DOWN (Dinner Out With Nerds) report: Julie and Julia

Recently we wanted to see Inglorious Basterds, but that started at 10pm; with previews, it would have let out well after midnight. So instead we saw Julie and Julia, which started earlier and is a shorter movie. It’s mandatory for all reviews of this movie to have food puns, consider yourself warned. Personally, my own food skills mostly run towards eating it, and (to steal a joke), with my taste buds I could be the Food Editor for Guns and Ammo magazine.

Briefly, Julie and Julia tastes great, but an hour later you’re hungry again. The bad news: It’s really a documentary. The plot is therefore simple and obvious, the lives of two women (and their husbands). Important incidents in their lives are portrayed: sometimes they affect everything downstream, and sometimes they’re there only because they really happened. We learn that Julia Child was a virgin when she married. And so...? Well, this is an important fact for a documentary. It has no effect on the rest of the movie at all. Her husband was harrassed by McCarthyites during the 1950s? It’s a rather distressing ten minutes of the film, and the couple is shown reassuring each other, and so... well, that’s it. Julia’s relationship with her husband is always the same. At the end, she dies, and her kitchen is preserved forever in the Smithsonian.

Julie actually grows more during the film (easier to do if you’re in your 20s or 30s). Her relationship with her husband is tested and becomes deeper, and her struggle to order her life by duplicating Julia’s 524 recipes in 365 days strengthens and enriches her personality, at least a little. Perhaps that’s the real point of this movie.

On the other hand, the food looks fantastic. And there’s lots of it — it’s the third protagonist — and all joyous. The individual scenes are well done. Meryl Streep does an outstanding Julia Child, and Amy Adams is majorly cute. Women will love this movie as an example to their husbands or boyfriends of how men should always be loving, thoughtful, and supporting. It’s definitely a fun movie; they even showed the famous Saturday Night Live parody of Child’s TV show. Maybe I shouldn’t be overthinking it.