The Movie: Originally made in Mexico, Like Water For Chocolate found it's way north of the border into the united states, meeting much critical acclaim. This movie is somewhat spiritual or mythical in nature, and yet, mostly grounded in the realities of life near the border in the early 20th century.

At it's very root, I guess you could say it's a story about the hard life of Tita, the youngest daughter of an overbearing mother, who by family tradition, is forbidden to marry, and required to take care of her mother until the day she dies. This causes problems as Tita falls in love with Pedro. Pedro foolishly (in my opinion) marries Tita's sister, as this is the only way he could be near Tita, his true love. You can imagine the kinds of problems this could cause! Somewhere along the way though, Tita discovers that her cooking has almost mystical powers.

I didn't hate this movie, but I didn't really like it that much either. Some of the characters seemed one-dimensional, particularly the mother, and sometimes the plot seemed to go off in strange directions. And the ending, dear lord, it was just way over the top. It made me laugh out loud, and I'm not really sure that it was supposed to be funny.

But, it wasn't such a bad movie either. Would I recommend it? Well I wouldn't go out of my way to see it again, but I don't particularly regret having seen it either.

The DVD: This could just about be the absolute worst quality DVD I've ever had in my possession. The quality of the video was absolutely horrid. Overall, it was too dark, with poor contrast, grainy, blurry, with all detail in the shadows lost. Furthermore, it had a yellowish-brown cast over the entire movie, but that may have just been the way the movie was shot. And oh yeah, it was in letterboxed, non-anamorphic widescreen.

The audio, though supposedly in Dolby 2.0 Surround was practically monaural, and was of horrible quality. Included on the disc are both the original Spanish and also an English-dubbed soundtrack, and of course, there are subtitles in English if you want to watch this movie in the original language. One interesting thing about the two audio options is that if you select English, they even have special credits sequences in English.

There were no special features whatsoever, except for recommendations from Miramax of how we can further line their pockets with money by buying more of their DVD's.

The only other DVD that I've seen so far that comes even close to this level of sucktitude was Beavis and Butthead: The Final Judgement which had better audio and video, but absolutely no special features, not even any sort of menu system.