A Recommendation.......

This afternoon, the lady I aide and I went to see the movie "Julie and Julia". It was wonderful!Funny, enlightening and very entertaining!

Meryll Streep wonderfully plays The famous Julia Child. Her husband, Paul (no, not the soccer player-wrong era) is portrayed by Stanley Tucci.

In 2002, a Queens woman named Julie Powell decided to
make all the recipes in "Mastering the Art of French
Cooking", co-authored by Child, and blog about her Herculean and epicurean efforts. Powell imposed on herself a year's deadline: 524 recipes in 365 days. She was drowning in her mundane job, and cooking and the blogging saves her! Her dream is to actually meet the famous Julia Child, who was 90 years old in 2002.

Julie Powell is played by Amy Adams and her husband, Eric, is played by Chris Messina.

The tale twins the two women's lives, even though they are decades apart. It was well done, and did not lull too much at anytime.

It shows Julia and Paul Child moving into a flat in Paris, where he is assigned a 4 year gig as a Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. Julia has apparently quit her job as a gov't. worker, where she met Paul, to be a housewife. But, she is bored with that and needs to find something to do. She tries her hand at hat making, but is completely miserable. So, she decides to go to cooking school. She ends up being the only woman in the class at the now prestigious Cordon-Bleu.
The disagreeable owner of the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, for instance,
informs Child: "I must tell you, you have no real talent for cooking, but the Americans will never know the difference."

Powell, meanwhile, is a secretary at a government agency charged with rebuilding the World Trade Center site and as she tells a caller, "I'm just a person in a cubicle and I'm doing the best I can." That goes double for her home, a 900 square foot apartment above a pizza parlor in Queens, where she's trying to flip omelets without flipping out.

With the help of help of high heels and unnaturally low kitchen fixtures, Streep appears closer to Child's height of 6 foot 2. She also adopts or mimics a thicker midsection, frowsier brown hair, a lower voice and the ability to be moved almost to tears by superb food.

When Julie's husband, Eric (Chris Messina), accuses her of being narcissistic and forbids her from writing on her blog about a tiff they have, he comes across as unreasonable ... and a bit of a jerk. However, he convincingly devours bruschetta as if he were starving; neither ever seems to gain any or much weight, however.

As Julie's blog gains readers and media attention, Julia masters the art of French cooking with a little help from her beloved husband, an American Foreign Service officer, Paul and friends and co-authors, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. It took the 3 women 8 years to write the book!

The ending, which I will not give away, is a great one but did make me tear up a wee little bit. I would go see this movie a second time.

I learned so much about Julia Child it was amazing. She and Paul didn't marry until she was 40 and he was 50. She was a virgin when she got married. She had a sister, taller than she, who also married a man shorter than herself. She started out making women's hats. Thank goodness for all of us, she hated it! She pioneered television cooking shows. Because of her, (indirectly) we now have the food network!

But tell me. Why do they list the start time of the movie as 1:30, and the previews don't start till 1:35 or so, then you have 25 minutes of them?!!!

The next movie I want to see is The Proposal starring Sandra Bullock..............