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To be honest, I had no idea of what to expect from this film except perhaps a fine performance from Meryl Streep. I really liked Julie & Julia when I saw it! It is a very inspiring, heart-warming film that will delight all hearts who watch it! It is quite a special film because there aren't that many films based on cooking because there aren't many true stories that would be good for a film. Plus, it'll be hard to make a fictional story about cooking. It worked well with Julie & Julia but worked even better with the Pixar animated film Ratatouille. The food looked lovely in the film but the film itself as well as the food consumed you with its charm and beauty.
Julie & Julia tells two stories set in two different generations. The first being set in the 1950s with Julia Child when she is learning French cooking which is the time she achieves a breakthrough in her cooking career. The second story is set in 2002 of a young writer called Julie Powell. She is bored with her career and lives with her husband Eric. To make her life a bit easier and enlighten it, she decides to make an attempt at cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's cookbook "Mastering The Arts Of French Cooking" in a year. Over the years, Meryl Streep has proven herself to be one of the greatest actresses of all time and her performance as Julia Child is a performance that in my opinion should have earned her third and long overdue Oscar! Streep was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Leading Actress for her performance but lost to Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side. However, she did win the Best Actress Musical/Comedy Golden Globe Award over Sandra Bullock, Marion Cotillard, Julia Roberts as well as a second nomination for herself. Amy Adams was amazing in this film too! It is her second film with Meryl Streep and despite that they don't appear in a single scene together, the chemistry is awesome and there is this inspiring feeling that the audience feel towards both. To be honest, despite Meryl Streep's role is classed as the leading role and Amy Adams's role is classed as supporting; I personally think that the film is more about Julie Powell than Julia Child.
Out of the films that I have heard that director Nora Ephron has done (mostly comedy-dramas), Julie & Julia seems quite typical of Ephron to make. After seeing Julie & Julia, my enthusiasm to watch more films from Nora Ephron has woken up and I intend to watch some more from her especially When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood and Sleepless In Seattle. As far as filming of Julie & Julia is concerned, it seemed like a very hard film to make because it is one film set in two completely different generations as well as two different cities of the world: New York and Paris and needing different backgrounds and different actors from the specific places.
Overall, Julie & Julia is a really good entertaining film based on a theme that we don't see very often. It is perhaps one of the most inspiring films that I have watched in a while. It doesn't quite reach my list of the best films of 2009 but it isn't far off. Damn you, Academy that Meryl Streep didn't win her 3rd Oscar! Best Meryl Streep performance in a long time!
8/10
