There’s a fine art to making food look good on film, and it is pretty distant from the fine art of actually making food taste good. The cheeseburger you buy from a fast food joint looks nothing like the advertisement, for example, but it sure will taste the way you want it to. In this capacity, it shows the distance that occurs any time we stylize something on film, prioritizing pure visual pop and seductive editing over more pragmatic concerns.
What if we totally extrapolated the desire to eat the food on film and prioritized visual style over edible substance? The food stylist David Ma performed this thought experiment on his new YouTube channel, and, readers, prepare your eyes for some pure unbridled Michael Bay:
Yeah, it’s fucking big! Imagine John Turturro acting as comic relief to those fucking waffles! Imagine bikinis and shit!
Lower your heart rate after that with some elegant, meditative Alfonso Cuarón pancakes:
Some Quentin Tarantino-style spaghetti and meatballs:
And, finally, some masterfully framed, whimsical Wes Anderson s’mores:
These are all impressive, but let’s up the stakes here. How about a devotional nine-minute Tarkovskyan long-take about a ham sandwich? A brutal, unflinching Todd Solondz-style character study of a single Pop Tart? A Felliniesque bacchanalia celebrating the tragicomic existence of a six-pack of Bud Dry? The sky’s the limit.