Thoughts on Julie and Julia The Movie
I recently finished the 2005 book so this affected my thoughts about the movie. I really enjoyed the Julia-Paul segments —those were just sketched very faintly in the book. Meryl Streep did her magic trick of disappearing....I liked that they reproduced some of the video clips with her in them.... I liked that Stanley Tucci was cast for this part. He underplayed it, as he should have; and I liked that I had first seen him in The Big Night (about FOOD FOOD FOOD). Amy Adams was adorable --- not bitchy enough. I guess Nora Ephron thought that Julie’s language and slightly slutty friends could be cleaned up out of the movie so it could be PG, but I missed the outrageous bits. I missed Julie’s brother and her friends. (Their stories advanced along with Julie’s, so the book seemed more multi-dimensional). But I think the movie got across the idea that she couldn’t do it all alone and that friends were part of the mix. Certain parts were hysterically funny. But maybe there was just a bit too much gloss or sentimentality....can’t quite put my finger on it. Too much kissing? The music? The cat? I’m just not sure Julie Powell’s brand of humor could come across in this form. It’s not just the incidents that happened, it’s the way she chose to describe them, with hyperbole and lots of swearing....that made the book so funny. (At least the first third....then the novelty starts to wear off). I appreciated the choice of just keeping her mom as a voice on the phone. But in the book, moving day involved her parents and an ongoing fiasco involving a couch that never made it into the apartment and stayed in the hallway of the new loft for months, while her friend (who was supposed to pick it up before it got moved) tried various movers that always held her up at the last moment.
Guess you can’t collapse a year of trying, funny, tragic, challenging moments into two hours....just can’t be done! So many choices have to be made when doing a screenplay like this and no one is going to be happy with them all. But it didn’t stop me from enjoying it, and I really do want to read about Julia. You also can’t really appreciate fully her brand of genius and what she did until you read her writing and master (or flub) the recipes (in MtAoFC) --- which is what Julie did, of course! I got out Roxanne’s copy of the book and read some of it out loud to a friend. It is in parts very very funny. I also looked up about beating egg whites because the other day I tried to beat some and they failed to beat. I knew it was because the yolk got into it (even though I repeated to myself beforehand —be very very careful, don’t get the yolks into the whites!!!) but I also did several other things wrong. Didn’t bring them to room temperature, didn’t use a whisk. Shameful. One must go back to the basics!!!
