Julie & Julia (Ephron, 2009) is streaming on Prime Video
Back in the very early days of ‘blogging’, Julie Powell took on the enormous challenge of cooking – and writing about – every recipe in Julia Childs’ famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Those blogs were turned into a book and then, in 2009, the book was turned into a successful film.
In October 2009, I wrote this about it:
Nora Ephron’s new film Julie & Julia skilfully merges the two stories, freely noting the parallels between them, and managing to produce a warm and witty film that honours the remarkable Child.
She’s aided in this endeavour by the formidable Meryl Streep: tottering around on huge platform shoes, relishing the sing-songy vowels that were Child’s trademark and exhibiting that glorious lust for life that produced her greatest achievements. Against this joi de vivre, Amy Adams as Julie could easily be swamped but she holds her own, largely by not competing and not falling back on the usual fidgets and bits of business that I think she uses just to annoy me.
It’s far from perfect – the casting of the smaller roles is occasionally sub-optimal and there’s one scene of such clunkiness that Streep appears to deliberately act badly to try and ensure that it is cut – but Ephron’s ability to manufacture great romantic moments is undiminished and I can’t imagine many being disappointed.
Julie & Julia has just landed on Amazon’s Prime Video.
Since I wrote that, of course, we have lost Nora Ephron and Julie Powell.
And I want to make clear that that crack about the smaller roles did not apply to Stanley Tucci who is marvellous as Julia’s husband Paul.
