BEFORE: Kicking off the home stretch - 100 more movies before I take a break for a few months. The list is still bigger than I'd like (279 films) but maybe in the next 100 days I can get it close to 200. From Meryl Streep as a Danish author to Streep as cookbok author (and chef) Julia Child.
THE PLOT: Julia Child's story of her start in the cooking profession is intertwined with blogger Julie Powell's 2002 challenge to cook all the recipes in Child's first book.
AFTER: Yes, half the story here is about a blogger working her way through a cookbook, one or two recipes a day. I wasn't sure that I'd find something here that I could relate to. Who does stuff like that?
I mean, sure, lots of people write books, and cookbooks, and screenplays for that matter - and a lot of people wonder if what they're doing is worthwhile, and whether anyone out in the world's going to be interested. How arrogant it is for anyone to assume that their ramblings will have any impact, or even any entertainment value?
I started out thinking this would be a week of classy films, since Streep's the record holder for Oscar nominations (16) - then after the last three films I thought the theme was more like adultery and betrayal. But the real theme this week seems to be that of self-obsession. The lovers in "It's Complicated" and "She-Devil" who were only concerned with their own pleasure, and Karen Blixen wondering when the universe would deliver the love of her life to her door. Now we've got a blogger, thinking that all of her thoughts are worthy of being published on the internet, and then in a book?
God, I hate self-absorbed people. Now, where's MY book deal? Where's the movie about ME?
All kidding aside, I'm down with a lot of what's seen here, including great food (though I don't have much time for the cooking of it, I do my fair share of eating it) and how hard it is to keep forging ahead on a seemingly endless project - but thank God for my OCD that forces me to keep organizing and rating things. And I know how a vanity project like this can consume a person's time and put a strain on a marriage (but apparently so can infidelity - though Julie's cheating was covered in her 2nd book, and not mentioned in this film).
So congratulations to Julie for doing all that cooking, and for Julia for doing all that cooking AND writing AND all that secret spy stuff she did during WWII that she was always too humble to brag about. No, I'm serious - you can look it up.
Also starring Amy Adams (last seen in "Catch Me If You Can"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Jury Duty"), Chris Messina (last seen in "Away We Go"), with cameos from Jane Lynch (last seen in "Role Models"), Mary Lynn Rajskub (last seen in "Firewall"), Frances Sternhagen (last seen in "Misery"), Deborah Rush (last seen in "She-Devil", but I still confuse her with Rachael Harris and/or Leslie Mann), Mary Kay Place (last seen in "It's Complicated") as the voice of Julie's mother, and Dan Aykroyd as himself.
RATING: 7 out of 10 poached eggs
I was interested in Julia's story but not very interested in Julie's. That was my problem with the film. It's hard to fictionalize Julie's blog without making her seem silly. A movie wants there to be a real emotional arc and the quickest way to get there is to have Julie find inspiration and catharsis for her own life as she makes her way through the cookbook.
ReplyDeleteThis makes her seem silly.
Have you undergone a catharsis by reviewing a movie a day for nearly three years? People wouldn't "get" it if they made a movie out of this undertaking because no producer would accept "This man is exceptionally well organized and derives great pleasure from solving the puzzles involved in accomplishing difficult, tangible goals." At no point was there a madcap race to get to a movie theater at 10 PM because he miscounted and if he _doesn't_ see a movie and post about it before midnight, then he'll lose his $14,000,000 inheritance that his loony movie-loving uncle left him in his will.
(Dramatic Act Three scene: "Dammit John! Did it ever occur to you that this obsession with seeing movies has taken you out of the audience of the greatest show there is? YOUR CHILD'S LIFE!")
(Sobs, runs out of house)
(John eyes the checklist in his hand. He's FEEEELLLLINNNG the words!)
Back to the movie. It doesn't help matters that by all accounts, Julie did this blog as a lark and a larf and with a side-hope that this stunt would jumpstart her career. The movie obliquely references Julia Child's reaction to the blog but doesn't get specific. She had little respect for the project, correctly pegging it as a gimmick for a blog and sussing Julie as someone with little real interest in cooking.
You're generally better off doing things that are real than reality-based stunts.
I was once having lunch at Legal Seafoods in Kendall Square. Suddenly, applause rolled in like a wave, preceded with hushed muttering "Why are those people five tables away applauding?"
Yes, Julia Child had entered the room. Her mere presence made the waiters want to be better waiters, the cooks and chefs want to be better cooks and chefs, the hostess to be a better hostess...even the customers wanted to be better customers. It was a huge and undeniable outpouring of love.
(But hey, if the first line in your obit is "He's best known for sticking a toy car up his ass in a movie" or "He killed himself and a passenger drunk-driving at 130 miles an hour" I suppose that's a legacy, too.)
Yeah, I kind of forgot to review this as a narrative film because I was more interested in the process than in any character development or catharsis. Normally I hate the non-linear storytelling, but since this was more of a "split" narrative, and each of the two sections moved forward linearly, I didn't mind it so much.
ReplyDeleteMy call for a book deal was facetious, I thought you would have picked up on that. I made Movie Year 1 and Movie Year 2 into books using Blog2Print, so I'm already a published author, in terms of the modern age.
I did appreciate that there were some comparisons drawn between Julie writing her blog and Julia writing her first cookbook. That made the story a little more universal. But drawing a connection between Julie and myself, just because I'm blogging about her movie about blogging about cooking, just seemed a little too meta.
And you're right, it seems a bit silly to imply a mystical connection between Julie and Julia just because she followed her recipes. If I were to watch every Woody Allen film back-to-back, it might give me a greater appreciation or understanding of the man's work, but it wouldn't exactly make us blood brothers. By the same token, the Woodman might frown upon such an exercise, and he'd be within his rights to do so.
I suspect that any injected catharsis or watershed moments in this film were added to counteract the fact that the writing process is not very visual - so a movie about a writer writing would usually be very boring indeed, unless that movie is "Misery".
Have I undergone a catharsis, after 900 films? Not unless you count becoming a nocturnal creature with even worse sleeping habits than before. This was done to increase my movie knowledge, and that's an ongoing process. My trivia team, though, has benefited - on the last movie-based visual round, I scored 30 out of 30.
My ability to converse about films has been amplified, plus I now know the difference between actors Peter Saarsgard and Stellan Skarsgard. That's about it.
But, in deference to the musical "Gypsy", I didn't start blogging until I had a gimmick. Cause I heard that you need one of those.
Oh, I didn't think you were serious about wanting a book or a movie deal. I was just saying that if Hollywood optioned your blog, they'd wind up recasting your blog as the engine of a Hero's Journey or some other Campbellian/Robert McKee script-formula nonsense.
ReplyDeleteThe big problem with the film is that they shuffled together a lightweight biopic and a by-the-numbers Spunky Young Woman Finds And Defines Herself flick. They could have made a great Julia Child biography or a solid (if mediocre) light comedy if they'd just focused on what they wanted.
Agreed - it seems like someone optioned the "Julie" story, and then realized that by itself it wasn't enough to carry a movie, so they (wisely?) optioned another book, Julia Child's "My Life in France".
ReplyDeleteThen they were surgically intertwined, but I guess the Frankenstein-like result didn't bother me as much.