Cooking History (2009)
A documentary about army cooks and how the everyday needs of thousands of armed stomachs affect the victories and defeats of statesmen. The film is based on eleven meals based on recipes from the Second World War till the war in Chechnya; from France through the Balkans to Russia.
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As Good As It Gets
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
I have to admit that I started watching this documentary with low expectations, particularly because of its insufficient and irrelevant one-liner in IMDb. Actually, although this documentary tells about 'military cooking', it manages to put it into a historical. at the same time very human context.The documentary starts with details on cooks and cooking in the German and Russian armies during the Second World War. It visit Hungarian military cooks who happened to witness Soviet occupation in 1956, then continues with two French military cooks with different viewpoints on the Algerian occupation, then it visits Czechoslovakia in 1968, again, during the Soviet Occupation. The next stop is Yugoslavia, but then, we have an interesting guest, the cook of Josip Bros Tito. Afterwards, we witness the disintegration of the same country through two different eyes / cooks. There is an epilogue as well, of which I wouldn't give any details.To be honest, such a topic can be handled in a wide scope ranging from extremely boring to extremely loose. I think Peter Kerekes was concerned enough about that, so that he always yearns for a discourse. The other that he is good at is, although the historical venues I mentioned above are mostly eclectic, he tried to catch a common pattern by asking 'thick' questions about the similarities in military orders and recipes, about war, about occupation and collaborators, about killing. Nevertheless, humour is always there.One last note: in the movie you'll watch animals getting killed in various ways, for their meat. These are deeply disturbing scenes, but I think, as a vegetarian, any meat eater should be disturbed.