Monkey Monday: Julie & Julia edition. 8 September 2009 2:32 pm
Posted by Tracy in : meta,monkeys,movies,random,school,writing , trackbackSo happy day after Labor Day, readers! My holiday weekend featured a fair amount of baking, which I hope to write about later on this week, as well as tasty dinners both higher end (Aroma) and low (all hail my local Cuban diner! Es muy delicioso!) Also, I finally saw Julie & Julia this holiday weekend, and my brain is still full, so that’s what today’s post is all about.
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I’m in full agreement with everyone else loving the hell out of Meryl Streep playing, as Salon reviewer Stephanie Zacharek put it, not Julia Child but “something both more elusive and more truthful… our idea of Julia Child.” Also, mad props to Stanley Tucci for managing to share the screen with, well, a force of nature portraying another force of nature, somehow in such a way that I’m still remembering and appreciating his performance days later. Well played, sir. (Another “well played” to Michael Ruhlman, who was weeks ahead of me on the Julia as force of nature line. Also you should read that whole piece because Ruhlman has lots of good stuff to say about Michael Pollan’s “no one cooks anymore” essay, about which I still can only stew — inarticulate pun most certainly intended, thankyouverymuch.)
I’m with everybody else who wanted less Julie and more Julia, and I wonder whether I’m misreading the movie’s younger characters as an attempt to pander to people my age — the more I think about it, the more Julie (Amy Adams) and Eric (Chris Messina) seem less like people and more like some Hollywood executive’s idea of kids these days, with their cats and their blogging. Or something. Also, all the references to their sex life seemed oddly forced into the story, like some studio executive somewhere wouldn’t approve the gleeful Streep-Tucci makeouts without some standard-issue young and pretty eye candy getting it on. I don’t know. Maybe the “turning 30 and feeling like you haven’t done anything in your life” stuff hit too close to home, and I’m just rocking some sour grapes about being five years behind the times on the whole food blogging thing. Whatever. My orange cat is way cuter than the one in the movie, even if he isn’t nearly as well-trained, and my black cat is too smart to do tricks on cue. Yay for my cats!
And while I’m all cheerful, thanks to happy cat thoughts, here’s a few more things I really liked about Julie & Julia:
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Totally passes the Bechdel test. As A.O. Scott wrote in his New York Times review of Julie and Julia, “this is a Hollywood movie about women that is not about the desperate pursuit of men.” Holy women as people, Batman! I accept.
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Awesome older women! I especially loved the scenes with Julia and her sister, as well as the cameo appearance of Irma Rombauer as played by Frances Sternhagen. Really, maybe the young characters were written to be the exotic fascinating “other” for older audience members, and the older characters were written to exert fascination on younger people? Except how can anybody not love Meryl/Julia?
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The happy partnership between the Childs (more about how it’s a rare movie about relationships that isn’t all fraught with angst al the time).
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Amanda Hesser as herself.
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Depiction of food as a source of basically pure joy, with only fleeting references to diet-type angst.
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Depiction of cooking as a learning process, and the delight that comes with making something new for the first time and having it turn out awesome. In fact, that last is a most TracyFood-appropriate note to leave this post on. The movie didn’t make me hungry — I was far too full of delicious Cuban diner food for that — but it did make me want to adventure-cook. Maybe that’s why I finally baked a cake yesterday… but that’s a post for another time.
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cj
