The Ramen Girl (Robert Allan Ackerman, 2008)

With: Brittany Murphy, Toshiyuki Nishida, Sohee Park, Tammy Blanchard

Plot: Abby (Murphy) is at a loss in Tokyo after being dumped by the boyfriend she moved there for. She takes refuge in a local Ramen shop and trains under a tempestuous master (Nishida) to become a skilled ramen chef.

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Starts off agreeable enough, with Murphy a fairly appealing presence as the emotional but plucky fish out of water, and for a good forty minutes it's a pleasant, if derivative extended training montage. there seems to be no real goals set for the character other than becoming good at cooking ramen, so other elements such as a chef's contest and a parental bond forming between teacher and student are half-heartedly thrown into the last act. This gives the film's second half a curiously unsatisfying feel, but despite this the main problems are fuzzy logic and character motivations (this certainly isn't the real world) and the awful western friends who are obviously copied from the wacky, lovable brit-com friend template but are written and acted with such shrieking campness that the film literally drops dead whnever they're on screen. The slightly unusual mix of elements (girly self-actualisation film with karate kid structure) is unusual enough to keep things mildly engaging, but as one listless scene fades into the next (the romantic sub-plot is the definition of an afterthought, and the much-vaunted ramen cooking barely features) it's hard to sustain interest.

38