Julie and Julia

Even though the film Julie and Julia came out in 2009,

I've only just now seen it. Written and directed by Nora Ephron, and based in part on the blog Julie Powell started in 2002 at Salon. I liked Julie and Juliavery much. Meryl Streep is fabulous, (as usual), so much so that now I have to double-check to make sure I'm looking at images and video of the real Julia. Stanley Tucci is wonderful as Child's spouse Paul Child. I wish there had been less of Julie the cooking-blogger (though she is well-played by Amy Adams) and more of Meryl Streep as Julia Child. As much as I admire Nora Ephron's work, I think a film about Julia Child would have been even better. Ephron's decision to intertwine Julia Child's life with the story in Julie Powell's book Julie/Julia, based on Julie Powell's blog The Julie/Julia Project was perhaps unfortunate. The Project was a blog about Powell's efforts to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year.

As a blog, The Julie/Julia Project is less than inspired.

Powell's blog is the kind of thing that early bloggers (most of whom were male) would sneer at while they made jokes about "journal bloggers." Part of that was Internet misogyny, but I have the impression, having slogged through what's still available of the blog, that Powell was a) unhappy, b) completely self absorbed, and c) not a cooking blogger in the sense we use the phrase today, nor was she serious about cooking. If you read the blog, you'll see Powell screwing with recipes before she's even tried them. I say Powell is not a cooking blogger knowing that in 2002 when Powell started, we have bloggers like The Pioneer Woman Cooks, and, just a few months later, Elise Bauer began Simply Recipes. Both of these cooks, in terms of their methods, their approaches to recipes, have been profoundly influenced (though probably quite indirectly) by Julia Child, who very much regularized cooking for American audiences through her cookbooks (eleven of 'em!) and her WGBH PBS television series. Child did three very different things from other cookbook authors; she tested all the recipes, repeatedly, and approached the procedures and methods as serious writing (I was told as a technical writer to use Julia Child as a model), writing that needed to be both precise and clear. Finally, she used the concept of master recipes that could be endlessly varied, and combined to create new dishes.

I think the smartest thing I've seen about the film is a piece by Kurt Loder for mtv.com:

"Julie & Julia" is one-half of a great biopic. In portraying Julia Child—the effervescent author and chef whose four decades of TV cooking shows made her an intimate presence in millions of American homes—Meryl Streep gives a performance that's virtually an act of reincarnation.

The smartest thing I've seen about Julia Child in the context of the Julie and Julia film is "Our Lady of the Kitchen" piece by Laura Jacobs in Vanity Fair.