Julie and Julia

For better or for worse, I promised my take on the book "Julie and Julia" several months ago. Below is my attempt to deliver.

After viewing, what I consider to be one of the most entertaining and charming movies of 2009, "Julie and Julia," I immediately checked out the book "Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen," thinking that the book is always better than it's screen adaptation.

For my money, the movie is much better!

Writer/Director Nora Ephron never fails to deliver on witty, mesmerizing, and idealistic alternate realities that captivates the viewer and makes him yearn to live in that created universe. I should have remembered that little fact.

I have to give props, however, to author Julie Powell for her courageous and well written memoir. There were moments of hilarity and she did reel the reader into her world so that, as a reader, I felt like I knew Julie. This is not surprising, though, as Julie Powell double majored in Creative Writing and Theater. Some of the antics that were in the movie did happen in the book with which she so eloquently described. Plus, and I feel this is one of my major draws into reading the book, I could relate to Julie. Here was a talented young lady, around my age, stuck in a dead end job, not realizing her artistic goals, certainly not using her college degrees, who seeks to better her life through a project like cooking her way through Julia Child's book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and blogging about it. Through her project she had an outlet and she learned about herself and life in the process. What could be better?

As a conservative who does tend to vote Republican, I felt like I was not welcome to read her book or peer into her world. She is unabashedly honest on her feelings about Republicans, which are very negative, and uses her book somewhat as a soap box. She even discusses how she dropped this beautiful dessert on a gritty sidewalk of Manhattan and scoops it up to leave for the Republicans in her office.


The book is dry in several spots and Julie tries to weave a cohesive work by inserting very crude thoughts on sex, infidelity, and comparing her father's porn to Julia Child's recipe masterpiece. And please, don't get me started on the language for which she is very proud.

In the end, the book was a colossal waste of time and I received all that I needed merely by watching the movie. However, academically, I felt the need to finish what I had started so that I can compare and contrast and hopefully use it in a blog post someday!