Food style and film style often go hand in hand — because we all love a good bit of food porn. You know what we mean, those slow motion shots of melted yellow cheese cascading towards macaroni or broccoli or the fat of a smoked brisket glistening in the hot Texas sun. But there’s a standard for good food porn and it often looks the same. Until now!
Director David Ma asked, ‘what if Michael Bay or Quentin Tarantino directed our food porn?’ This is a question for the ages and the answer is pretty f*cking phenomenal. Ma — and a very long list of collaborators — chose four iconic directors to mimic. He didn’t just rely on quick edits and easy tropes. Ma went all the way. The music is right. The titles are exact. The cuts, explosions, gratuity, and even the twee-ness are all on point. We all are benefitting from this tremendous effort.
Ma dropped four videos in the same day, to coincide with a brand new YouTube channel. So we’ve gone ahead and listed them here for you pleasure.
Michael Bay
The first video is a Michael Bay explosion-filled take of making waffles. A Bay-plosion of waffles if you will. There are lens flares a plenty. The score pumps and thumps along as eggs, milk, and flour are turned to batter. Slow motion is intercut with sped up film to create chaos. Then everything explodes into a rattled hum.
It’s the atmosphere and precision of the parody of Bay’s style that really kinda makes this hilarious. You can’t help but laugh when small bowls of flour explode in slow motion for no reason other than that it looks cool.
Alfonso Cuarón
Famed film director Alfonso Cuarón probably has the most difficult-to-pin down style of filmmaking compared to the others on Ma’s list. He’s made films as disparate as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Children of Men, and Gravity. It’s the latter that Ma chose to parody using a stack of flapjacks.
Ma’s take on pancakes as seen through Cuarón’s Gravity (and a fair dash of Kubrick’s 2001) is a hypnotic dance with butter, eggs, and syrup. There’s no center of gravity anywhere in the recipe video, as ingredients float freely through the blackness of space while haunting piano music tinkles in the background. And then comes the syrup like a horizontal web of sucrose. It’s mesmerizing.
Quentin Tarantino
Tarantino is all style. Hell, it might say that on his gravestone. ‘Here lies QT. He was all style.’ And what better dish than some high contrast spaghetti and meatballs to highlight that signature Tarantino look?
The music hits the old-school B-movie nail on the head. The stark contrast colors, blood-soaked gratuity, title card chapters, and jump cuts are all here. The only thing missing is a close up of someone’s feet. Otherwise, it’s fast, dirty, and looks delicious.
Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson seems like the easiest to parody until you think about the art direction, set design, props, costumes … and, wow, there’s a lot that goes into a Wes Anderson movie parody. All that twee-ness has some serious depth to it. So it’s kinda appropriate that Ma chose the very twee campfire treat of s’mores.
This montage of s’mores truly feels like it could have been in Moonrise Kingdom or Grand Budapest Hotel at some point. Ma harnesses actors in full costume for the first time, as the video goes through the do’s and don’ts of making the perfect precocious s’more. Seriously, though, would any of us question seeing this bombastic food video intercut into an actual Wes Anderson film?
