Editor’s Note

A movie to suit all tastes

They say smell is the most powerful sense in evoking memory.

A whiff of apple pie whisks you back to your mother’s kitchen. A sniff of mosquito repellent transports you to a campsite you haven’t seen in decades.

I’d argue that taste is a close second, and that it works both ways. Think about a certain food and you can practically taste it. I’ve been a vegetarian for seven years and can still lay in bed at night (and in the interest of full disclosure, often do) and recall spice-for-spice how a piece of KFC tastes, its salty intricacies entirely different than the tangy sauce on the quarter-chicken over at Swiss Chalet.

Which may be why the vast majority of movies about food turn out to be so good — Chocolat, Babette’s Feast, Eat Drink Man Woman, Big Night, Ratatouille. Without the aid of actual smell or taste, the filmmakers manage to access those sense memories, even activating your salivary glands. The eyes kick in and send messages to your stomach, the sound of something sizzling in a fry pan doesn’t hurt, and then the ultimate shot — a character tastes the food.

While a lot of people are categorizing Julie & Julia as a chick flick, I propose it’s part of that much narrower — and far more interesting — genre, the food flick. The movie stars Meryl Streep as cooking-show pioneer Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie Powell, a woman who dedicated a full year of her life to replicating every recipe in Child’s cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

In “All the Right Ingredients,” Adams and Streep discuss their improbably entwined characters, filming on either side of the Atlantic and how butter makes everything taste good. And, if you do see the movie, make sure you have reservations for a good restaurant booked beforehand.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is another film that relies largely on accessing memories — those belonging to a generation of (largely) men who spent their childhoods in basements playing with camo-clad dolls. In “Being All That He Can Be,” Dennis Quaid discusses the big-bang flick.

Diane Kruger returned to her native Germany to play a Nazi killer in Quentin Tarantino’s bloody and brutal Inglourious Basterds. Read “Beauty and the Beasts” for her take on the revisionist pic she calls a “fairy tale” and a “farce.”

If you think the violence in Tarantino’s film is over-the-top, you might want to skip Rob Zombie’s H2, the heavy-metal-singer-turned-horror-auteur’s follow-up to his Halloween remake. In “Prince of Darkness,” Zombie warns there’s no humour in his film — it’s grim and it’s dirty.

Vanessa Hudgens makes the slow move away from High School Musical with a movie about…some high schoolers…making music. But it is quite a different film. We swear. In “Can’t Stop the Music,” Hudgens recalls shooting Bandslam.

Then there's “Field of Dreams,” our interview with Ang Lee, Emile Hirsch and Demetri Martin about Taking Woodstock, their surprising perspective on the most famous music festival of all time. The surprise? The main character doesn’t even see the show.

—Marni Weisz, editor