READ: Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell. Cooking any recipe out of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking seems like the challenge of a lifetime. Cooking all 523 recipes in one year flat seems just this side of manic. Julie Powell did that and blogged about her experience. The fact that she lived to tell the tale (thanks to a living-saint of a husband) and write another book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, is testimony to the power of the human spirit.
The humor in the memoir is infectious, and it’s easy to empathize with the author’s ups and downs, which seem to happen at the drop of a spoon. I’m not quite sure she’s the kind of person I’d want around the house for more than a few days, but those days would be a riot of food and fun.
WATCH: Julie & Julia: based on two true stories. Based on Julie Powell’s book (above) and My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’Homme, the movie intertwines the stories of Julia Child’s initiation into the world of French cuisine first French cook book for an American audience and Julie Powell’s attempts to cook all the recipes in it in one year.
The film is remarkable on many levels. Meryl Streep completely captures Child’s quirky persona, an especially difficult feat since so many of us have that persona living in our memories from her numerous television shows. Amy Adams does a good job of capturing the Julie Powell we only know from her book, but writer/director Nora Ephron has cleaned her up a bit and made her tone less abrasive.
The depiction of marriage is also a wonderful and rare aspect of the film. Both the Powell’s and the Child’s marriages are seen as loving, respectful, supportive and kind without ever being cheapened by becoming maudlin. These are real people who genuinely care for each other, not idealized or romanticized.
Julie & Julia is the first movie of the summer that’s worth seeing twice.
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