You must see this movie...

I ended up biking to the movie theater yesterday and seeing Julie and Julia. I've really been wanting to see it but feared I couldn't go yesterday because the weather's been so bad. It seemed like it had been mostly clear for a while when it was time to go but I put on a rain jaI'cket just in case. In the time it took me to wheel my bike from the shed around to the driveway it went from light sprinkles to steady rain. At that point I couldn't give up though, right? It was a rather damp 15 minutes to the mall.

Visually, I love this movie for all of the beautiful food and the mid-fifties to sixties fashions. The actresses are fantastic. I'd never seen Amy Adams until we rented Sunshine Cleaning last week and have now been impressed twice by her performances. Meryl Streep as Julia Child steals the movie though. It's hilarious. She's not doing an impression, even though it's such an over the top character. She just is Julia Child.

It's interesting to me how often women are portrayed as needing to find direction in their lives, feeling lost, before they find their calling. It's a story I enjoy watching but I realized that it never seems to be explored as a male problem. Men don't externalize the seeking? They're so busy having to have careers and support themselves and others that they don't have time for it to come up? Maybe it happens plenty in real life but there's no one who would be interested in going to the movie about it since women tend to like watching movies about other women and men tend to like watching movies with more intrigue/adventure. More "plot" and less "character".

Anyway, everybody on the planet should go see the movie. It had me laughing out loud many times and I went home very hungry. I simply must be brave enough to try the beef bourguignon sometime. The problem is that that would involve following a recipe exactly though, which I'm not entirely sure I'm capable of doing. However, I also don't think I'd be sacrilegious enough to casually fling ingredients in the way I do when I'm following Julia Child's recipe. And heres a link to a youtube video of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin making sandwiches. It's somehow utterly hilarious without meaning to be (but in a good, uplifting way).