One wonderful movie
I did go see 'Julie and Julia' yesterday. I loved it. We went to the theater and I was the youngest person there!! There was a whole crowd of white-haired ladies. It was wonderful to see that if the movie producers will make an intelligent movie (without guns, car chases and gratuitous sex) people will come. And this is an intelligent, funny movie. It's based on Julie Powell's book of the same title, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, (retitled My Year of Cooking Dangerously on the paperback version. I think I need to read this now too!!) which came from a blog she started in 2002, which was about her year of following the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. From beginning to end, this was a beautiful movie. My mother - who watched Julia Child on tv in the 1970's, so is familiar with her voice and mannerisms, said that Meryl Streep does a marvellous, perfect job recreating Julia Child in the movie. The wonderful actor Stanley Tucci plays her husband, Paul. Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, and she is also wonderful as the young woman who decides she needs a goal in her life, because she is nearing thirty and hasn't finished anything, since her first novel was unpublished.
I really loved this movie. It was also about writing, and getting published, and most of all, each part was about a person who was finding and doing what she loved. Julia Child always loved to eat, so she decided to go to Cordon Bleu while in Paris, to learn how to cook. Julie Powell loved to cook, and decided to challenge herself by following her favourite chef and master French cooking. The dialogue was really good -it was people talking to eachother, it was about marriages and love and cooking, and how life interferes - Paul was a diplomat, and kept getting posted to far-flung cities as Julia tried to finish her book. It took her 8 years to do Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and that wasn't the original title; her agent at Little, Brown came up with it. The acting - very very good. Dialogue - excellent. Sometimes things were hinted at, or left unsaid, which is how we do talk in real life. And best of all - there was so much humour, so much delightful wit and joy in this movie. Oh, and the real star was the the cooking. The food. The love of cooking, of preparing food that is delicious to eat.
And, as I expected, I came out of the movie wanting to buy a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. " It's time I learned," I said to my mother. She said she would leave me her copy.....
So today, I am thinking over the things I love to do, and I'm really glad I challenged myself to read 100 books this year. It may not sound like a lot of work or books read, but it is a challenge, and it is involving some lifestyle changes - less tv, less doing things that I don't want to do, in order for me to make more time to read.
Do you have something that you like to do, Gentle Reader, that you would like to do more of, or challenge yourself in some way?
Other reviews: Bibliohistoria
