Flutterby™! : Julie & Julia

There's been a lot of helping other people happening recently, so yesterday evening Charlene and I took some time to ourselves. One of our activities was hopping on the bike and pedaling over to the theater to see Julie and Julia. It's the new Nora Ephron film, riffing on a book by Julie Powell which appears to be either titled Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously or Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, an expansion of the blog The Julie/Julia Project.

Let's get the preliminaries out of the way: We liked the movie, and will probably see it again when it comes out on DVD. Meryl Streep does a damned good job at capturing Julia Child in all her goofy glory, and we laughed and cheered at her successes.

Many reviewers have complained that the scenes with Julie, played by Amy Adams, drag the movie down a bit, but I've got a different interpretation: This is the meanest Nora Ephron film ever, and the reason the Julie scenes don't move along is that Ephron views the media sensation that Julie became, with her whiny New York City sensibilities and attitudes, as a bumbling lightweight next to the accomplishments of Julia Child. Played this way the film isn't as lighthearted, it's comparing a woman who viewed her recipes as a simplified version of a cuisine she poured her heart into learning to a woman who thought cooking those recipes was a great success. The film then becomes a lighthearted hagiography of Julia Child(which I'm not at all averse to, and I'm now hoping I can rent more of her video from the store rather than buying DVDs, but I will if I have to), and a dark condemnation of the popular attitudes of celebrity.

No matter how its viewed, we enjoyed it a lot. And wondered how the lobsters fit into the "No animals were harmed during the making of this film" statement...