![]() The film is also a reminder to forgive guests who don’t yet know their host’s unspoken customs and taboos, like the mother who pardons her daughter’s fiancé for pouring soy sauce on her signature dish. The novelist Amy Tan reworked her best seller into this screenplay, a collaboration with Ronald Bass, the “Rain Man” screenwriter. Their mothers made painful choices before they crossed the Pacific, enduring traumas the daughters may risk repeating if they can’t share their secrets (along with several bowls of noodles and a bottle of champagne). The Americanized daughters are well aware of these concerns, but they don’t know the full story. Four Chinese-born women living in San Francisco regularly gather over the mahjong table to gossip about their grown daughters who, they fear, have settled for the wrong career or the wrong man. There’s no better film on food, family and empathy than Wayne Wang’s epic about two generations who reconcile their differences over sesame balls and stuffed crab. A personal favorite: “You’re a pain in my ass, you have bad hair, but I like you a lot.” Every quip deserves to be memorialized in needlepoint. ![]() For the film’s centerpiece Thanksgiving scene, Foster went through 64 roast turkeys whose carcasses were flung into laps or onto the floor, then plopped back on the carving dish so Charles Durning’s paterfamilias could continue pretending things were fine. ![]() Her aunt (Geraldine Chaplin) has dementia, her mother (Anne Bancroft) is crying in the pantry and her brother (Robert Downey Jr.) is slinging zingers to deflect from his own big secret. ![]() Richter, and when Foster gave it a read, she was struck by the artificiality of being “asked to make a vow of love to people you don’t really know and who don’t really understand you.” Holly Hunter stars as a single mother who comes home to a household simmering with tension. The script is by the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” screenwriter W.D. ![]() Believe it or not, Jodie Foster’s relatable dramedy about a family who bickers, sobs and seriously questions why they bother sharing a table is rooted in science fiction. ![]()
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