AAAFF co-presents TAMPOPO at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar

Sat, Feb 25 at noon & Mon, Feb 27 at 7pm.

Built around a riff on SHANE, Juzo Itami’s TAMPOPO  lives up to the moniker ‘Noodle Western’, but it’s so much more. By turns (and sometimes simultaneously) comic and tragic, it’s about the relationship between food and human existence. Widower Tampopo (Nobuko Minamoto, Itami’s wife and regular leading lady) enlists the help of truck driver Goro (Tsutomo Yamasaki) in helping her turn around her failing noodle shop. Along the way Itami veers off along wild tangents, like an etiquette class scandalized by an American, a vicious toothache and an ice cream cone, and a white-suited gangster gourmand. TAMPOPO is an unabashed crowd-pleaser, stacked with B-plots and layered with Itami’s trademark satire of contemporary Japanese life. Newly restored, after decades of being unavailable theatrically. (Anand Modi)