and about
thirty seconds later, a huge, juicy, beautiful,
hot, steaming pizza pops out.
We are a long way away from having this kind
of technology in our homes.
It’s not just the special little pizza that
becomes ten times its original size in seconds
– it’s the oven that does it.
It has to be able to enlarge things and cook
them and do it all in a matter of moments.
For now, we have the scene in the movie.
Bridesmaids
This 2011 instant classic directed by Paul
Feig and starring Kristen Wiig can be attributed
with not only making Wiig a viable movie star,
which we are all thankful for, but also with
bringing on the current wave of female-led
comedies.
While comedy movies starring men had been
tanking at the box office, this powerhouse
came along charged to a worldwide gross of
almost $300 million.
The comedy community hasn’t looked back
– Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Ellie Kemper,
Wendi McLendon Covey, and countless other
stars broke out from this movie.
In the glorious cooking sequence in this movie,
Annie only makes one cupcake.
She used to run a bakery with big, fat, industrial
ovens, making those cupcakes for dozens of
customers at a time, but now, she’s completely
on her own.
She gets out a big bag of flour and a big
bag of sugar and a big mixing bowl and a big
baking tray and then it is revealed that she
has only actually made one solitary cupcake.
And then she just tucks right into it.
So, it’s symbolic of how alone she is, which
is sad, but ultimately leads to her happy
ending, so it’s also wonderful.
Ratatouille
When the first trailer for this Pixar animated
movie was released, a lot of people scoffed
at the idea of a rat controlling a chef with
his hair.
The human body doesn’t work like that.
You can’t make the chopping of onions finer
or the sautéing of garlic smoother just by
pulling someone’s hair.
But these are the same people who scoffed
at the first trailer for a movie about a guy
who uproots his house from its foundations
with hundreds of balloons and uses them to
fly his house to a tropical paradise.
The defense in both is the same: it’s not
about logic.
It’s not about whether a rat can tug on
someone’s hair and make them automatically
cook delicious food and it’s not about whether
that many balloons could lift a house of that
size off the ground.
It’s about finding your place in an environment
that you dream to be a part of but that wants
to reject you and it’s about escaping from
the stranglehold of modern life and fulfilling
your dead wife’s childhood wishes, respectively.
That’s what makes the scene of Remy cooking
so spectacular.
He’s finally working in a top class kitchen
and doing what he loves.
Superbad
Jonah Hill and Emma Stone were reunited recently
for the first time in over ten years as they
starred alongside one another in a weirdly
dark comedy series on Netflix called Maniac,
but it was this movie, written by Seth Rogen
and Evan Goldberg when they were just thirteen
years old, that gave them both their start
in the movie business.
Their characters’ initial “meet cute”
moment in this hit R rated teen comedy takes
place during a home economics class.
For all of its crass jokes and explicit language,
paired with the lead characters’ obsession
with losing their virginity, this movie might
get shrugged off by the passing viewer as
a sex comedy.
But it’s actually a lot sweeter than that.
Hill’s character has a lot of genuine affection
for Stone’s character.
She starts off as the object of his desire,
but their relationship becomes a lot deeper
than that over the course of the movie.
The home-ec scene where they cook a tiramisu
together has everything that makes this movie
great: it has vulgar humor, moments of sweetness,
moments of awkwardness, Jonah Hill being Jonah
Hill, Emma Stone being Emma Stone, Michael
Cera being Michael Cera, and of course, McLovin.
Annie Hall
Woody Allen’s romantic comedy masterpiece
was showered with awards and critical acclaim
back in 1977.
It beat George Lucas’ space opera set in
a galaxy far, far away to the Academy Award
for Best Picture and Diane Keaton’s title
character became a style icon for indie women
in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
Her bohemian influence on fashion can still
be seen today.
One of the movie’s funniest and most iconic
moments is when Alvy and Annie are trying
to cook lobsters together.
They chase them around the kitchen and Alvy
is terrified of them and it is very funny,
very sweet, and very romantic.
As we see later as Alvy attempts to recreate
the moment with a different girl, it is also
the moment that best exemplifies how much
these two are meant to be together and how
special their relationship is.
He and Annie joke around with the lobsters
and make a fun adventure out of it.
They say fun things like.
But the other girl that Alvy cooks lobsters
with just isn’t as into it.
She just says, “Are you joking or what?”
It’s one of the most iconic cooking moments
from any movie.
Goodfellas
Martin Scorsese just has a way of making anything
look glamorous with the iconic crooners on
his soundtrack and his cinematic shooting
style and his erratic editing.
In this movie, which is possibly his finest
work and is definitely his most entertaining,
Scorsese makes prison life look glamorous.
A lot of his mafioso characters are taken
down by the feds and thrown into the slammer.
While they’re in there, Ray Liotta’s Henry
Hill gets his wife to sneak in vegetables
and other ingredients when she comes to visit
him and he and the rest of his mobster friends
learn how to cook in prison.
There’s that beautiful shot of the garlic
being sliced really thin with a razor blade.
Any foodie watching that shot will just melt
in their seat.
And that’s just one scene in a nearly two
and a half hour roller coaster ride that takes
audiences through the rise and fall of an
infamous gangster, ending with his tragic
downfall and the crashing down of his various
clashing moral conflicts.
It is without a doubt one of the greatest
movies of all time, so it’s only fitting
that it should feature the most incredible
food scene from any movie ever.
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