★
www.starescapes.net
Aug. 7-13, 2009
11
JULIE & JULIA HHHH RATING: PG-13 for brief strong language and some sensuality RUNNING TIME: 2:00 STARRING: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina, Jane Lynch
By Roger Moore The Orlando Sentinel
Special to The Star
Amy Adams as Julie Powell in Columbia Pictures’ ‘Julie & Julia.’
feast on these flicks Movies guaranteed to make you hungry: n Babette’s Feast (1987) — Blue cheese, papaya, grapes and pineapple; buckwheat cakes with caviar and sour cream; turtle soup; and rum sponge cake with figs and glaceed fruits — such is the menu in Gabriel Axel’s Danish feature about the indelible link between the spiritual and
‘Julie & Julia’ delightful, funny
the culinary. n Big Night (1996) — Two restaurant-running brothers — one of whom is a kitchen genius who refuses to compromise — stake everything they have on one spectacular evening of Italian delicacies (the tub-sized timpano being the coup de grace). n Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) — Ang Lee’s celebra-
tion of Chinese family and cuisine looks as good as great food tastes. It’s not egg rolls you’ll be craving. n Ratatouille (2007) — He may be a rodent, but Remy, the furry hero of this animated Pixar feature, personifies the chef as artist, who embodies the passion behind all epic cooking, and even epic eating.
Julie & Julia is a gloriously frothy confection, a late summer delight built on Meryl Streep’s hilarious impersonation of “The French Chef,” Julia Child. The comedy about a would-be writer’s attempt to cook her way through Child’s culture-changing cookbook sees Nora Ephron return to her Sleepless in Seattle form. She combined Julie Powell’s book on her quest to “be like Julia” and Child’s own memoir of her years in France to create a movie that engages every time it focuses on Julie (Amy Adams, sweet as ever) in her Queens, N.Y. kitchen, and tickles every moment it flashes back to Julia’s struggles to learn French, learn French cuisine and write the cookbook that taught America “Bon appetit!” Julie was living in quiet desperation, with a thankless job dealing with irate, grieving New Yorkers over plans to replace The World Trade Center. But she liked to cook. Her husband (Chris Messina, solid support) suggests a blog. And Julie comes up with a task, the chance “to finally finish something” in her life. She will follow the 524 recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, cook them all within a year, and blog about it. As Julie goes through this culinary metamorphosis we skip back to the late 1940s, when newlywed Julia Child (Stanley Tucci is spot-on perfect as her droll husband, Paul) moved to Paris and found her life’s calling. The tall, loud woman with the silly, fluty voice, boundless enthusiasm and adorably self-deprecating wit comes back to life in Streep’s hands. Virtually every time she opens her mouth as “Joooooolia” she lands a laugh. Streep even plays “tall,” a neat trick. Through her performance we realize, as Julie did, the truth in her husband’s don’t-be-intimidated-bythe-great-cook pep talk. “Julia Child wasn’t always Julia Child.” Another coup — landing the towering comedienne Jane Lynch (Role Models) as Julia’s sister. She holds her own with Streep and then some. Every bit of casting works so well that even slower moments sing.
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we know if we’re doing Julia or Dan Aykroyd?” Aykroyd’s high-pitched, hemorrhaging Julia Stepchild of Saturday Night Live fame remains indelible enough to be included in the film. But in addition to her mother, Streep said, her Julia was based partly on Powell’s elevated image of the older woman. One truly angelic thing in Julie & Julia is Paul Child, who, as played by Tucci, is that rare thing in a modern story — a selfless, supportive husband, in this case one born considerably before such qualities were even considered, much less considered assets. He’s positively ... “Nice?” Ephron said. “I know, yes, I know. Well, I know nice men. But that was a true thing for both of those women, that both Eric and Paul were nice. I didn’t have to change either of those guys, they were fantastically nice guys. You don’t think there were nice men in the 1950s?” The ’50s, yes; ’50s movies, not so much. Tucci and Streep shared the screen in The Devil Wears Prada, and when asked what it’s like being in another “chick flick” with the actress, Tucci laughed out loud. “I gotta say, a lot of guys come up and say, ‘Oh my God, I loved that movie. I crossed some threshold. But this is different. I felt like I was making this little, intimate movie about two people, and it was very comfortable, you never felt anyone was working at cross-purposes. And Nora knew how to tell both stories truthfully. And besides, everybody loves food. People are going to go to the movie because they love food. And they love to see people eat.”