JULIE & JULIA

“JULIE & JULIA” (Amy Adams & Meryl Streep)

Five and a half hours of cooking food, eating food, talking about food, writing a blog about food and compiling a cookbook - This may well be the dullest movie ever made & a shoe-in to make my 10 Worst of 2009 list.
How could the two female leads of “Doubt” produce such dreck? This film is awful. I cannot fathom how anyone would find anything in this story even remotely interesting.
It is, in a word, B-O-R-I-N-G, with a capital BORE.
When I heard about this film I thought it couldn’t possibly be as bad as the plot would lead you to believe – but it’s even worse than I could have imagined. For those of you who may not know, this is the 'tales' of 2 women leading exceptionally boring lives & boring us with their unfathomably boring exploits in which absolutely nothing interesting happens to either person. To add to the misery everyone they know & come in contact with is also a boorish boring bore.
To give you an idea as to how terrible this film is the lone highlight involved a SNL rerun involving Dan Ackroyd. The only deserving Oscar nomination from this pile of rubbish should go to Ackroyd for Best Supporting Actress. In my last review I took a shot at ‘Inglourious Basterds’ for stooping to a low level by including Mike Myers; Here, the only scene worth viewing WAS an actual SNL skit!
Amy Adams plays Julie; a boring woman with a boring job who has aggravatingly pretentious friends whom we are forced to endure during a ‘lunch’ scene in which the two most insufferable of these friends spend more time on their cell phones talking to their assistants than they do with their dining companions. Having to sit with a pair of boring, insufferable bitches is not my idea of entertainment – It’s ANNOYING!
When Julie finds out one of her boring friends is having her blog turned into a book, she decides she can do the same – after all, she’s just as boring as they are & not nearly as pretentious or insufferable. Unfortunately Julie decides to blog about cooking every meal in Julia Child’s French cookbook... Scene after scene of cooks cooking & bloggers blogging; how could the script not be jam packed with excitement?
The film then shifts back & forth from Julie’s boring exploits as a cooking blogger to how Julia Child actually came to write a boring cookbook with her boring ambassador to France husband (boringly played by John Tucci)
Let’s pick on Julie first, shall we? We are forced to sit thru a scene with Julie & her husband eating dinner & both continuously talking with their mouths’ full - & what are they talking about? Well, the food they’re eating, of course! (Why did you even bother to ask?) So not only are these people boring, they have deplorable table manners as well.
An early entry in Julie’s blog reads, “Yesterday, I poached an egg...”
Fascinating reading, is it not?
Since I am a notorious nit picker, here’s a little snippet about Julie that annoyed me as well; after inviting friends over to have one of her fabulous French meals, Julie greets her female friend with a warm hug – she then addresses her friend’s male companion as “Hey, You.” I hate that. It is so rude & condescending. ‘Hey You’ is what you call someone when you can’t remember their name or feel they are so insignificant you don’t give a crap what their name is... Bloggers are such bitches.
Now, I’ll switch gears to the fascinating world of Julia Child before she ‘changed the world’ with her cookbook... Yes, they actually say this woman ‘CHANGED THE WORLD’ with a COOKBOOK.
As Julia attends a cooking class in France, we get to see her & several other chefs on the brink of changing the world as we know it by chopping onions... Not content with showing us the one scene of onion chopping, we are then shown a scene of Julia chopping onions at home (going solo – must have been that extra effort that helped her to change the world so dramatically) We then are taken back to cooking class where we see... you guessed it, future French chefs standing around a table chopping even more onions. If viewing a circle-onion-chopping-jerk is your idea of great filmmaking, you WILL shoot a load while watching ‘Julie & Julia’.
Julia tells her husband, “All I think about is food – All I DREAM about is food...” & all she ever talks about is food! They couldn’t have written these characters any more boring even if they had used actual corpses to play the roles.
Also Julia & her husband are chain smokers – in the 136 scenes of Julia & her non-morbidly obese husband having dinner, they both are shown smoking cigarettes & cigarette smoke is swirling in big puffy clouds all about them... I grew up in a family full of chain smokers – You can’t taste anything but smoke when you eat around them & this pair of nimrods are so infatuated with food that it’s all they think & DREAM about?
Their taste buds are covered with tar & nicotine! They can’t taste anything but ashes!
The usually scene stealing Jane Lynch plays Julia’s sister, Dorothy & when I realized it was Jane playing the role, I actually got my hopes up that this film was finally going to entertain me briefly... Don’t ask me how they did it, but they even made Jane Lynch boring!
There was one scene that made me smile (Aside from the SNL rerun) At Dorothy’s wedding, Julia touches her sister’s arm while dancing with their spouses. Dorothy reaches out & touches Julia back. It was a sweet moment, a tender moment & a wonderfully welcomed moment... Because No One Was Talking About FOOD!
Other than my mind shouting to me, “Hey, look, its Cliff Clavin’s ‘ma’!” this film was void of any memorable scenes.
I’ll quote my favorite quotable character to end this review – As Homer Simpson said to Tom Petty after Tom told the wanna-be rockers at the Rolling Stones Rock’n’Roll Fantasy Camp how hard it was to come up with a set of truly meaningful lyrics . . .
“B-O-R-I-N-G!”