Hacker Cinema
City of Gold
2016 · Film · documentary · 96 min
Directed by Laura Gabbert
As the unabashed cradle of Hollywood superficiality and smoggy urban sprawl, Los Angeles has long been condemned as a cultural wasteland. In the richly penetrating documentary odyssey City of Gold, Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold shows us another Los Angeles, where ethnic cooking is a kaleidoscopic portal to the mysteries of an unwieldy city and the soul of America.
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
2 comments on Hacker News
City of Gold [0] is a wonderful documentary, well worth the watch.
[0](https://amzn.to/2JIe0JJ)
If you're interested in this concept, may I recommend the documentary film City of Gold, about the LA-based food critic Jonathan Gold, who rather famously was the first food writer to win a Pulitzer prize.
[The film: https://variety.com/2016/film/production/jonathan-gold-food-critic-1201724814/ -- Gold's approach: https://www.gq.com/story/jonathan-gold-gutsiest-food-critic]
Gold takes a very democratic and open-minded attitude toward reviewing. He has been one of a handful of writers that were early appreciators and promoters of various now-common food trends - food trucks and strip-mall food joints, niche ethnic/regional foods, unusual meats and ingredients.
But, clarified by a pair of quite touching anecdotes that, like parentheses, open and close the film, Gold's real guiding light is not foodie culture -- it is the ability of shared food to bring people together, in a metropolis that is ever more diverse. The first anecdote is about his sorrow after the LA riots of 1992, which devastated the Koreatown area where he lived at the time. And the second is a book reading at what looks like Skylight Books in Los Feliz, where he says that perhaps some of these tensions could be healed at the micro-level if we "could just invite someone over for dinner."
We all know there are structural problems as well, but the problem of ethnic tension and misunderstanding operates at many scales and many strategies are needed. Perhaps this is one.