I got tickets to see an advance preview. It was just terrific. Meryl Streep was absolutely believeable and even my GF, who met JC, thought so. The two stories intertwined well though Amy Adams did not show the acting chops that Meryl displayed.
My prediction is that Streep wins best actress and Nora Ephron wins best adapted screenplay. The costume design may win as well.
I’m Not Gay, But… I really like Meryl Streep. It looks like an interesting movie, but one I might (20something manly man) have to be “forced” into watching. How much of a standard “chick flick” is it?
Did they cover Julia being a spy?
Yes, to some degree.
Skylark: I wouldn’t say it’s a “chick flick”. Anyone who is interested in food or Julia Child will find it fascinating.
You do mean Julie and Julia? Jules and Julia hasn’t been made yet, to the best of my knowledge… but I can see it. Gay man, Jules, tries to cash in on Julie’s blog idea and decides to cook his way through her cookbooks, not to write a blog, but to feed the men visiting his quaint Massachusetts B&B.
(BTW, I do not think that men who cook are gay… I’m marrying a chef.)
Well at least I din’t say Jim and Julia.
I read somewhere that Child was not impressed by the blog project, saying that it came across as a stunt that did not show much love for the food. Does the movie mention this?
Yes it does. It kinda kills the mood too.
The movie is about how the two projects (MTAOFC and the blog) changed the lives of the two participants more than it is about the food itself. That said, the love of food and cooking is presented very well.
Ok that actually sounds really interesting. The trailier makes it look pretty annoying, like a really doofus-y episode of Hell’s Kitchen. I was impressed by how Child-like (as opposed to child-like) Streep looks though!
Jules and Julia would be a movie I’d run to, if it was Jules from Pulp Fiction…
Hmm… Tarantino meets tartlets…
It’s hard to describe how good Streep is in this role. It could have gone wrong on so many levels: campy, annoying, inconvincing, but from the moment she opens her mouth she is Julia Child. My girlfriend met Julia Child on several occasions and she was impressed by the little things like her pattern of breathing.
There are several scenes of Julia with her sister, who is even more over-the-top. Absolutely hysterical.
I just saw it and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought Streep was intentionally a tiny bit over the top as she wasn’t playing the real life Julia Child but the Julia that existed in Julie’s mind as she was doing this project. The film shows her reading several biographies of Child.
I thought Amy Adams was, as always, adorable. I think she is a very good actress technically (her transition from a live-action cartoon to a real person in Enchanted deserved an Oscar nomination - far more than her much more one-dimensional role in the terribly over-rated Doubt), but more than acting talent, she is a movie star - someone you fall in love with for 90 minutes.
The man does know a tasty burger when he eats one.
I’ve read bits and pieces of Julie’s log. The trouble with Amy Adams in this is that she’s so darn engaging. You instantly love her as the sweet person she seems to be. The real Julie Powell is a lot edgier and not as sweet. She uses curse words throughout her blog.
The Julie / Julia Project
I saw it yesterday, and honestly, I thought Amy Adams’s character was whiny and annoying. I liked the Julia Child segments…they were fun and Meryl Streep did a good Julia Child, but I just wanted to slap Amy Adams. I hated the woman.
There was also no real conflict in the entire movie.
I read that Julia Child had read some of Julie Powell’s blog messages, (this was of course before Julia was called to the Great Kitchen In The Sky) and found Julie, or at least her writing, to be vulgar and offputting…
We saw the film yesterday and liked it a lot. Streep was, as usual, brilliant in the role and the story was nicely mixed between the two characters.
However, by the time the film was finished, we were starving! Watching all that food…my SO who is thin, but can eat like the proverbial horse, was literally salivating. I joked that some guys see a porno and want to go to a strip club, he watched this film and was planning on what to order at the restaurant.
Through a great stroke of fortune, my cousin is visiting this weekend and wanted to take us to Lucille’s (a great BBQ restaurant) after the movie. Needless to say, it was greatly appreciated and we ate as if we had not eaten in three weeks.
Great film, but either don’t go hungry or plan on eating immediately afterward!
I adored Meryl Streep as Julia! It was a great movie with many funny scenes, as well as many poignant ones.
It’s a great story of two women’s success stories.
I’m making Boeuf Bourgignon tomorrow. I hope I spelled that right! 
My husband went with me, and on the way out he told me, “You are the butter on my bread, and the breath in my life.” Awww!!!
So you really liked Amy Adams’s character? She seemed really whiny and unpleasant to me. There was also a scene at the end that a friend I saw it with pointed out to me. You see the years of work that Child went through to write the cookbook. She learns how to cook in spite of the woman at the school hating her, she has to deal with her husband being reassigned all over the place, her one collaborator slacks off on her, the one publishing house rejects the book as too long and encyclopedic, and so on, until finally in the end, a publisher accepts the book, and she’s Made It.
Julie Powell, on the other hand, writes a blog, and she ends up getting swamped by all these offers by publishers and TV networks. The contrast just bothers me some.