Julie & Julia - So far, probably the best i've seen this year

Things i loved about Julie and Julia:
Meryl Streep
Stanley Tucci
Julia and Paul's relationship
Julia's optimism and determination
Paris
The food!!
the onion chopping scene
the canneloni line (won't spoil it but it was totally unexpected)
Julie's meltdowns
Julie's triumphs

Things i didn't love about the movie
Sometimes Julie was whiny
No location shots from other places Julia lived


Really, there wasn't much i didn't like about the movie, Julie & Julia. I really loved the Julia parts with Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep and it might have been nice to have a movie just of that part but then maybe that would have been too much of a good thing, I don't know. The last time Stanley and Meryl were together on screen was in The Devil Wears Prada and they were a very different couple. He was a gay stylist and she was iron lady Miranda Priestly. This time they are a romantic pairing, married later in life and absolutely besotted with each other and it most definitely shows. They move to Paris because he's working with the embassy and there's lots of great location shots of the streets and markets of Paris with only the obligatory Eiffel tower shot to show they've arrived. She loves food and bravely enters the Cordon Bleu school of cooking which is not encouraged as something a woman would do. French Chefs are men, you see. But she does it and she perserveres and succeeds with the support of her loving husband. Julia is cheerful, determined, forthright and she seems to love life. She spends years with one of her friends from Paris collaborating and revising a French cookbook, a great doorstop of a project but which was finally accepted for publication and came out in 1961. The movie ends with Julia brandishing her newly printed book in her Cambridge, Mass. kitchen which apparently was quite famous. I never watched her tv show, which was a huge hit in the 60s and was the spark that lit the popularity for dozens of cooking shows after that, resulting in whole tv networks for food and cooking. Her kitchen was actually used for filming three shows/series in the 90s.

Julie lives in NYC in a small apartment over a pizza shop. She doesn't like living there in Queens and she has a government job where she's got to listen to a lot of sad stories from people that lost someone in the 911 debacle. She's about to turn 30 and doesn't seem to have a direction to her life. She too loves food and cooking and her husband and friends reap the benefits. Her husband comes up with the blog idea and she decides to cook her way through Julia Childs' iconic cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blog about it. We follow her successes and spectacular failures and her ability and inablity to cope while her husband doesn't really deal too well with her growing obsession and dedication to blogging and cooking. He's no Paul Childs. He whinges and strops off in a huff one night because it's all about her, not him, but cools down and comes back and it's all good again after that. She's a bit whiny at times instead of being optimistically cheerful like Julia would have been (so she believes) but her confidence grows and by the end of the year long project she's getting interest from the media and publication world.

Julia is played, of course, by Meryl Streep who is probably the best actress ever, usurping past favourites like Katherine Hepburn and maybe even Audrey Hepburn. Mainly because Meryl seems to be completely different in every role she plays and is so good at it that you aren't watching Meryl play the role, you are watching the actual character. We saw a trailer for her next movie, It's Complicated, (which looks good, she's a divorcee who ends up having an affair with her remarried ex played by Alec Baldwin). Julia was quite a tall woman and as Meryl isn't quite that tall, they achieve this by using shorter actors, probably putting her in heels and using judicious camera angles and it all gives the illusion of height very well. She infuses Julia with the joie de vivre that the woman seems to have had (I think i'm going to have to get Julia's autobiography now!) She has the voice and diction down pat and she's perfect in the role. You can't imagine anyone else doing it after seeing this. Stanley Tucci is really good, as well. I loved his performance as the supportive and loving husband Paul. The Paris location shots were great as well and the 1950s atmosphere created by the fashions and set decoration was spot on. You'll notice lots of smoking, even in restaurants while people are eating which seems odd now but it wasn't all that long ago when you smoked in restaurants, even in this day and age. Back then, everyone smoked.

Amy Adams plays Julie who is a bit lost, drifting through her 20s. She's happily married, she loves to cook but is a bit petulant at times only because she's not really found anything in her life to give her the confidence. That's fairly typical of a lot of people in their 20s though, trying to figure out who they are and what they really want to do with their lives. Julie's no different. Cooking is her way of destressing after a rough day. Her job is for a government agency or project to work setting up the memorial to 911 so, in her anonymous cubical, she fields a lot of calls, people complaining or upset and she hears sad stories and she hears people full of anger that take it out on her. Cooking her way through Julia's cookbook and taking up Julia as her role model gives her purpose and a goal and over the year she has a lot of ups and downs but comes out in the end with an accomplishment. She never met Julia but after Julia died, Julie wrote this in her blog which pretty much sums Julia Childs up as seen by Julie. Amy plays Julie with just the right amount of hmmm is non-confidence the right description? You get what i mean though, right? She glows when she hits the high spots and crumples at the disasters and shakes when she has to face the real challenges (lobster!). Her husband is probably the weakest link of the four main characters. We really don't learn a whole lot about him and only a throwaway answering machine message reveals he works at a magazine. The actor, Chris Messina, is fine in the part, but doesn't stand out for me. Obviously the two female roles are the leads and the men are the supporting roles but i think Stanley Tucci brings so much more to his but maybe that just comes from experience. Stanley's next movie out is very different, he plays a man that rapes and murders a 14 year old girl in The Lovely Bones. Very grim.

This is probably a movie i will buy when it comes out in dvd, i liked it that much. I can see that it's one i'll want to watch more than once. Now i have to get myself together, my sister and i are going to see a movie this afternoon, Time Traveler's Wife :) Last night's movie was a spur of the moment thing when my friend T. called to ask me to go with her.

And another movie review - The Time Traveler's Wife

I read the book a couple of years ago and quite liked it. It was one of those wildly popular books that everyone was reading that i actually did read and liked. Quite often the "flavour of the month" book are ones i don't get round to reading for awhile and then find they don't live up to the hype. The time traveling and mixed up timelines sometimes does your head in but it's very good.

Having said that, the movie as you would expect leaves out a lot of the book. I don't remember a lot of details now but it seems the movie focussed on the romance, on the couple and their life rather than give you any detail about what happens to Henry when he's away traveling. You get glimpses but it's mostly about him and Clare and later, their daughter. It's about a man who meets a woman in the library where he works but she tells him she's known him most of her life and he's her best friend. He's a time traveler who has been haunted by the death of his mother in a car crash, where he was in the back seat. That seems to be the first time he traveled, outside the car and watching the crash. He's visited by himself as an adult who tells him what's going on and not to be scared, it'll be ok. He's haunted by the accident because, in spite of the time traveling, he can't change it.

Turns out he first meets Clare when she's a child, playing in a meadow. Only when he travels, he arrives where he's going buck naked so he stays in the bushes and gets her to give him the blanket she's got. It's the start of a beautiful friendship. Sometimes during their life together he does let some little detail of their future out but mostly he doesn't. Sometimes he knows and sometimes he doesn't know what's going to happen because he's not necessarily traveled to the future or returned from the past yet. But she loves him so she puts up with the periods where he's gone, or when he disappears at inopportune moments, leaving just a heap of clothes. It's a genetic anomoly and it also seems to be hindering her being able to carry a baby to term, possibly because the baby "travels" out of the womb but she manages at one point and they have a daughter. What's kind of cool is that they actually used sisters to play the daughter at two ages, 5 and 9/10. I thought they looked so much alike and indeed they were sisters.

Eric Bana plays Henry and Rachel MacAdam plays Claire and i have to say i thought they were very well cast from what i remember thinking of them when i read the book. Eric is suitably haunted and tortured by it all, wanting to be normal and loving Clare and his daughter but never knowing where he's going to end up and what's going to happen when he's there. He has to break and enter, to get in or out of places, to find clothing to wear until he disappears again so he has to be tough to survive. Rachel plays Clare from about the age of 18 onwards, growing up, getting stronger, always devoted to him even when it's a trial.

If you really, really loved the book, you might find the movie a bit disappointing because you don't really get a lot of the detail from Henry's "leaps" back and forth in time, just a few things. The ending is a bit different than the book though ... hmmm how can i put it without giving it away? The ending is still based on something that happens in the book, just not the same ending as the book but it still works ok. I had actually forgotten the book ending but i don't retain all the detail from a book on just the one read.

So it was a very different movie from Julie&Julia which i enjoyed more i think but i did enjoy this one too, even with the sad bits. It makes you think about if you could see your loved ones again after they die, just see them once but then i think that it might be even more difficult after they go again. You'd always be looking for them and hoping for another return and it would be more difficult to move on with your life. As much as we'd all wish to see them again, it's probably better the way it is. We get other things instead. Laurie and i went to Mom's after the movie, stopping at the Tim's drive through on the way. After, she drove me home and when i got out of the car, she called my name, with a sort of insistent tone of voice. I turned around and looked down. I know it was probably from the change from Tim's but we didn't see it when i got out of the car at Mom's, only after.

There was a dime on the seat.