Julie and Julia

When I got back from Georgetown, I got off the metro in Silver Spring and walked a few blocks up the street to the gorgeous AFI Silver Theater, the flagship theater of the American Film Institute. I had visited it last fall when I was here, but I had seen Miracle at St. Anna there, which I counted as one of my biggest disappointments of the year. I figured Julie and Julia would give me a chance to redeem that experience, and it mostly did. It definitely is one of the more enjoyable movies of the summer, if not one of the better ones.

The acting is superb on the part of Streep and Adams (teamed up once again). Streep disappears into her role as Julia Child utterly.

The story is rather unique in that it is actually two completely different stories, taking place decades apart, which have no explicit connection to each other. This was actually quite a fresh way of approaching the narrative, and I thought it worked pretty well.

I could write a lot of good things about this movie, including the direction by Nora Ephron. On the narrative level, it came a little bit apart in the Third Act. This is probably because the story was so lighthearted and fun, that it seemed like the writers almost had to invent somewhat phony difficulties for the characters to encounter (especially Adams' Julie). For some reason, her husband no longer likes her weird project. It came out of the blue. The big crisis was that someone cancels a dinner invitation?

And in the end, we get no real resolution of the Julie-Julia connection (because in real life Julia Child died before there could be one). But it feels a little awkward. I wish they could have found a little bit better way to end both stories that came completeness to how fun the movie was to watch.

And it was fun, especially if you like food. A lot of really good fun scenes. Yum. Makes me hungry.