tv review: stanley tucci's italy
no one lets stanley tucci chew his italian dinner in peace. they watch him the whole time, no better than dogs. worse, they film. imagine that. soon as dinners ready and youre sitting down to eat, someones putting a big camera in your face. no wonder he looks so sheepish. he’s masking being self conscious. 'not bad' he'll say with an ironic shrug. stanley, we know perfectly well your italian dinner was marvellous. when all he can do is make wry understatements, we begin to question the guy's status as a food critic. but theyve set him up to fail. with a dozen gawkers waiting on his words, can you blame him for trying to break the silence? of course his words are going to be inadequate. with the boom mics looming, theyve given him no time to process his thoughts.
i empathise with his predicament. some can talk like a beautiful stream, words springing from the larynx and running through the vocal folds, trickling down the tongue and spilling from the mouth in a misty glittering waterfall. the sentences they produce are not just tap water but voss, evian, san pelegrino; the sublime ideal. normal people like me and stan are not so lucky. our creeks are half dry and clotted with frog eggs.
the speech system is much like the digestive system. sometimes one has trouble on the john. for me and stan, the gap between input and output can take as long as 72 hours, which makes spontaneous judgement near impossible. to make an adequate response to something we must think and draft and redraft and practice and practice before releasing my words to the public. if we dont wait, what spills forth is merely wastewater.
eating is an intensely private act; one usually avoids doing it in front of others. if the showrunners of stanley tucci’s italy had any respect, they’d switch the camera off as soon as the fork moved past his teeth. then once he had digested his food and thoughts, he would submit a video diary from the comfort of his hotel, discussing the highs and lows of his culinary experience. at the very least they could let him take more than one bite before talking, yet from the producer's perspective, i understand that time is of the essence. filmstock is expensive and the man is chewing on company time. the boom guy's arms are sore and the cameraman wants to sit down. on top of that, none of them have had lunch. theyre all waiting for a chance to scab the leftovers. ‘tucci first’ goes the saying on set. no wonder they stare like ill-trained hounds.
and what happens when stanley messes up the take by blinking or choking or accidentally stretching out a middle finger while holding the ciabatta? they will have to yell cut and the chefs will have to cook a whole new meal and chefs hate cooking. i know this from first and secondhand experience. i did hello fresh once and i also washed dishes in a hotel kitchen. the chefs were always pissed. someone would order a chicken parmigana and theyd say fuck me. again? tell those cunts to fuck off with the parm. the chefs were always so rude but they were actually good people deep down. they just hated their life. you never see that side of cooking on stanley tucci. its all warm smiles and reverence for the purity of their ingredients and stories of how the ratatouille is their grand-nonnas recipe, an ethnic blend of tuscan and roman cuisines. i know for a fact that chefs dont act like that off camera. sure they can talk nice a few minutes, but if you filmed them all day they’d crack.
nobody should ever be filmed doing anything.
1 ⭐