Julie & Julia?

So last night I kicked back with Julie & Julia. I’ve been told multiple times to watch it, but I have to say, I didn’t love it!

Meryl Streep is always an amazing actress, but I don’t think even her abilities could save the movie. Were we supposed to feel sympathy for Julie, played by Amy Acker? Mostly I just felt that she was extremely obnoxious. The splices between Julia Childs and Julie just didn’t seem to fit to me.

Also, I expected to be wowed and made hungry by all the food in the movie, but it was no Waitress. Waitress makes you want to go straight from the theater to your kitchen and to start cranking out pies. Maybe pies speak to me personally more than Beef Bourguignon?

Please tell me if I was missing something here. It did make me wish for some more formal training in the kitchen and a larger repertoire for cooking – but do I really need to know how to bone a duck? It’s an interesting question that a lot of food bloggers and modern cooks probably wonder. Do you have to be the Iron Chef, able to make a meal with any sort of flavor and food item that’s thrown at you, in order to be a good cook?

4 Responses to “Julie & Julia?”

  1. Lindsey says:

    I liked the movie a lot more than I did after I actually read Julie’s real blog. She’s kind of a bitch and her husband left her for a bit because she cheated on him…not because of a little fight. I liked the movie version of her better. Plus, I adore Amy Acker. However, that’s not who plays Julie. It’s Amy Adams. 🙂

  2. Kristin says:

    I really enjoyed the Julia parts, especially the relationship with Julia and her husband. I was always disappointed when it went back to Julie. Julia Child is so fascinating that I wish they would me a whole movie about her!

    The movie just made me want to eat butter.

  3. Chef Edwin says:

    Nah, I wouldn’t say so. Plenty of people cook just from written or memorized recipes and I wouldn’t call them “bad” cooks. Iron chefs aren’t good cooks, they’re amazing cooks. They’re chefs (cook to the millionth power). It’s all where you put good on the scale, I suppose.

  4. Kat says:

    I haven’t seen the movie but I did read both books (Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia, and My Life in France by Julia Child), and honestly… I’m sure Ms. Powell is a lovely person, but she’s not my favorite author. She kept saying things that shocked me – not in a “wow, look what she did!” way, but in a “why would you tell the entire world that you want to cheat on your husband?” way. The whole book made me rather uncomfortable, both by her tendency to over-share personal details and by the way she frequently berated her husband.

    My Life In France, however, was awesome. I have a huge respect for Julia Child now (not that I didn’t before – more that I never really thought about it), and I will probably read it again. I’m going to watch the movie when I have time, and see if it changes anything.