by Dr. Cecelia Ford
Interviewed on NPR last week, the director Nora Ephron, said her eagerly awaited new film is about marriage as much as it is about food. Julie and Julia presents the parallel true stories of both Julia Child’s emergence— as a chef and a cookbook writer — and that of a contemporary young Queens woman named Julie Powell. Powell executed all 500 or so recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days —while writing and blogging about it, holding down a full-time office job, and attempting to maintain a relationship with her husband.
Inherent in this description is one glaring discrepancy in the two stories and the times they represent: the pace of life and how much it influences women’s lives in particular. Julia Child, whose experience occupies the whole of the 1950’s as depicted here, was able to cheerfully experiment with her developing interest in cooking at her own pace, and share it with her husband, clearly contributing to their passionate partnership. Julie, her twenty-first-century counterpart, is a picture of frenzied, tormented activity throughout the film; at the end she says that the experience has been wonderfully fulfilling, and she has managed to hang on to her marriage, but that it has been repeatedly stretched to the breaking point.
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I saw the movie last night and I was thoroughly disappointed. The movie had little substance because it was stretched thin over 2 hours. I was left in the theater wondering where my money had gone and what time it was when I discovered that Hollywood had begun to kill books in overdrive. I give this movie 3 1/2 stars. I don't recommend spending over $6 for this movie.
I haven't gone to see the movie yet so I cannot say anything about that. However the book describes a woman who was in a desperate situation where she had lost herself and was already questioning her marriage, because she felt stuck. She decided to take julia's cookbook and cook her way through it because she thought it would give her time to process her life, and teach her something about herself. The book wa amazing