Movie summary of Julie & Julia by Michael the Moviegoer.
JULIE & JULIA = ***
“Two Many Chefs…”
Meryl Streep gives a deliciously inspired performance as Julia Child, TV’s wacky French Chef and author of “Mastering The Art Of French Cooking”. Streep is such a great actress that one might assume she upstages the other actors she performs with. But it’s because she’s so good at her craft that she always seamlessly blends in with all the actors in her scenes. That’s why in last year’s “Doubt”, newcomer Amy Adams’ performance was equally as strong as Streep’s.
But here in “Julie & Julia”, Amy Adams plays a New Yorker writing a blog about cooking all of the recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook. Adams is super-adorable in all of her scenes, but she never shares the screen with Streep and that puts her at a disadvantage. Streep’s Julia Child performance is so spectacular that I wanted the whole movie to be about Child. So each cut back to Adams began to get annoying. And yet, Adams is still very good here in her role as blogger Julie Powell.
Despite this, director Nora Ephron has managed to create a truly enjoyable film by telling two true stories that are alternately connected and disconnected. But both sections evoke a deeply passionate love of good food and the fine art of creating it.
If there isn’t yet a quota on the number of Oscar nominations an actress can get, Meryl Streep’s performance as Julia Child should be recognized as yet another in a series of multiple career-defining roles for this amazing performer.
DVD Double-Feature: “Cross Creek” and “Julie & Julia” are about as different as “Jaws” and “Finding Nemo”. But the two films do share one common thread. They are both true stories about women authors struggling to get their first books published. In “Julie & Julia” Meryl Streep plays Julia Child during the years she was writing and trying to publish her book about French cooking. In “Cross Creek”, Mary Steenburgen plays Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of “The Yearling”. After a series of un-published fiction, a frustrated Rawlings moves to Cross Creek and begins writing about her life there, which leads to her finding her own voice as an author.
Michael The Moviegoer
