Soul Kitchen (2009)

This film started so well that it was beginning to look like a hidden gem, a classic in the making. I give this film 5 stars out of 10, but I have to say that the 5 stars are for the first 30 minutes, which were so well done. The remaining 60 minutes deserve a zero.

The comedy is not funny. Slapstick and cheap laughs. Everything is so predictable that we were trying to take bets on the story in the middle of the film, but no one wanted to take any bets. We were all on the same page and guess what? Every single thing we predicted happened. Predicting one thing or another is fine, but not everything.

The movie just drags and drags without direction. You're not sure if it's a story of two Greek brothers, a story of a couple, a story of another couple or a story of a restaurant and a rag-tag team of staff that turn a failure around.

Everything is so contrived you wouldn't believe it. Sometimes in life you can make decisions or take actions that COULD lead to something bad happening. There is that risk in life. But in this film characters take "chances" that almost guarantee an unwanted event. As in, the director wants this event to happen so he has to find a sure-fire way to make it happen. So the characters take actions to ensure this event, even though it is not in their personality to do so.

The expression Americans now use is "because script." People do things that don't make any logical sense in their world, but it makes sense "because script" says so. There was also one bit of incredibly amateur screen writing - a character in another country knew a piece of information that (s)he could not have known in real life (unless they had access to the script somehow!).

The music scenes are too long, some reviewers say "the female characters are flat and without depth" - well you gotta take a closer look at the male characters, friends, because they're cardboard caricatures just the same.

The cinematography and camera work were really good. Locations too. But you can't get too many points for that.

It's a wanna-be feel-good movie that fails terribly at making you feel good or at entertaining you in most ways.

Hopefully someone takes the idea from the first 30 minutes and does something else with it.

Fmovies: This frothy, light, slightly shapeless but endearing comedy is further proof of the protean nature of Akin's amazing talents.

While nowhere near as good a film as his great, dark comedy-drama 'Head On' or his complex. philosophical 'The Edge of Heaven', I appreciate that Akin seems more interested in exploring different genres and stories than creating a signature style.

This is the kind of comedy that makes you smile more than laugh, and is stronger on character and acting than on comic set pieces, but even the jokes that don't work aren't annoying.

A shaggy, likable young Greek man living in Germany tries to start his own restaurant, juggling his ex-con brother, his out-of town girlfriend, his slightly insane chef, and a rival who wants to take over his space. It's not an 'important' film, but it captures something wonderful about being young and trying to find your place in the world.

The reason I picked this up was that I had read/heard somewhere that this had inspired the movie 'Ustad Hotel' in 'malayalam' which I had enjoyed.

Having seen excellent movies like The Trap/Troubled Water/L' Infante recently, I was not extremely impressed by this one but at the same time the movie is young and lovable.

There are some original humor sequences.You may like the movie a whole lot or the movie may not touch you at all - depending on your frame of mind while you watch this.

I liked the main protagonist of the movie. The back ache that he carries through out movie somehow aches your back as well while you watch the movie!. He goes easy on various people - letting his employees practice music in his dying restaurant , letting his tenant stay off rent , letting his brother run the business etc.That is how the main protagonist has been built.

The movie is filled with short easy sequences - a nice watch.

Soul Kitchen fmovies. You could be excused, if by hearing the title, you'd thought this is yet another "urban" comedy, starring Martin Lawrence or Ice Cube or Queen Latifah. It ain't so. While the title might be misleading (in quite a few ways), the characters in this aren't. You have finely structured people (with a cliché here and there), who seem to have their everyday problems and find a way to live with them.

Our main character has quite a few struggles to go through this movie, some of them come "back" at him (no pun intended). And while quite a few things are more than cliché (the brother and what he does towards the end, is borderline believable, even with the setup through the movie), it has quite a few nice touches to it. All in all, a warm comedy, that goes more for the heart than the brain. A nice change of pace by Faith Akin and a movie, whose flaws shouldn't hinder you enjoying it.

With films like Against the Wall, Crossing the Bridge and The Edge of Heaven, Faith Akin has set a high aesthetic bar at which his newest work inevitably stumbles. Which is not to say that the film is a failure by any means, simply that it must be judged as a minor work in this impressive directors oeuvre.

Set in Hamburg's seedy demi-monde, the film relates the fortunes of the Soul Kitchen restaurant and its unhappy-go-lucky proprietor, with a protein-rich narrative arc from wretched normality through multiple adversities to a slightly more hopeful normality. And while the restaurant moves up-scale gastronomically the story remains comfort food throughout, providing plenty of opportunities for comic set pieces and tragi-comic misunderstandings.

What we end up with is a patchwork of scenes, connected by a narrative strand that connects property speculation, prostitution, drugs and music. None of it quite makes sense, but this is a film ruled by the heart and not the head. What it lacks in precision it makes up for in warmth.

In general the performances are impressive, and the unavoidable Moritz Bleibtreu (who seems to be compulsory casting in any German film worth its salt) is particularly engaging as the protagonist's jailbird brother, constantly swinging his prayer beads as hustles.

The film's lightness of touch is perhaps its saving grace: the music complements the story without dominating; food and cookery play a subordinate, if enjoyable role, but never do we get too bogged down in the niceties of nouvelle cuisine. And this must be the first major film in which Skype plays such a major role. Product placement perhaps but very realistically done.

Another enjoyable aspect is the way in which the interplay of cultures - Greek, Turkish, German, whatever - is handled in a no-nonsense workmanlike way. Perhaps it takes a German of Turkish extraction to do this. My feeling is that other German directors would be more sheepish in their handling of these issues.

In conclusion I'd say that the film is good, not great, and shows that Faith Akin can also make a gentle, feel-good comedy without compromising his higher aesthetic achievements.

Faith Akin, the director, presents a beautiful Hamburg, creates again diverse and strong characters, in a film that returns him to the genre of comedy, and all of these surrounded with an amazing soundtrack. I enjoyed very much this film, the scenography and music is lovely, I could laugh a lot, which is not very common in the recent Akin films such as Gegen die Wand or The Edge of Heaven, which were exquisite, but in a more dramatic and touching way. This film is somehow a return to the soul of much more than a kitchen. Is a sight into the soul of music, food, purpose in life and people indeed. I highly recommend this film, especially for those who, like me, had a great time seeing Im Juli, some years ago.