"Julie & Julia"

Opens today, I think. Sounds delicious!

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2009/08/07/julie_julia_review/


"Julie & Julia"

Meryl Streep's gleeful performance as the beloved cook goes beyond imitation. She is the Julia Child of our dreams

By Stephanie Zacharek


Meryl Streep in "Julie & Julia."


Aug. 7, 2009 | When an actor plays a real-life character we know and love, we always hope for verisimilitude, for body movements that capture the physical essence of a person we feel we know pretty well, for line readings that conjure the tone and timber of a particular voice and its speech patterns (that is, for line readings that make us forget there's such a thing as "line readings"). A good actor can usually give us an exacting impersonation, a strictly followed recipe with every ingredient appropriately calibrated, and sometimes that's good enough. But watching Meryl Streep as Julia Child in "Julie & Julia" -- as she only semi-successfully flips an omelette, in a re-created clip from Child's seminal '60s-era television show "The French Chef"; as she stands at a table with her classmates at Le Cordon Bleu, her elbows crooked jauntily and a little awkwardly behind her; as she sits down to dinner with her husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci), the two of them having so much to say to each other that they sometimes chatter with their mouths full -- goes beyond recipe reading. Streep isn't playing Julia Child here, but something both more elusive and more truthful -- she's playing our idea of Julia Child. When Streep's Julia nearly loses that omelette on TV, she pooh-poohs the possible dangers of dropping food on the floor: "You're alone in the kitchen. Whoooooooo's to see?" The line, and the way Streep draws it out, is just one measure of the intimacy of this performance. We're not observers here, but conspirators: We know exactly where the food has been, and we're not telling.

"Julie & Julia," directed by Nora Ephron, is only partly a movie about Julia Child. Ephron adapted the script from two sources: Child's posthumously published 2006 memoir (co-written with Alex Prud'homme) "My Life in France" and Julie Powell's entertaining, soufflé-light memoir -- from which the movie gets its name -- a recounting of the year Powell spent cooking every recipe in Child's 1961 classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." (Powell's book got its start as a blog hosted by Salon.) In "Julie & Julia," Powell (played by an exhaustingly perky Amy Adams) toils by day as a low-level government employee but, in her evenings at home in Queens, N.Y., gives her life meaning by wrestling with the challenges of boning duck carcasses, murdering lobsters and making perfect aspic (a food that, perfect or not, practically no one wants to eat anymore). In between recipes, she squabbles and cuddles with her long-suffering husband, Eric (Chris Messina), commiserates about her life troubles with her surly friend Sarah (Mary Lynn Rajskub) and sits down at the computer to blog about it. Through it all, we wait for the payoff, and eventually get it: She jumps up and down when, after her blog takes off and gets media exposure, she starts getting offers from agents and book publishers.

Contrast that with the other subject of "Julie & Julia": A strapping, cheerful 6-foot-plus California girl (and former OSS secretary) who, in the late 1940s, moves to Paris with her shorter, much beloved husband and immediately falls in love with her new country and its food, embarking on an adventure that will ultimately change the way Americans think about food, as well as provide a genius flash of inspiration for Dan Aykroyd. Which story sounds more interesting to you? (Or, as Julia would put it, "To yooooooooooou?")

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Streep uses her gift for mimicry to make the link between Julia as pop-culture presence and human being. Just listening to Streep is pure joy: She gets the way Julia's voice resembled the unself-conscious chortling of an extremely happy bird. And Ephron and Streep both trust their instincts in one of the movie's best scenes: Julia's inability to have children is handled in one brief, essentially wordless moment between her and her husband. That moment, like much of the movie around it, is about the business of getting on with life, and of cooking as one of the most pleasurable ways to sustain it. That's as true in Queens as it is in Paris, which was Julia Child's point all along.

and I'm almost willing to endure a monsterplex to do it.

Julia Child taught me to cook. I wish they'd rerun her shows, gaffes and all, to show a new generation of people raised on sad corporate food that cooking doesn't have to be a dismal chore.

Cooking can be fun. Julia Child showed the way.

queue and "saved" Julie&Julia for whenever it comes out on DVD.

Methinks the movie will expose a lot more people to Julia than rerunning her shows would.

As much as I enjoy Meryl Streep's talent and loved watching Julia (and still do on PBS) I heard a clip from the film on NPR the other day and I found her impression of Julia was extremely annoying to listen to.

I prefer reading anyway so the book will go into my must read list. :hi:

:D

Both me an my SO want to see it. He's a pretty good cook himself. We're also going to an italian place that we both love. (no, I'm not getting pasta! ) :P

I bought the book but haven't read it yet.

This is one that I might brave the megacomplex for.

:-)

It feels like just good fun summer viewing to me.

Most of the criticisms that I've seen center around the idea that the modern story is weaker than the Julia one. Don't know if that's true, but that's kinda the point of the material.

now there will never be a movie about Julia alone. The movie industry will feel it's already been done. And pretty much the same criticism; that the modern story is weak & Julie is a bore. I'm going to see if for Julia, but I thought the Julie part looked fun. And Julia said one time that as a young adult, she was the original slacker.

I'm not interested in Julie, and suspect the only reason a movie on Julia hasn't been made already is because she doesn't fit the average producer or director's idea of beauty.

I'd pay money to see Dan Ackroyd play Julia in a bio-pic - at least you know it would be a genuine tribute.

As for Streep ... of course she's great and magnificent, but now that I've seen the film version of Mamma Mia, I have a whole new appreciation of her dedication to her craft. She almost managed to rescue that movie, single-handedly.

I know I did and could have told them the outcome at their prescreening just by the preview-trailer:

Julie & Julia - The Houston Press

I'm sure once it comes out on DVD someone will edit out the Julie bits, as the above review alludes to at the end ;)
I think I'll wait for that edited version :D