Julie & Julia (2009)

Director: Nora Ephron 
Stars: Amy Adams, Meryl Streep, Chris Messina (Full Cast)
Studio: Columbia Pictures

 

The Plot: Frustrated secretary Julie Powell (Adams) tries to shake up her life by chronicling her attempt to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’sMastering the Art of French Cooking in a year’s time.

 

THE BUZZ: Another blogger gets a chance to turn her Internet archive into a motion picture, but the real-life Julie Powell has a leg up on the Diablo Codys of the writing world, since her memoir Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen became an enduring best seller since its debut in 2005. Two things I’m worried about here: The stiff hand of writer-director Nora Ephron (Bewitched) and the decision to cut back and forth between Powell’s travails with marrowbones and lotsa butter and Julia Child’s life circa 1949. But here’s a question: Has Amy Adams been styled to resemble Cynthia Nixon, and does it look like the contemporary half of the movie was filmed in Carrie Bradshaw’s old apartment?

 

Based on Julie Powell’s book “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul. Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that’s going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother’s dog-eared copy of Julia Child’s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year.

At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crepes, she realizes there’s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. With Julia’s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver. And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life’s ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.

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