review of Julie & Julia

Last night Jonathan took me to see the movie Julie & Julia. (Thanks to our favorite babysitter, we had a real date night and even got to go out to dinner before the movie! That was really fun!) I wasn't sure what to expect from the movie, initially. I don't really enjoy reading movie reviews until after I've seen a movie. I hadn't read any books about Julia Child and confess I've never seen one of her cooking shows. The closest I've ever come to experiencing Mrs. Childs is through Bill Cosby's imitations of her (which are quite funny - you can watch the 1 1/2 min. clip of Cosby's impression here). That was the extent of my knowledge about Julia going in.

I had heard of the book Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen as it was making the rounds earlier. I picked up a copy of it once and flipped through it to get a feel for it and kept running into foul language issues and so I never read it. All that to say, I was the ignorant movie go-er last night.


To say I liked the movie is an understatement. As Jonathan said as we were walking out of the theatre, it appeared as if those making the movies were just having fun. Meryl Streep's portrayal of Julia Child made the whole audience laugh out loud numerous times. In fact, I never remember hearing an audience so engaged with the movie they were watching. I've seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the theatre, Narnia, Inkheart and Star Wars (the first three episodes) all touted as having received audible exclamations of delight from the viewers. I have never experienced any of this. However, last night people were roaring with laughter and just genuinely enjoying their evening, learning about how Julia Childs learned to cook French food and then turned around and shared her knowledge with others. Who would have thought food could be so funny? Or relaxing?

The movie is two hours long and while I typically find myself becoming antsy if I have to sit still for more than an hour, I did not tire of watching Meryl Streep's performance. It was grand fun! The disclaimers to the fun: there were a few foul words scattered about (3 or 4, I think) and two "too close for comfort" sexual scenes involved. Both were brief and thankfully left more to the imagination than anything else. That said, I think that the movie would have been over the top stellar had they not left anything to the imagination AT ALL by excluding those scenes all together. They were highly unnecessary to the story.

The top reasons I enjoyed this movie were:

1. It showed off an amazing marriage between Julia and her husband, Paul Childs. He was supportive, kind, funny, supportive, loving and supportive. He knew where her strengths were and he encouraged her in them.

2. Julia's deprecating humor. SO funny to have Julia Childs making fun of herself.

3. Julie, the woman who wants to learn how to cook like Julia and BE like Julia learns the value and importance of putting her marriage relationship ahead of her blogging goal. (Hmmm?)

4. Marriage. It really gave a good display of warm, friendly, funny marriages that had their problems alright but mostly showed of the strengths and stick-to-itveness that is so lacking in marriages that we see today.

Lovely movie, lovely woman. Jennifer recently watched this movie and wrote (another positive!) review of it over at 5 Minutes for Books. She also recommended that I pick up a copy of My Life in France and I think I shall take up her recommendation and do that. I'd love to know more about this altogether charming and fascinating woman.

In the meantime, I've been satisfying myself with a few YouTube clips today of the REAL Julia Childs. Here's a quick one for your viewing pleasure:



Here's another video but you'll have to CLICK HERE to see it or cut and paste this into your browser: (Youtube disabled the feed.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ohiUbQyDhk

(It's Julia Child talking about roasting chickens. Hilarious!)

Until next time,




Have a Happy Weekend!