Closed Captioned; Bio/Filmographies; English Subtitles
In EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN, a Chinese widower and father of three beautiful daughters discovers that no matter how good his cooking is, it's not as tempting as sex in this comedy from Ang Lee, director of THE WEDDING BANQUET.
Every Sunday, venerable chef Chu (Sihung Lung) prepares an elaborate dinner for his three lovely daughters. Despite Chu's exotic dishes, the family barely nibbles at the food. The listless mealtime ritual mirrors the foursome's general lack of appetite for life: Chu has lost his sense of taste, and his daughters just want to go on with their separate, lonely lives. But something new is cooking that is about to spice up everyone's existence, and three marriages and a funeral later, the Chu family will learn to embrace life's unpredictabilty. The third and final film in director Ang Lee's Father Knows Best trilogy, EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN is laugh-out-loud funny in its depiction of the foibles of the contemporary Taiwanese family. Whenever one of the characters utters "I have an announcement," be prepared for ensuing hilarity. The film also movingly captures the complexities of modern life, the inevitability of change, and the necessity for Zen-like balance. Lee himself seems to have absorbed the film's central message. After this film, he began to take on a variety of projects, boldly covering vastly different subjects such as 18th-century England, the New Age 1970s, and the Civil War.
Theatrical release: August 3, 1994.
EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN grossed a little of $7 million at the domestic box office.
Director Ang Lee employed three full time chefs. Some of the dishes the cooked up include: jade prawn, dragon head playing in the sea, steamed deer spare ribs with ginger in a pumpkin pot, lotus flower soup, and chicken wrapped in clay. Pei Mei, a famous Chinese chef, served as a consultant. The first cooking scene in the film took a week to shoot.
The idea for the film is partially based on FOUR DAUGHTERS, a television melodrama in Taiwan in the 1950s.
The script was translated back and forth between Chinese and English, so that screenwriters Hui-ling Wang and James Schamus could work on it. To help him write the script, Schamus thought of the characters as Jewish.
Lee started cooking when he came to the U.S. in 1978 because he couldn't get used to the food here. Later, while going through script "development hell," he was a house husband in charge of the cooking. "When I didn't make money to put food on the table, I cooked. I cooked a lot, in fact, and I still do," he told the St. Louis Dispatch. "It's a way of expressing love--and very satisfying." Lee has cooked on the Food Channel and claims that chinese meatball with cabbage is one of his best dishes.
Eat Drink Man Woman Quotes/Excerpts:
"Now she has the perfect boyfriend: Jesus Christ."--Old Wen (Jui Wang) to Chu (Sihung Lung)
"Good sound is not in the ear, good taste is not in the mouth, and good sex...God knows where...."--Old Wen to Chu
"I think the only reason we're not divorced is that we're both too busy."--Li Kai (Winston Chao) to Jia-Chien (Chien-lien Wu)
"This worry is what makes us a family."--Chu to his daughters
"Eat, drink, man, woman. Food and sex. Basic human desires. Can't avoid them! All my life, everyday, all I do. It pisses me off."--Chu to Old Wen
Eat Drink Man Woman Reviews:
"...Ambitious and entertaining....A cinematic feast..."
-- Leonard Klady, Variety
"...Wise and rueful....Strikingly confident..."-- Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
"A title that covers all the bases befits an Oscar-nominated comedy full of incident..."
-- Mike Clark, USA Today
"...Delectable....[Lee is] a warmly engaging storyteller under any circumstances..."
-- Janet Maslin, New York Times
"...Bighearted....The personalities...combine to produce subtle new flavors..." -- Rating: A-
-- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
This is the only Yu-Wen Wang video. Stars also making their debut in this video: Chien-Lien Wu.
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