07 August 2009

Julie & Julia

Written & Directed by: Nora Ephron
Full credits at IMDb

Thematically, the two temporally disconnected story strands--Julia Child writing her cookbook, Julie Powell writing her blog about cooking--complement each other well...But for me it wasn’t so neat in practice. In last year’s Doubt, Amy Adams turned in a strong performance playing off of Meryl Streep: a teary mouse under the tutelage of a lion. It worked well as real-life allegory, too: the Grand Dame dominating the next generation of young starlets. Here, though, Adams is competing to hold our attention when Streep’s off-screen, and she’s just not that good. Hell, no one is. Streep is a national treasure, man; they should put her on Auto-Oscar until she dies...Even Ephron seems electrified by her; in contrast to the Child sections—which were rife with unnecessary anti-McCarthy digs, because Hollywood just can’t pass up the chance to knock Mr. Blacklist—the contemporary Julie portions almost seem shot by another director; lifeless settings, overscored, overnarrated, as if to compensate for the lack of verve. “I’m not Julia Child,” Julie admits late in the film. Yeah, and you ain’t no Streep, either.

Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer:

1 comment:

Jillian Laughing Waters said...

I was enjoying the movie until the proverbial Hollywood Republican-bashing reared it's ugly head, as it often does through this medium. It was so obviously just thrown in there as a dig (not to flavor the writing, no pun intended), and perhaps to contribute to the social engineering of America. It was irrelevant and offensive and turned me off to the movie, the actors and the writer. In fact, half the country is Republican, so what are they trying to do - turn off half their audience? I lost my respect for Nora, who through this movie, has shown her "appetite" for bowing down to the Hollywood elite...