Julie and Julia

Well, it’s only been about twenty hours since my last review, but sometimes I will do reviews this quickly. If you read my last blog (The Time Traveler’s Wife) then you will already know what movie is next.

We began watching Julie and Julia this afternoon. I didn’t think I’d care for it much being that I’m not much of an Amy Adams fan, and also it looked rather dull. I was still interested in watching in for the food aspect, as I enjoy home cooking myself. When Julie and Julia came to theaters, my mother wanted to see it, but I refused because, like I said earlier, it looked rather dull. Well, I must say that I’m quite glad that I decided to go against my instincts and sit through the two hour long movie.

It begins in 1949 Paris with a young(ish) Julia Child and her husband Paul going to France because Paul has been sent there for a four year job at the American Embassy. Julia is lost, not really knowing what to do with herself in Paris, and after thinking about it for a while, she decides to take a cooking class. She is in a beginners cooking class and she decides to go be in a professional cooking class full of French men.

Shortly before that, the movie skips ahead to the year 2002 to a young couple named Julie and Eric moving to a small apartment above a pizzeria. Julie is a government worker and is tired of her job. She enjoys cooking and her husband convinces her to start a blog about cooking. So, Julie decides to start a blog talking about her adventures in making all 524 recipes in the Julia Child cook book, Mastering The Art of French Cooking, in 365 days (quite coincidentally, she sets her blog up at BlogSpot).

It goes back and shows Julia learning how to cook and getting better at it. Then she meets a couple other ladies who are trying to publish a recipe book and they ask her to join her in their writing.

The movie keeps jumping back and forth between 2002 and the 1950’s-1970’s. They did it perfectly in my opinion because they give you just the right amount of each character. When I would be watching Julia learning to cook and writing her book, after ten minutes or so, I would begin to wonder when it would go back to Julie, and then it would go to her almost immediately.

The editing wasn’t the best. There were moments where I felt the scene cut away too quickly, or not quick enough. The cinematography was quite brilliantly done, I truly believed what I was watching. The cast was well-chosen and the acting talent fantastic. It had a lot of humor where needed and it made me laugh hard enough that I had to pause the movie. It also had the right amount of emotion to it to make it full of heart.

This was definitely one of 2009’s higher-caliber movies. I give it an 8 out of 10.