While Asia has a glut of food movies (TAMPOPO! THE CHINESE FEAST! LE GRAND CHEF! BULGOGI! GOD OF COOKERY!) America doesn't have any that I'm aware of. Not movies set in a restaurant (WAITRESS, DINER) or movies that hinge on making money through cooking as a plot point (MILDRED PIERCE, the original IMITATION OF LIFE) but movies that celebrate food and eating (RATATOUILLE is set in France, not America). Could this be because so many restaurants in America stink? Do Americans not eat food? Is food scary if you live in America? Not sure. But the kind of delirious foodie fantasia that pops up on Asian screens with almost clockwork regularity seems destined to be a genre that doesn't cross over to the US of A.

Which means it's almost certain that a movie like the upcoming TEA FIGHT from Taiwan will not get picked up for US release. Starring Taiwan's Vic Zhou and Eric Tsang as well as DEATH NOTE's Erika Toda (who played the sexy, evil Misa) it's a love story between two kids from rival tea houses, directed by theater director Wang Ye-ming. And it's possessed of the kind of daunting plot synopsis that tells you everything while leaving you even more confused than when you started:

"In Sung dynasty, a Japanese man named Yagi... couldn't take the badgering from the male black tea tribe and ridiculed that the male black tea was not the best tea in the world; causing the two tribes to challenge each other in a "tea fight." The male black tea tribe massacred the female black tea tribe and burned down the tea farm. A child escaped from the fire and turned into a fire dragon and flew away after drinking a mixture of both male and female black tea. It wasn't until then that the male black tea tribe realized that they had made a big mistake, thus begins the long journey in search of the female black tea."

With so many people raving about Virginia BBQ and Southern cooking, and so many people in America actually clinically obese, you'd think that a food movie set in the US would clean up, but that doesn't seem to be the case. So until the culture changes, we'll have to go to Asia when we want to learn about the long journey in search of the female black tea.

(Official Tea Fight site)

(A clip from the giddy food porn of THE CHINESE FEAST - truly the best food movie ever made) 

(Thanks to logboy for the news)