Notes on Julie & Julia
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!
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.