• Kris boldly offered some early winner predictions … I (and you) followed.
• AMPAS unveiled the official list of 20 animated feature contenders, guaranteeing five eventual nominees.
• This week’s Off the Carpet column picked through the leading Best Supporting Actor contenders.
• In The Long Shot, we reflected on a handful of the Academy’s better moves this past decade.
It’s probably a little cliche to lead a review of Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia” with a phrase like “I’m not wired for movies like this.” It ends up being a back-handed compliment to the film and doesn’t exactly illuminate why it’s a successful piece of work, but that is, nevertheless, the first thought that popped in when, to my surprised delight, I found myself falling in love with it.
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.”
In some ways, it’s becoming almost unsettling, the acute level of precision with which Streep can flesh out a character. Almost as if something’s off, like the paranoid feeling that seeps in when things are too “good.” As chef Julia Child, Streep manhandles the role and makes it her own, exuding passion, dedication and a well-rounded personality that we’ve only truly known as a performance of sorts on TV throughout the years.
The film parallels the story of Child’s culinary awakening in Paris (accompanied by her loving husband, Paul Child, played by Stanley Tucci) with that of Julie Powell, living a modest but unfulfilled life in Queens and stumbling onto a raison d’être in Child’s cookbook. Powell, annoyed at her knack for never finishing what she sets out to do, commits to cooking every recipe in Child’s book over the course of one year.