Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.

This week: Films & TV from the early Field Notes archive: a Japanese noodle western that refuses to behave, a British government held together by panic and insults, three men undone by a bag of cash, an ultramarathon designed to defeat its runners, and a high-wire walk planned like a heist.

1. Tampopo : The Ramen Western That’s Also About Everything Else

I came across a clip from this 1985 Japanese film, and it instantly piqued my interest. The poster described it as a “Japanese Noodle Western.” The sheer hilarity of that phrase was enough to send it straight to the top of my watch list. What even is a Japanese Noodle Western?

Turns out, it’s one of the most original movies I’ve ever seen.

The central plot follows a pair of truck drivers who, along with a ragtag gang they assemble along the way, help a widowed ramen shop owner master the art of ramen and turn around her struggling business. It’s equal parts earnest and absurd, driven by the same Japanese devotion to craft and perfection that Jimmy talked about in Jimmy’s earlier recommendation, of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. This is not a world where mediocre ramen is acceptable. Ramen chefs here are ready to duel you if you leave broth in the bowl or dare insult their work.

But what makes Juzo Itami’s Tampopo truly unlike anything else is its structure. Woven between the main storyline are these vignettes, little short films really, depicting completely unrelated slices of human life revolving around food. They are funny, erotic (kinky food sex?), goofy, and so independently delightful that the lack of connection never bothers you. It’s like picking up a book and finding out it’s both a novel and a short story collection bound together, and somehow it works. I can’t think of another movie that pulls this off.

Nearly every scene exists because of food — even the death scenes, even the credits. Tampopo is a love letter to food, and to all the strange little rituals we build around it. [Vatsal]

🎬 Tampopo (1985)

2. The Thick of It : Real Politics Was Always This Stupid

If you know Armando Iannucci, it’s probably from Veep. Maybe from The Death of Stalin. But before either of those, Iannucci made a low-budget BBC series about the inner workings of British politics. And it might be one of the funniest comedies ever made.

The Thick of It follows a hapless politician and his team of advisors as they lurch from crisis to crisis under the supervision and wrath of Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications. The performance of Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker is so hilarious and outrageous that if there’s a Mount Rushmore of comedic performances, Capaldi’s face is right there.

The dialogue feels mostly improvised, delivered at a pace so breathless it blows your mind, and yet somehow winds up as endlessly quotable. True catching-lightning-in-a-bottle stuff. The whole cast were in some kind of flow state.

And hilarity aside, if the last decade or so is anything to go by, I’d argue it’s also one of the most accurate portrayals of politics ever captured on screen. Real politics isn’t House of Cards. Real politics is a comedy of errors.

Much like the two versions of The Office, watching The Thick of It alongside Veep is one of the best ways to understand the difference between British and American comedy. Veep is funny but entirely sanitized and slowed down by comparison. Although they share DNA, The Thick of It is a different animal altogether: meaner, faster, and much closer to the chaos of the real world. [Dylan]

📺 The Thick of It (2005-2012)

3. A Simple Plan : How Good People Talk Themselves Into Evil

Sam Raimi has been back in the news recently with the gonzo desert-island thriller Send Help (very fun). Best known for directing the still-influential Evil Dead movies and the equally influential 2000s Spider-Man trilogy, Raimi is beloved among cinephiles for his dark humor and kid-in-a-candy-store directing style, defined by extravagant camera moves, extreme close-ups, and gore. So much gore.

His 1998 thriller A Simple Plan was a blind spot for me, and occupies a curious place in his filmography. A swing for critical prestige in the vein of Fargo (Raimi was an early collaborator of the Coen Brothers), it sees Raimi abandon many of his favorite moves in favor of a sober, tragic account of three blue-collar Midwesterners - two of them brothers - who stumble across a duffel bag stuffed with cash and must decide how far they’re willing to go to keep it. It’s hardly a spoiler to say things turn bloody.

Great performances all around, particularly from Billy Bob Thornton as Jacob, whose childlike innocence proves ripe for corruption by his seemingly upstanding younger brother (Bill Paxton).

A great thriller on its own merits, and for anyone interested in the art of directing, a compelling example of a filmmaker putting away the toys to achieve something stylistically different. The ease with which ordinary people convince themselves they’re still good while doing terrible things can be darker than gore. [Ed]

🎬 A Simple Plan (1998)

4. The Barkley Marathons : A Documentary About Beautiful Failure

Every year in the muddy hills of Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee, a cigarette-smoking accountant named Gary Cantrell — who goes by Lazarus Lake — sends a field of forty ultrarunners into the woods to suffer. The Barkley Marathons is 100 miles through punishing terrain: five unmarked 20-mile loops, 60,000 feet of elevation gain, no GPS, no trail markers, no aid stations. Expect dense, prickly undergrowth, wild boar, snakes, poison ivy, and brutal temperature swings.

Runners navigate by map and compass and prove they’ve hit each checkpoint by tearing pages from books Laz has stashed along the course — prophetic titles like What Did I Do Wrong? and How to Survive and Grow Richer in the Tough Times Ahead. The entry fee is $1.60 and a pack of Camel cigarettes. The acceptance letter advises runners that their time before the race would be better spent updating their wills. Since 1995, only 20 runners have finished.

I first heard about Barkley from an ultra-runner friend, and then I found this documentary — which has become one of my favorite sports films. Filmmakers Annika Iltis and Timothy James Kane followed the 2012 race, and what they captured is less a story about running than a study of what happens when you strip a human being down to the essential ingredients: compass, willpower, and whatever’s left after forty hours without sleep. Laz himself is the film’s central character: part sadist, part philosopher, a man who pulls his own teeth rather than visit a dentist, and who once stocked the entire course with adult-themed novels. He looks like Edward Abbey and talks like the kind of character Cormac McCarthy might’ve dreamed up between novels, sitting on a porch in Tennessee, laughing at something no one else found funny.

What brought me back was a beautifully shot short film by Noah Reese recapping the 2026 race, which fielded one of the deepest talent pools in Barkley history. Not shocking, the race didn’t yield a finisher. The best runner only did three loops. Barkley won again, as it almost always does. And somehow, that’s the most inspiring thing about it. [Taylor]

🎬 Official Website for The Barkley Marathons (2014)
📺 The full film on YouTube (top comment: “I just love the irony of an elite ultra marathon event set up by an eccentric chain-smoking madman”)

5. Man on Wire : ‘An act justified entirely by its beauty and audacity.’

I have watched James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire more times than I care to count. It tells the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, and it unfolds with the tension of a heist film. Petit and his small band of co-conspirators spent months casing the buildings, forging IDs, smuggling equipment past security guards, all to pull off an act that was illegal, unprofitable, and by any reasonable measure insane.

Marsh structures the documentary around this preparation, intercutting archival footage with present-day interviews, and the effect is to make you lean forward even though you know how it ends. Petit survived. He walked for 45 minutes, a quarter mile above the streets of Manhattan, crossing back and forth eight times while crowds gathered below.

What elevates the film beyond spectacle is its interest in the question of why. Petit is charming and elusive on this point, almost allergic to explanation, and Marsh wisely lets the ambiguity stand. The walk had no cause, no sponsor, no message. It was art in its purest form, an act that justified itself entirely by its beauty and audacity.

Watching Petit describe that morning, you sense something that our culture often has trouble accepting: some things are worth doing precisely because they serve no purpose beyond the doing. The Twin Towers are gone now, which gives the footage an unexpected weight. But Petit’s walk remains, suspended in memory, a reminder that human beings are capable of the unnecessary and the magnificent. [Jimmy]

🎬 Man on Wire (documentary, 2008)

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OSV Field Notes #41