Electric Shadow

Boeuf

I've watched Julie & Julia 2.5 times. The public advance screening that press was invited to was plagued by a projection fuck-up. They put on the fourth reel upside down and backwards just as I was going along with the crowd and enjoying it. I watched the Blu-ray as soon as it arrived and then watched it again when my in-laws came into town a couple of weeks ago.


I'm a sucker for movies that involve cooking, and I'm generally too kind and forgiving to them so long as the cooking sequences are utterly pornographic. Even with that aside, I like the movie just fine. As Julie Powell's husband remarks at one point about her Boeuf Bourguignon, I found it a little bland in places, but it went down easily. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are utter heaven, and the duo of Amy Adams and Chris Messina are appropriately mundane and ordinary. I'm glad to see Jane Lynch getting this level of exposure.

The juxtaposition of the legend and the admirer, I gather, was just too easy to brush off for the majority of online critics to resist. Whether they engage in the Julie Powell kind of obsessiveness as portrayed in the movie, or are merely accused of it, the relationship here just cut to close, I think. The movie is general audience, non-arthouse frou frou stuff with dashes of committed relationship issues, so that may also play a part.

The three half-hour(ish) featurettes (Secret Ingredients, Family & Friends Remember Julia Child, and Julia's Kitchen) are really meaty and substantive. Ingredients is a making-of, Family & Friends has tons of interviews about the French Chef, and Julia's Kitchen is all about the transfer of Mrs. Child's famous kitchen to the Smithsonian. The commentary is very...quiet. There's also a pile of cooking lessons done by Child, Jacques Pepin, Suzanne Goin, and various others. The BD-Live-requiring "movieIQ" feature displays recipes on-screen and allows you to "email them to friends". I just used it grab the recipes. The DVD includes only Secret Ingredients and the commentary track, so if you're buying or renting, go for the Blu-ray.