Julie & Julia

Mine is not a movie review blog, but this is what's on my mind.

I loved "Julie & Julia." Really, though, I just love Julia. Amy McAdams is forgettable and her character is regrettable. She's self-absorbed and has terrible coping skills for a grownup. She is also neatly eclipsed by a great actress playing a great person.

Julia Child, as portrayed by the skillful Ms. Streep, is a larger-than-life and utterly lovable personality. She is so -herself- with her fluted voice and florid gestures. She is without apology for her candor or her love for butter. She is pure glory in her lust for food and her wonderful husband. Their relationship is boundlessly wonderful and she has that perfect air of a woman who is loved for what she is. She's hilarious and her laugh is singular and quintessentially her own.

I planned to take my mother to see this film. My mother is an amazing cook herself and very much belongs among the ranks of the self-made. Julia Child or Paula Deen are great role models for her best self, and I knew she would love it. However, I have been positively skint since moving, and I couldn't take her to the movies. So, when she saw it on her own, she texted me two things. First, that she needs a string of pearls, post haste. I put it on the list. Second, that Julia Child was hers and hers alone, and they borrowed her without asking. She said she wanted to stand in the theater and explain to people that she has the same pots, uses the same butter, and knew this story long before they did. I love my mother, and she deserves her relationship with Julia. She reminded me of a much younger girl, who's upset because she liked a band long before they were popular, and these johnny come latelies are ruining everything.

I myself have never prepared a single recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I have been inspired to try by this film, and I can't wait to dive headfirst into an aspic or something equally exotic. But I learned my taste and cooking ability and shamelessness for my true self from my mother. She has kissed us and flipped us off and told the stories of her life from her vantage point at the stove, bathed in her own sweat, glowing with butter, making our sometimes very poor house smell like a king's kitchen. In the film, Mr. Child sits and watches Julia cook, much as I always watched my mom, and they share a joke about the relative heat of a canneloni and the male genitals when aroused (see the film.) I saw there my mother sauteing onions and laughing when there was reason to laugh. I saw there my husband, who supports me in everything I love, and adores me in the way that every woman should be adored. Like my mother, I took this film very personally. We're a foodie family; a baguette is never just a baguette.

It was wonderful. I will see it again. I will advise everyone to see it. And I have a shopping list.

1. Mastering the Art of French Cooking,any edition
2. 1 lb good European butter
3. 1 bottle Burgundy wine
4. 1 string of pearls
5. The ingredients of my husband's favorite dish. It's his birthday on Saturday, and I can't do much. But, like my mom, I can always do that.

Movie Review: Speed Racer

First of all, we saw Iron Man, and nothing can be said about it. It is perfect.

After that, we saw Speed Racer.

Imagine your favorite low-budget Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980's. Now give it a million dollars and a generous hit of acid. Instead of watching it on your parents' nappy rug in your pajamas, imagine watching it trapped inside a kaleidoscope made out of the stained glass from Chartres cathedral. Also, you're wearing a slick vinyl jumpsuit fashioned in the most virulent possible shade of your favorite color, and it's lined with baby-soft fleece.
Speed Racer was as bright and shiny as any plastic toy you wanted with the whole of your child's heart and simply BURST with pleasure when you got it. I've never seen such use of color anywhere before and I think we may have raised the bar on cartoon adaptations. The Wachowski Brothers, in their damn-near infinite wisdom, seem to have postulated on the depressing lack of intensity we all suffer when the wants of childhood wane into less than life-or-death humdrum adulthood. They took this fade and turned up the contrast on it until we are reduced to an open-mouthed stare punctuated by involuntary laughs and cheers. Congratulations, boys, you've made us all eight years old again.

Emile Hirsch is a wonderful Speed, elegantly echoing the performance of Scott Porter as the haunted older brother, Rex. Nicholas Elia as young Speed is the portrait of a cheerfully ADD-addled child of the exact type the movie appears to be made for. Christina Ricci is wide-eyed and fetching as the spitfire Trixie, who in this adaptation drives a racecar as well. Female characters here are remarkably well portrayed, Susan Sarandon is lovely and genuine as always in her role as Mom. John Goodman shows us a depth of chracter undreamed of in his other roles and frankly unexpected in such a film. Comic relief comes to us courtesy of the perrenial Fat Kid. Following in the footsteps of the Goonies' Chunk comes Paulie Litt as little brother Spritle, replete with chimp sidekick and a lust for all things candy. All in all, the cast is well-chosen and well-directed, providing a formidable distraction from the almost non-stop action.

The racing sequences are dizzying, pulse-pounding and wonderful. John remarked as we watched that the racers seemed to be practicing the long lost martial art of Car-Fu. The drivers are wildly out of control and daring, the terrain nightmarish and swooping through the Technicolor skies. The gadgetry is the of the gleefully impossible type only known to the world of animation, and we do not disbelieve it for a second. We are drawn in past the point of grown-up skepticism.

I highly reccomend you take your kids to see this. On the other hand, if you don't have kids yet, or if you sometimes think wistfully that the sky was bluer, the trees were greener, and everything was so much brighter when you were a kid yourself... buy yourself some popcorn, promise to be quiet and sit still, take yourself in hand and go see Speed Racer.