- This synopsis leaves out the other half of the movie, in which government cubicle worker Julie Powell turns her foodie fanaticism into a year-long blogging project documenting her attempt to cook her way through all 500+ recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
- A small note for whom this irritates as much as it irritates me: many, many trailer clips were not in the final film. Oh, how I loathe this.
- Meryl Streep is fabulous. That is all.
- There were only a couple of instances where they touched on the Childs being childless and both times it seemed rather unnecessary. Julia is repeatedly saying that she’s looking for something to do while they’re living in Paris and I feel like the “P.S., she really wants a baby” scenes have the distasteful subtext that she’s taken up cooking (or hat making or whatever she might be inclined to do) because if she had children, she wouldn’t be looking for something to do with all her free time. Perhaps this is something that’s present in the autobiography, I don’t know, but since she’s presented as this rather ass-kicking, stick-it-to-the-man kind of woman it kind of bummed me out that her success and talent were still secondary to such tiny little glimpses into their private lives. I didn’t question why they didn’t have children up until that point and I’m not sure that implied infertility really adds anything to the story.
- Costumes = FABULOUS. Paris = FABULOUS.
- It seemed a little harsh that poor Julie kind of got the message that Julia perhaps strongly disliked her blog project when earlier in the film Julia says something about how she likes everyone and there is probably only one person in the world she hates (i.e. the woman who ran the cooking school she attended).
- Julie’s husband had some important words of wisdom that most bloggers could probably stand to hear: your readers will get over it, they will move on, if you disappoint them in some way or if you stop writing or, well, just about anything else. Don’t let increasing popularity lull you into a false sense of what you’re saying being Super Important™ to other people. At the end of the day, your readers turn off their computers and you disappear from their lives.
- The food looked fabulous and it makes me sad that I am allergic to fish.
- I would have to say that aspic is quite possibly the most disgusting food I had never heard of until this movie. For the love of all things delicious, please don’t ever make this.
- I forgot to mention that I enjoyed the dual depictions of marriage in the movie. I tired of abusive “how they met” stories (most rom-coms) and I tire of abusive mid-life marriages in crisis (most suburban melodramas) and I find it refreshing to find couples who work, couples who are in love, couples who are supportive of one another, and couples who are imperfect but can work past that. I know it’s quite commonplace to throw out the stat that 50% of marriages end in divorce to explain why we get to see such abominable relationships depicted on film, but I’d like to point out that this also means that 50% of marriages survive. So.
Julie & Julia
Now more than ever I just want to sew aprons and bake.
IMDB Plot Synopsis The movie also follows Julia and Paul Child through Julia Child's memoir, MY LIFE IN FRANCE, which she wrote with her grand nephew Alex Prud'homme.
I thought the childless bits were all right. It felt to me that she got into cooking (hats etc) because she didnt have kids. That in that time (era? I’m not sure of the right word here), she would be home, taking care of kids, while the husband was at work. Not that that took away from her kickassedness, but maybe she was so kick ass because she had to find other things to do. Circular logic FTW
You should probably know that if you decide one day to discontinue your blog it would take me an unaturally long amount of time to get over it. There would be a ‘kills me dead’-shaped hole in my soul that would resurface after every movie I saw since I’m pretty sure I don’t know how to form my own opinions anymore. That is all.
Never fear, I have no plans in the near future to stop!