Notes on Julie & Julia

December 17, 2009 / Jen Miller / /

Last night, I watched Julie & Julia, the movie based on both Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously and My Life in France

I started this blog by reading Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (you can read that first review here).

I understand now why the publication of Julie Powell’s follow up book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, was delayed until December. As I’ve also written here, I hated the book for a lot of reasons, and I couldn’t watch the movie without remembering:

1. How much I hated Cleaving.
2. What Powell eventually did to her husband. I know that the happy ending didn’t really happen, and that all the problems simmering in their marriage exploded thereafter.

I also watched You've Got Mailover the weekend, another Nora Ephron film. I don’t know if it’s the acting or what, but that was a much more clever film. Julie & Julia didn’t have that same charm. I also agree with Joy Manning that Amy Adams was way too skinny for the role. Nora, Nora, Nora. If you wanted to make a movie about people eating (as she has said in interviews), make it look like they eat!

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Jen Miller

Jen Miller

Jen A. Miller is a an author and freelance writer. Her memoir, Running a Love Story, was a Philadelphia Inquirer best book of the year. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, SELF, Buzzfeed and the Guardian, among others.

1 Comment

  1. Garry on December 27, 2009 at 9:23 am

    After hearing about the disaster that is Cleaving, I regret that I saw J&J after hearing about the personal stories that followed. I was entertained by the movie, especially the Julia parts, but the portrayal of the marriage between Julie and Eric was never without a sense of foreboding. I was always thinking about how fake it all was! Even though it is a movie and it is supposed to be fake! I guess Julia Child was right about Julie Powell after all.

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