Bon Appétit!

While the boy is away, the parents will play. Two nights ago it was all-you-can-eat ribs night at Stanley’s and last night was movie night. The usual procedure for movie night is that one of us will throw out several movies that they would like to see and the other chooses from the approved movie list. The wife suggested Funny People, The Hangover and Julie & Julia.  I choose the chick flick, because it involved blogging and it would get me out of seeing The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Julie & Julia is the story about a young failed novelist — god, I’m getting old as I call someone turning 30 young — and her quest to do something with her life. Besides loving her too perfect husband, she loves writing and cooking, consequently, she chooses to blog her way, recipe by recipe, through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

From the previews, I knew that Meryl Streep plays Julia Child,  making Julie & Julia a movie with two distinct storylines which is a difficult thing to do — The Godfather II and Crimes and Misdemeanors do this very well. (I’m not holding Julie & Julia up to these works, I’m just saying director Nora Ephron pulls it off).

This is not a movie about blogging, though they seem to get blogging as right as Hollywood can. You see Julie’s frustration at blogging and all the work that goes into a post. What you don’t see, thankfully, is a cheesy music montage of Julie cooking meals and typing posts over several months.  Amy Adams and Chris Messina, who play the wife and husband who embark on this blog quest, do an adequate job, but nothing more than that. BTW, the wife cooks and types, while the husband only eats.

But for me, this is Meryl Streep’s movie. Streep brings to life a truly larger-than-life woman — a woman I have only known as TV cook with an annoying voice and as an author of an incredibly large cookbook that I have never opened. But after watching Streep’s performance and Stanly Tucci’s sublime work as Julia’s husband, Paul Child, I came away with the desire to cook and eat lots of French food, drink glass after glass of red wine,  and add butter to everything I cook.