Julie & Julia - A Movie Review

Sorry there's no Working the Shows Wednesday feature today. I did attend an event Saturday where there was supposed to be a few crafters exhibiting their wares but I found none so I have nothing to report on this week. I am hoping for much better luck this week.
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I do, however, have a movie review for you today!

I've had a friend visiting for a few days and we took advantage of matinee prices today and went to see Julie & Julia. We loved it. It is really a chick flick so leave the guys at home and go with a friend. Basically, Nora Ephron has taken two true stories, Julia Child's memoir of her life in France in 1949 and Julie Powell's account of blogging about cooking her way through Julia's famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and blended the two into one truly entertaining movie.

The movie flips back and forth from Julia's life in Paris in the late 40s to Julie's life in Queens, New York in 2002. Meryl Streep does a fantastic job of portraying Julia. If you are old enough to remember watching Julia Child on TV, you may forget this really isn't her. Meryl's that good! As the movie opens, Julia finds herself accompanying her diplomat husband to Paris. She's absolutely thrilled to find herself among the beauty and mystique of the famous city but she is also quite bored and needs to find something to occupy her time.

Critics have not been kind to Amy Adams in this role but I liked the character and I feel Amy definitely did it justice. (Okay, so maybe I was a bit sympathetic to start with. She does play a blogger!) Amy plays Julie Powell, a frustrated writer, or at least she wants to be a writer, only she's stuck in a stressful job that keeps her on the phone in a tiny little cubicle, dealing with very trying callers. She wants to find an outlet for her creative juices and eventually finds her way to blogging. As bloggers, we've all reached that point early in the experience where we wonder if we're talking to ourselves and Julie asks her readers early on, "Is there anybody out there?" (I can identify with that moment!)

Both women find their way to cooking as the solution to their doldrums. It gives them a creative outlet, a goal in life and it definitely adds some zing to their existence. Both women eventually reach their goal and bask in the thrill of completing a job well done.

We left the theater hungry. After all, we had spent 2 hours at that point watching the characters eat some fantastic looking food that they and their companions raved over, making almost orgasmic sounds as they savored the meals. My friend has vowed to go home and make Julia's Boef Bourguignon as they showed it at least four times throughout the last half of the movie. You could almost smell it in you mind. It did look wonderful!!