A lady agrees to become a surrogate mother in order to achieve her dream of opening a restaurant, an ex-con meets a group of new friends and gets a second chance, and a woman tries to land the man of her dreams.  All these, and several other plots, occur in Food for Love (originally titled with the much superior moniker The Hungry Bachelor's Club.) While there were some interesting characters and plots, overall the movie is just too crammed to succeed.

Delmar (Jorja Fox) is a single mother who puts on dinner parties for her friends.  She loves to cook, and dreams of opening her own restaurant.  She lives with her mother, son, and her best friend Hortense (Suzanne Mara.) Hortense is engaged to a slick lawyer, Stanley (Paul Provenza,) who won't quite agree to marry her, and Delmar's brother, Jethro (Peter Murnik) has run away from life and spends all his time working on old cars.  While scrounging for parts one evening, Jethro and his alcoholic friend Marlon (David Shackelford,) find an ex-con, Moses (Bill Nunn,) sleeping in an old Cadillac.  The three of them find they have a lot in common and Moses moves in with the two other slackers.

Stanley's boss at his law firm wants to find a surrogate for his child, and Stanley turns to Delmar.  The money would allow her to open up her own restaurant, and so she agrees.  Meanwhile Marlon starts having an affair with Hortense.  Oh, yea, and Jethro starts dating a coke addict whose mother died at one of Delmar's parties, Marlon turns out to be a great cook, and a Delmar has problems with her ex-husband.

The movie doesn't really have a single plot, it is more of a group of related subplots.  That's the problem with the film; all of these subplots are fighting for attention, and it's hard to care about any single one of them.  The movie was based on a novel, and I can see where it would have worked much better printed on the page.  As a film though, there are just too many characters, and too much of the novel was presumably removed.  The result is a film that is too crowded, and with large chunks of time, and the associated plot development, missing.  The ending of the movie was fun, unless you actually thought about it, in which case more questions were raised than answered.
 
I also had a problem with the script itself.  The dialog felt forced and unnatural.  It didn't feel like people were actually talking to each other, but reciting lines that someone else had written.  The scene where Delmar was interviewed by Mr. Bainbridge was particularly false sounding.  Delmar's words and style were different from the rest of the movie, and didn't ring true.

The acting was passable, though not outstanding.  Jorja Fox did a good job as the lead, though Suzanne Mara seemed to just walk through her part.  The one actor who ended up stealing a lot of scenes was Bill Nunn.  He played Moses with jsut the right amount of sadness and optimism to bring the character to life.

Billed as a romantic comedy, this movie is neither humorous nor romantic.  Though several couples fall in love, the romance was rushed in every case.  You never see the people growing closer or connecting, it's just announced that two people have hooked up.   As a comedy it's worse.  I can't recall a humorous moment in the film.  If you see this movie, go into it expecting a drama.  It works much better that way.

Audio:

The movie has a stereo English soundtrack without subtitles.  It sounded good, as most recent movies do.  There was a good amount of range and there wasn't any hiss or dropouts.  There were a few scenes that were looped after production, and these had a slightly different tonal quality to them, but this is a minor critique.

Video:

Though the case claims that the movie is in widescreen, the version I received, which appears to be the final product, was a 4:3 pan and scan version.  It is too bad that the production company, Razor Digital, didn't bother to put the film on the disc in its original aspect ratio.  Why they'd lie about it on the cover is beyond me.

The image quality itself looks good, with accurate looking flesh tones and a good amount of detail.  There are some digital defects, mainly some noise in the background and aliasing of lines, but these weren't distracting.  One thing that was distracting was the macro blocking, but this is only in one scene.

Extras:

In addition to the film, this disc also has two theatrical trailers, and eleven deleted/extended scenes.  There isn't an option to play all of the scene together, which is too bad because it gets old having to select each one.

Final Thoughts:

This movie really didn't work.  There were too many small plots fighting for attention and not an overriding theme to the film.  The acting was okay, but when all was said and done, I didn't really care for any of the characters.  The fact that the video is a P&S edit, drops this down a knotch.  Skip it.