Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Vietnam but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: Vietnam
Movie: Táo Quậy [Naughty Kitchen Guardians]
Director: Toàn Joshua
Year: 2019
The Elevator Pitch: Minh moves out of his family home to be on his own for the first time only to wake up one morning starving shocked to find he’s attached at the ankle to a kitchen guardian for some reason! At first Minh and the Kitchen God try and break their bond themselves but eventually it escalates into an adventure where they are tasked with having to save all of the kitchen gods as someone is putting out the fire of mankind.
How Was the Movie?: This movie was absolutely insane. The pacing is honestly terrible and the movie ends before having a nearly 20 minutes coda but other than that it’s really fantastic. I wasn’t sure how real kitchen gods were or how integral they were to Vietnamese culture when I started the movie but they do seem like actual things people can believe in not too dislike hearth gods and the opening myth is probably real and fairly wide spread so it’s nice that they added it for us clueless rubes 🙂
The humor in this movie is extremely vibrant, especially if you like slapstick. There are a lot of very goofy sound cues but once you get into the vibe, the constant flow of tit for tat humor makes it easy to enjoy. The movie goes through a lot of different types of humor and action also so there’s very little of it that is boring and it becomes a full blown tokusatsu/sentai/power rangers alike somewhere in the middle as well so it’s not just people walking around being funny.
You won’t find a lot of depth here, it’s about as deep as your average Netflix movie but the brisk pace, funny characters, and honestly very cute special effects will keep you entertained for it’s entire run time. We especially liked all the god outfits and the lady who represents the fire demon. The resolution to this film is so perfect and obvious my husband and I laughed about it for a few days.
I love that all the gods are their own flavor of sassy but we both especially liked the gods of love 🙂 They were our favorites.
This is a great popcorn watch for anyone who enjoys a little cheese with their movie.
What was for Dinner?:
I took the easy route and ordered Vietnamese food, specifically: Bánh mì, Gỏi cuốn, phở gà, and Chè. We don’t have a ton of Vietnamese specific ingredients available here, it’s really hard to get a hold of the majority of fresh greens, various forms of coconut, mung beans, tapioca things and so on and to make all of this myself would have been a real pain in my butt.
I know it’s probably controversial but I’ve never been a fan of Vietnamese food and didn’t change my opinion about it eating this but it was nice to have a little change. I used to have phở from time to time in Seattle but it’s just not my thing? I think because most Vietnamese food is based on pork or beef and I don’t eat either so I often just get the extremely bad version – the equivalent of giving a vegan a green salad at a fancy restaurant. This was also the saddest chè I have ever eaten because it didn’t have any fresh fruit or interesting textures. It needed more everything.
Just to make sure I don’t end on a downer, my husband really enjoyed his bánh mì.
That’s it for Vietnam, see you next in Norway!