Feta Up
17. Aug, 2010 
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Soul Kitchen
You Can’t Make An Omelette Without Breaking
A Few Eggs & Including a Few Clichés
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
We’ve only seen one Fatih Akin film before (2007’s The Edge of Heaven), but even from juss that one experience it’s purty easy to tell that the dude’s good with depicting clashing cultures in a dramatic melting pot/plot. Par for his usual course are Turkish strangers in a strange Germany land, as is his background, so it’s slightly par for the course with his latest, Soul Kitchen, cept it’s Greeks in Germany, and the high drama is muted, while the ‘comedy’ is turned to 11, sorta. Quite the shift in tones, but maybe this lightweight trifle into a slapdash kitchen is juss what home cookin Akin needed. Is a Germanic tinged Waiting… what we needed? Maybe?
This material is obviously well below his skills, and yet it’s hard to resist the contrived contrivances contrived in the soulful Soul Kitchen. We got a Greekie (Adam Bousdoukos, co-writer of the script as well) whose lady friend (Pheline Roggan) juss took off for the Orient, and left him to mind his floundering restaurant, troublemaker brother (Run Lola Run’s Moritz Bleibtreu) and resident crabby hermit (Demir Gökgöl). Don’t ask about the hermit, juss enjoy him and his beard. And when the Greekster hires a wild chef (Birol Ãœnel), the steaks get higher and the steaks get tastier and things start to look up, before they go down, sideways and 9 other ways from Tuesday, all while a former classmate of his (Wotan Wilke Möhring) tries to buy the restaurant and land under his feet. Plus any movie where Udo Kier appears as a stuck up jerk has got to be sorta worth seeing, right? Maybe?
Face Time: although Wotan Wilke Möhring is a solidly awesomes name, it can’t touch Hendrik von Bültzingslöwen‘s and his face
expect both to walk away as Fenella Woolgar Bestest Names Award winners by the year’s end
Verdictgo: low end Jeepers Worth A Peepers
Kitchen cooks up some familiar good smells this Friday in NY and On Demand on August 25th
and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…
