Julie and Julia – The French Chef cooks a new book
Julie and Julia – The French Chef cooks a new book.
Rated: PG-13 Time: 2:03
Stars: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina, Jane Lynch and others
Final Grade: A
Summary:
Julie Powell(Adams) is a tertiary tier bureaucrat sitting across the street from Ground Zero in New York City taking calls from people with questions, problems, complaints and just wanting to air their frustrations out on someone. And it’s to her they call. Her husband Eric(Messina) is a editor for a trade rag also in town. Tiring of the campiness and costs in their current place, they move to an apartment above a pizza kitchen across town.
Already a good cook, she decides she needs to do something with her life. Get a hobby, but just do something to take her mind off the stress pot called her office. Picking up a copy of Julia Childs’s book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” she sets off as her goal to cook all the recipes in the book and to do so in a year’s time. All the while she’s cooking she’ll be documenting her life in an online blog. But first, she needs to create a blog.
As this cooking marathon unfolds, we flash back to Julia Childs’s(Streep) early beginnings in Paris while her husband Paul(Tucci) were stationed there with the embassy. As her life story unfolds, so do the adventures of Julie as they both live their lives inside and out of their kitchen’s. By the way, Streep does an excellent Child.
The time flash transitions and plotlines are incredibly well done and the biographical sectional snippets for both characters fall into a really nice lockstep cadence. You start to actually begin to appreciate their lives, you feel their motions, laugh at their jokes and haphazards. It was boredom from the mundane and menial that drove Childs to something outside of the embassy life and to where she eventually took a class in French Cooking. Courage to defy the status quo and mush on to the goal comes through in Julie’s life as she studies the life and methods of her unmet mentor and goal setter, Julia.
The story line does a very good job of putting you right into the middle of both family’s lives and happenings. You feel for Child when you realize she can’t have children and her pain when her friends are having theirs and you feel for Powell when her marriage is seeming to unravel and reporters and writers fail to show up for dinner. And you will laugh like you may not have done in a long time. Many the stereotypic eccentricities that Child was known and loved for come out in the movie and you see Powell adapting to some and reliving others in her experiments. Also, if I’d’ve known there was this much sex involved with cooking I’d’ve been a chef a long time ago! It’s all very well done and you get drawn in watching these two peoples live evolve over the stove.
The story is real and you can find Julie Powell’s book at your favorite bookstore and her blog is still alive and well.
One thing I did find myself wondering and perhaps someone can answer me: Was Julia Child a left handed person or right? In the movie I see Streep using both hands as if she were ambidextrous.
It would be nice to see this movie make the final cut for Oscar night. It’s got all the humanity, wit, emotion, plot and dialog to certainly make a winner and I really hope it shows well. It would be nice to see a really deserving film win big.
I know I’m playing catch up here, but if you’ve not seen this one, go. It’s going to be the most entertaining and interesting two hours and three minutes you’ll have spent in a theater in a while. You’ll come out with a smile on your face and a new attitude and appreciation for life in the kitchen.
I’m Don Rima, and that’s the way I saw it, From Where I Stand.
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