Tampopo is a 1985 Japanese comedy film written and directed by Juzo Itam. "Tampopo" doesn't limit itself to satirizing one genre of Hollywood film, either. With him is his young co-driver, Gun (Ken Watanabe). The movie is constructed as a series of episodes along the route to the perfect noodle restaurant. Some of the scenes hardly even seem to apply, but are hilarious anyway - the treatment, for example, of a man who dies in the pursuit of the perfect bowl of noodles.

This movie certainly made me hungry. Tampopo claims the title of being the first "noodle western" ( with ramen, and obviously a playful ode to Italian spaghetti westerns) and it's narrative structure is full to the brim with tropes of the drifter (he rides into town not on a horse, but in a bull horned mounted big …

Tampopo, however, is its own movie, not a derivation, and a fine movie it is, too.

Goro (Tsutomu Yamaguchi) is a long-haul truck driver.