It's a Nora Ephron movie starring Meryl Streep as a TV personality. It's catnip to them.
They gave Anchorman an 83, Metacritic gave it 63.
They have Harry Potter as an 87, nearly the same level. They ranked Brueno far above Metacritic.
Again, it's better than a kick in the head. Perhaps the film will get better reviews than Devil Wears Prada (BC - 83, Metacritic 62) overall.
Beyond that, it's not based on reviews - their members give numerical ratings based on their initial reactions so their website has a Metacritic-like number. Totally unprofessional.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,
What a Debby Downer. (joking) I'm not too familiar with the BFCA like you probrably are, but what I do know of them is that, like I previously said, films that they rate well mostly go over all with the critics. Besides, this is a new score and it could drop twenty points for all I know.
Actually, many films with high rankings at BC have far less favorable ones overall, as I've already cited in a few cases, so saying their is a correlation with real, legitimate critics is not true across the board. Sometimes, sure. But hardly as a rule.
These are entertainment reporters, for whom many career nirvana would be getting a big city weatherman's job. They for the most part have less of a background in thinking and writing about movies than a lot of people who post here. They get their jobs based on their looks, glibness and their willingness to shill for their station's TV programming. They are for the most part a joke when it comes to being considered critics.
As do I. And it's great that there is a studio film that people are eagerly anticipating. All I'm saying it that there have been no credible reviews yet. They'll start coming in a day or two most likely.
Hollywood Reporter extols Streep, soft on the film
By Kirk Honeycutt You feel hunger pangs all the way through "Julie & Julia." Platters of boeuf bourguignon, sole meuniere, fresh oysters, trussed chickens and calves' livers served with crusty baguettes and desserts of fromage blanc move tantalizingly before your eyes. But there is another hunger: As enjoyable as this foodie movie is, you wish it would take a deeper, more nuanced measure of the women who, in two different eras, star in the movie's kitchens.
Writer-director Nora Ephron tells of two real-life people, newly wed and restless with ill-defined ambitions, and how they discover their true selves in gourmet cooking. They are America's first food star, the late cookbook author and TV personality Julia Child, and an otherwise unknown 30-year-old wife in Queens, N.Y., Julie Powell, who blogged about her attempt to cook all 524 recipes in Child's legendary "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year.
The film is primed to do extremely well with female audiences in many markets, an attraction only enhanced by stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.
Ephron, who certainly delights in parallel story lines -- "Sleepless in Seattle," "You've Got Mail," "When Harry Met Sally ..." -- has merged two recent memoirs, "My Life in France," which Child wrote with her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme, and "Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously," by Powell.
Probably this merger makes commercial sense: Neither memoir is the stuff of popular moviemaking, though Child's reminiscences of her life-changing experiences in postwar France -- where she fell in love with French culture, cuisine, local markets and her classes at the Cordon Bleu -- might have been worth a try.
Powell's story about her single-minded engagement with Child's cookbook has an almost unpleasant taste of self-absorption. And by sharing her story with Child's, Ephron throws the wrong emphasis on Child's delightful memoir of the early years in her ideal marriage to Paul Child.
True, the movie shows that Paul -- played with modest self-effacement by Stanley Tucci against Streep's larger-than-life Julia -- encourages his beloved wife's every experiment in the kitchen and the writing of her seminal book. But by contrasting that memoir with Powell's, the movie somewhat distorts the life the Childs share as they revel in their love for la belle France and each other.
Streep delivers yet another uncanny impersonation, getting every shade of the famously hearty voice and extravagant, life-loving personality that was Julia. The evocation of late-'40s Paris encourages a terrific sense of nostalgia, whether one was alive or even in France then or not. After "Julie & Julia," you feel like you were.
The details of the couple's life and their meals, Julia's Kismet-like meeting with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she wrote her first cookbook, and all mood swings as publishers reject -- and Knopf enthusiastically accepts -- the monumental work fill the screen with joie de vivre.
Adams' Julie is more of a lost soul. She lives with a "saint," as she often calls her husband, Eric (Chris Messina), in an iffy apartment above a pizza parlor. She works as a secretary in a federal government office overlooking the World Trade Center crater and laments that she has never finished anything in her life. Thus her determination to complete the cookbook marathon.
She suffers for her blog. She drags herself to that cramped kitchen whether sick or well. She refuses to quit because it has become her identity. Without the "Julie/Julia Project," she'd revert to a frustrated wife with a husband, dead-end job and another unfinished project. No joie de vivre here.
Possibly the Powell sequences might have worked better as a framing device. Sharing equal time with Julia's discovery of la cuisine bourgeoisie, it turns the banquet that was Julia's French experiences into short-order dishes. And even in the Julia sequences, Ephron dwells far too long on the conflicts among the cookbook's three authors.
Consequently, the movie misses the point of "My Life in France." That country liberated Julia, a 6-foot-2 woman -- tall girls "don't fit it," her equally tall sister remarks -- from a conservative Republican household in Pasadena. France released her from middle-class values and its indifferent attitude toward food. She in turn introduced the modern American woman to the glories of cooking and how she could express artistry in her kitchen.
So "Julie & Julia" is a mixed blessing. You enjoy vicariously many dishes, sample the good life in France and get treated to another Streep marvel. Stephen Goldblatt's lush cinematography and Alexandre Desplat's whimsical score make the film's two worlds inviting. Both female protagonists even enjoy a final triumph, but one indulges far too much in Bridget Jones-like self-obsession.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: Streep Fan,
By JUSTIN CHANG It should come as no surprise that Meryl Streep's delightfully daffy turn as Julia Child, the woman who demystified French cuisine for American households, is the freshest ingredient in "Julie & Julia." Otherwise, this middling melange of Child biopic and contempo dramedy feels overstuffed and predigested as it depicts two ladies who found fame and fulfillment in their respective eras by cooking and writing about it. Despite the lack of shared screen time, the reteaming of "Doubt" duo Streep and Amy Adams under the femme-friendly imprimatur of writer-director Nora Ephron should yield tasty returns for this self-satisfied foodie fairy tale. "Julie & Julia" shares its title with Julie Powell's barbed-and-bubbly 2005 book about her plan to chop, stir, bake and whip her way through Child's seminal 1961 cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Powell's blog devoted to her crazy yearlong experiment, dubbed "The Julie/Julia Project," developed enough of a following to earn her a book deal and, as the end titles note with characteristic cuteness, inspire this movie. Probably aware that Powell's story alone wouldn't sustain an entire feature, Ephron opted to divide the film's 122-minute running time between Julie and Julia, also drawing material from the latter's posthumously completed 2006 memoir, "My Life in France."
Upon arriving in Paris in 1948 with her husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci), who has taken a job at the American embassy, Julia (Streep), a self-described "36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian," is enraptured by French culture in general and French cuisine in particular. The pic efficiently traces Julia's determined rise from impassioned gourmand to master cook, from her education alongside unfriendly male competition at the Cordon Bleu school to her friendship with fellow epicureans Simone Beck (Linda Emond) and Louisette Bertholle (Helen Carey) -- her eventual collaborators on the 524-recipe cookbook that no publisher would initially accept.
Meanwhile, in a rickety Gotham apartment circa 2002, Julie (a redheaded Adams), alarmed at the prospect of turning 30 and having little to show for it, embarks on her insane assignment -- working as a government secretary by day, cooking and blogging by night. Fortunately, Julie's husband, Eric (Chris Messina), loves her enough to put up with her exaggerated mood swings whenever a dish goes awry, though his patience and sensitivity wear thin as the project drags on.
And so the film implies a kinship between two women who never meet, united across time and space by their love of butter, their doting husbands, their search for meaning through pleasure and their struggles to see their work in print. (Call it "Publisher-less in Paris.") The crucial difference, one Ephron doesn't seem to grasp, is that while Julie courts the fickle attentions of the blogosphere and the media, Julia yearns to create something of lasting value, a work with genuine potential to enrich people's lives. Ironically, the pic's decision to foreground Julia's life only ends up trivializing it; by conflating the characters so neatly, "Julie & Julia" becomes the slick, presumptuous vanity project that Powell's book was not.
Doing her formidable best to counteract these drawbacks is Streep, whose 5-foot-6 frame makes her an imperfect physical match for the 6-foot-2 Julia, but who proves more than up to the challenge of tackling this beloved celebrity's equally outsized personality. Delivering an elegant approximation of the woman's distinctly flutelike vocal pitch and endearing mannerisms, Streep abundantly conveys the warmth, rich humor and joie de vivre so evident in Julia's TV appearances and her writing. She and Tucci (as fine a foil here as he was in "The Devil Wears Prada") etch moving portraits of two people who can scarcely conceal their delight at being married to each other.
As a more prosaic and bickersome modern couple, Adams and Messina acquit themselves well enough; Adams, rather miraculously, manages not to sink under the weight of her character's cloying perkiness and weepy hysterics. The overall tone of the present-day material strikes familiar, unsubtle romantic-comedy beats, with a few catty dashes of "Sex and the City" and "Bridget Jones's Diary" thrown in to taste.
While Ann Roth's costumes and Mark Ricker's production design nail the dual milieus with impressive versatility, the Paris scenes feel slightly gauche and unconvincing (the production was shot entirely in New York); commercial considerations also likely account for the near-total absence of French dialogue.
Most disappointingly, aside from the occasional glimpse of boeuf bourguignon, the film misses a clear opportunity to offer glorious culinary eye candy on the level of "Babette's Feast" or "Eat Drink Man Woman." Whatever auds make of "Julie & Julia," it's hard to imagine that Julia Child herself, an unapologetic Francophile with one hell of an appetite, would have been much of a fan.
of course Meryl Streep was going to be delightful. it's Julia freakin Child. How can you not love her as a person? Any actor playing the role would have been good, pending that the voice and mannerisms was mastered.
that's why i have to be more critical of these biopics, cause its mostly about immitation. this one, i dunno. doesn't look too much of a stretch, for me.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: Russ_Shigekuni,
BEST PICTURE: 500 Days of Summer, The Hangover, Up, Inglorious Basterds BEST ACTOR, Joseph Gordon-Levitt "500 Days of Summer" BEST ACTRESS, Michelle Pfeiffer, "Cheri" BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, Melanie Laurent, "Inglorious Basterds" BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, Christoph Waltz, "Inglorious Basterds"
Posts: 72 | Location: Irvine, California | Registered: May 04, 2009
There’s a key ingredient to the Julie & Julia experience which writer-director Nora Ephron has taken for granted, and that’s a familiarity with Julia Child. Credited with introducing French food to the US in the 1960s and 70s, Child was a Cordon Bleu chef with distinctive physical attributes and eccentric, if not downright campy, mannerisms, which Streep largely nails.
But Ephron does not help the uninitiated – that is to say the younger viewer or international audiences who haven’t seen Child’s TV shows – by providing any footage or context upfront. Thus it takes a while for Streep’s initially alarming performance – more reminiscent of her turn in Mamma Mia! than Doubt – to sink in and the good-natured Julie & Julia to warm up into a dish which will be best savoured by American kitchen goddesses, Streep and Ephron fans, skewing female and older.
Fluffy and inconsequential, Nora Ephron's "Julie & Julia" is a mildly entertaining comedy that's based on a potentially intriguing gimmick but lacks a real emotional pay-off. Juxtaposing two bored American wives in different historical eras, Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep) and Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams), it's a peculiar film about food in which the preparation for and results of cooking are not particularly appealing to the eye.
BEST PICTURE: 500 Days of Summer, The Hangover, Up, Inglorious Basterds BEST ACTOR, Joseph Gordon-Levitt "500 Days of Summer" BEST ACTRESS, Michelle Pfeiffer, "Cheri" BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS, Melanie Laurent, "Inglorious Basterds" BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, Christoph Waltz, "Inglorious Basterds"
Posts: 72 | Location: Irvine, California | Registered: May 04, 2009
Originally posted by Russ_Shigekuni: not this year guys. she won't win..
Carey Mulligan where is your competition yet?
You must be loving this right now!
2010 Oscars FYC:
Lead Actor - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, (500) Days of Summer Lead Actress - Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds Supporting Actress - Mo'Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire Original Screenplay - Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, (500) Days of Summer
Posts: 4925 | Location: Why Do You Want To Know? | Registered: November 21, 2006
Positive review from Kris Tapley of Incontention....
quote:
Cleverly adapted from two novels by Ephron (Julie Powell’s “Julie & Julia” and Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme’s “My Life in France”), the film moves along at an airy but focused pace for an hour and a half or so before losing that momentum going into the third act, but along the way, it provides the expected showcase for a controlled Meryl Streep performance that couldn’t have been more “on.”
By Dorothy Kalins | NEWSWEEK Published Jul 30, 2009
"Slipping away quietly in her sleep late last week may have been the only unspectacular thing Julia Child ever did," I wrote in August 2004 in NEWSWEEK. But I was wrong. Julia Child is not dead. Not as long as Meryl Streep inhabits her big-boned, 6-foot-2 frame; fills her size 12 shoes; sets the corners of her eyes in a permanent crinkle; and causes her voice—that voice!—to bubble up from some sweet, deep place in her soul. In Nora Ephron's film Julie & Julia, which opens this week, you're convinced that Julia Child is still here. This is reassuring stuff for those of us who learned to cook from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Watching the determined Julia slip a piece of carbon paper (carbon paper!) between two sheets of onionskin and roll them into her typewriter for the first time is quietly thrilling—like being there at the creation. "French people eat French food every single day! I can't get over it," Julia/Meryl says as she begins her midlife culinary adventure. Julia's (and Meryl's) diphthonging way of talking makes us laugh. Hell, her very laughter make us laugh.
The story of Julie & Julia is essentially a two-memoir mashup: Julia Child's own My Life in France and Julie & Julia, Julie Powell's 2005 book about spending a year cooking her way through the 524 recipes in the first volume of Mastering and blogging about it from her loft in Long Island City, Queens. It's kind of Julia squared, a double-edged story of food and love, cooking and redemption. The movie ping-pongs in time and place—Julia among the idle rich in '50s Paris, Julie (Amy Adams) in working-class 21st-century New York—but both characters are essentially on the same path. They're searching for themselves—"I decided I had three main weaknesses," Julia says in her memoir. "I was confused ... I had a lack of confidence …c I was overly emotional"—and food shows them the way. Surrounded by all that (then affordable) copper cookware, Julia confides to a friend as she lowers a whole fish wrapped in cheesecloth into a pot of poaching liquid: "I'm in heaven here? ... I've been looking for a career all my life and I've found it." Julie—secretary by day, food blogger by night—cooks with Julia's voice in her kitchen and in her head, "always chortling quietly to herself, like a roosting pigeon in its cote," Julie says. "I was drowning and she pulled me out of the ocean. She saved me. Both of us were saved by food."
Ephron herself learned to cook by angsting over Mastering—her meatloaf is legendary in certain New York circles—and her love of the book wafts through the movie. Each time its food-stained pages flash across the screen and we see that elegant Granjon type and those fine-line drawings made from Paul Child's photographs of Julia's step-by-step process, we remember how there never was such a cookbook before. The recipes are as full of narrative as a short story. Boeuf bourguignon, whose recipe stretches across three pages in Mastering, becomes a character in the film (made in that iconic flame-colored Le Creuset casserole I have to this day). When the twice-rejected manuscript of Mastering happens across the desk of Judith Jones, a New York book editor who in the late '40s discovered the French manuscript of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, she takes it home and cooks the bourguignon. Julia gets her book deal. Flash forward 50 years, and a reporter calls to talk about Julie's blog and to say she'd like to bring Judith Jones over for dinner. Julie cooks—the bourguignon. In fact, she cooks it twice. She burns the first pot (she falls asleep) and eats the second alone (it rains and Jones cancels). But the stew is still a lucky charm: Powell got her book deal.
Ephron knows all about the comfort of food in the midst of heartbreak. In Heartburn, her 1983 novel about the breakup of her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein, she puts cooking in the same redemptive role. After all, Rachel, the main character, is a food writer, and the book is dotted with recipes. "I've written about cooking and marriage dozens of times," Rachel says, "and I'm very smart on the subject, I'm very smart about how complicated things get when food and love become hopelessly tangled." Heartburn became a kind of classic of the genre that spawned Julie Powell's much raunchier book: "I discovered that in the physical act of cooking ... dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal, both gastronomic and sexual ... offering someone gustatory delights in order to win pleasures of another sort." Both are far better than chick lit. Call them chicken lit.
The most delicious thing about Julie & Julia—after Streep, of course—may be how it shifts the culinary spotlight back to our own kitchens, and away from the heat and glitz of the restaurant kitchen where only the strong survive. We need reservations for chefs' food, and we should have plenty about cooking food as complicated as theirs. While we've spent the last decades fetishizing celebrity chefs, seeking excitement in intense and expensive restaurant experiences, both these difficult times and this film suggest that we may have missed the point. Chefs are performance artists. Like athletes, they lead a physically demanding existence. They must run their businesses like CEOs and plate their food like esthetes, down to the last sprig of chervil. It is right to revere them; it is folly to attempt to emulate them.
Julia Child becomes a cook, not a chef, and, through her, so does Julie Powell. In their very human successes and failures, they are like us in a way chefs will never be. Perhaps the satisfaction we seek was lurking at home on the range all this time. At the end of her book, Julie writes: "I thought I was using the Book to learn to cook French food, but really I was learning to sniff out the secret doors of possibility." Perhaps Julie & Julia will lead us to find the home kitchen exciting again. And not just Betty Crocker, or three-ingredients-in-30-minutes, exciting. Ephron paraphrases her character in Heartburn when she has Julie say: "You know what I love about cooking? I love that after a day where nothing is sure ... you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It's such a comfort." That's what you might call the real joy of cooking.
Pedantic note, but this was not their film review - the writer clearly likes the film, but she is not one of their critics as far as I know.
(Possible explanation - Newsweek has vastly overhauled itself; not sure if they even have conventional film critics at this point - I know David Ansen accepted a buyout. But this woman is not listed in Metacritic as one of their critics, so if this is their review, they are doing weird things - it is her first ever. She was an editor for a while, now must be free-lancing.)
But appropriate to mention if it's not a film review - it reads more like a news article, which is of course fine to put in this thread. But as an assessment of the film by a film critic, thought it was appropriate to point out that it likely isn't what at first glance it might seem to be. It's more like a feature piece. Again, it should be posted here, and thanks for posting it.
But saying "Newsweek raves" implies it is their review. My guess is that it isn't, or they otherwise aren't going to do a review on this. I certainly undestand why you might have misintrepreted what it is.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,
