This American remake of the 2002 German film MOSTLY MARTA barely captures the delicacy of German template. While Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the part of Master Chef Kate functioning on the edge with a great deal of sensitivity, the American version fails to capture the attraction of opposites in the German original MOSTLY MARTA. A major element of the conflict of opposites in the original MOSTLY MARTA was the cultural conflict between the Italian sous chef and the German chef. The American film avoid the cultural clash.
The funniest line from the German original could not be worked into the American copy:
Mario: Why would she (your niece) want to stay with her family in sunny Italy when she can return to cold and grey Germany to live there with a nut case like you?
Although NO RESERVATIONS is a well made film, it represents an alarming tread in the US theatre borrowing good films from elsewhere and trying to translate the story line into an American venue.
Social circumstances are not completely congruous. The scene where Zoe, Kate's ward and niece, gets in trouble at school for telling the teacher that she works in a restaurant does not translate well into the NYC public school system which hears this everyday. In highly regimented and regulated German such a report would be an atrocity.
The American theatre should abandon remakes of foreign films and strive for a degree of originality.
The funniest line from the German original could not be worked into the American copy:
Mario: Why would she (your niece) want to stay with her family in sunny Italy when she can return to cold and grey Germany to live there with a nut case like you?
Although NO RESERVATIONS is a well made film, it represents an alarming tread in the US theatre borrowing good films from elsewhere and trying to translate the story line into an American venue.
Social circumstances are not completely congruous. The scene where Zoe, Kate's ward and niece, gets in trouble at school for telling the teacher that she works in a restaurant does not translate well into the NYC public school system which hears this everyday. In highly regimented and regulated German such a report would be an atrocity.
The American theatre should abandon remakes of foreign films and strive for a degree of originality.