Kirpianuscus romanticism. and cooking. and the Latino America air like embroidery of flavors, magic, beautiful images, noble feelings and profound dramas. a refuge in the inn of a fantastic world at the borders between fairy tale and reality, remembering Garcia Marquez and the seduction force of cinema. a love story and a family story. and the taste of dishes and the solitude of a young woman front to her duty and the answers to the strong, silent questions. a film like a travel. in a mythical time more than in a literary space. because all is so simple. and full of admirable definition of life, love and references to a version of Cinderella.

SnoopyStyle Tita (Lumi Cavazos) was born in the kitchen in 1895 Rio Grande, Mexico. After the death of her father, her mother vows to force her youngest Tita to care for her entire life. Tita grows up in the kitchen with servant Nacha. She falls in love with Pedro Muzquiz but her mother refuses to permit her to marry. Her mother offers older sister Rosaura and Pedro accepts hoping to stay close to Tita. Tita's tears infuse the wedding cake with her sadness.This has a great magically realism. It's a fable of food, family, and passion. The story is fun and fanciful. Lumi Cavazos is a sweet endearing lead. The only drawback is the limited chemistry in the epic romance. It's probably asking too much. They don't have much time together before they have to be Romeo and Juliet. Then they have to be apart. It's submerged passion and Pedro doesn't always come across well.

jaredmgoldberg After having read the book from which this is adapted, this movie deserves not the praise it received. First and foremost, the movie completely misconstrues the message of the book. The book stresses the importance of FOOD, and how the food is Tita's method of both coping with her realities and her method of communicating the feelings that are being suppressed by Mama Elena. In the movie, the beauty of the food is drowned by a disgusting, almost stereotypical soap-opera-like drama. The acting is cheesy, at best, and the feelings between Tita and Pedro are poorly conveyed as love. Rather, they are portrayed by a simple, unforgiving lust. Also, the last scene was TERRIBLE. The last scene is supposed to contain a grand crescendo of feelings that ultimately lead to Pedro's, and the Tita's, deaths. However, it simply appears that Pedro has an orgasm and then faints. There is absolutely no way, without having prior knowledge of the story, to correlate between this scene and the matches theory. Also, the way in which Tita days poorly illustrates the match theory. It seems like she just eats the matches and then dies. By this, however, the intense emotion required to kindle the inner matches is just not there. By its lonesome, this movie receives a 3 (soap opera quality crap).

nicsolomon I did not think that this was a particularly bad movie because it was able to capture some scenes that i thought would be difficult to do in a movie. The acting in this movie was not great, I found John's character to be creepy and depressing instead of the loving upbeat character I read about. I also thought that the film work was below par and if this movie were in English and released in American movie theaters it would have much more negative criticism. This movie also rushes through many important scenes and does not allow the plot to develop. If someone were to watch this movie without reading the book they would leave the movie extremely confused. Some of the positives in this movie are how they display magical realism in very interesting ways. For example in the beginning of the movie when there is rushing water to represent tears and then they harvest the salt from the tears seemed like it was represented the magical realism very well. Also the actresses who played the sisters did a good job of creating interesting sister- sister relationships. For example how Gertrudis and Tita had a very caring relationship where as the relationship between Rosura and Tita always seemed to be very competitive.