Julie & Julia isn’t a typical book adaptation, although it is based around two books. The story takes its lead from two very different tomes, one a blog inspired book by a self confessed “government drone by day, renegade foodie by night,” the other a classic by chef Julia Child. Bringing together the stories of Julie Powell, who made a name for herself on-line by blogging about her 2002 attempt to make all 536 recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just 365 days, and Julia Child’s coming of age in France in the 1950s seems like it shouldn’t work, but the mix and match of the two stories has resulted in one of the most delightful films of the year so far.
The contemporary story begins with Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a frustrated writer working as a temp at a government agency. Looking for a way to make her mark she hits on the idea of cooking her way through the seminal Julia Child cookbook on French food in one year, blogging as she goes. Turning the dial back fifty years we are then introduced to Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and her foreign diplomat husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) at the beginning of their life in France. “French people eat French food everyday,” a delighted Julia says on arrival. The stories mix and mingle, following the lives of these two women as they search for something to enhance their lives and find it in food.
Directed by Nora Ephron, a filmmaker who is occasionally pitch perfect—Sleepless in Seattle—and occasionally not—Bewitched—the movie has an awkward structure, but after a rocky start rights itself as the two, seemingly disparate stories come together thematically. As similarities emerge—both women are bored government workers with doting husbands who are looking for something to fulfill them—the movie’s flashback structure starts to make sense.
Either of these narratives could have carried the film on their own—although I found the Julia Child storyline more compelling—but bringing them together gives the story a depth I’m not sure the Julie Powell story could have achieved on its own.
At the forefront here is the performance of Meryl Streep as the indomitable Julia Childs. Standing 6’ 2” Childs, with her distinctive voice and formidable stature, is an easy target for mimicry. Dan Aykroyd’s bloody Saturday Night Live take-off on Julia is a classic—and one that she herself enjoyed, keeping a copy of it to show guests—so the trick for any actor playing her is to reach past the parody and find a real character. Streep does this, playing Childs with gusto, bringing out the real person beneath the character’s affectations. It’s the kind of performance the Academy loves, so look for it to be nominated at awards time.
Amy Adams is a bit more of a slow burn. Her mousy character gets bowled over in the early part of the film by Streep’s zesty performance, but manages to establish an interesting character by the time the credits roll.
Julie & Julia is an unexpectedly touching, uplifting story, unconventionally told, that will leave you feeling better when you leave the theater than you did when you went in.
“Leap Year”, a new opposites-attract-romantic-comedy, stars Amy Adams and Matthew Goode as the metaphoric oil and water. She’s a perfectionist, he isn’t. She pushy, he’s laid back. She doesn’t do quaint very well, he’s… well, quaint. It’s the standard rom com set up, but instead of the usual New York setting director Anand Tucker places the action in the picturesque Irish country side.
The action begins in Boston where uptight Anna (Adams) has become tired of waiting for her yuppie-scum cardiologist boyfriend of four years to propose. Taking matter into her own hands and citing an obscure Irish tradition that declares it impossible for a man to refuse a woman’s proposal on Leap Day she decides to ambush him on February 29 while he is in Dublin on business. Delayed by bad weather she lands in a remote Irish village and begins the long road trip to Dublin accompanied by Declan (Goode), a rough hewn local who agrees to take her to the big city in return for enough money to save his failing pub.
Rom coms are predictable beasts. We know who is going to end up with who, because if we don’t, I guess it would be a romantic suspense movie and who would pay to see that? The trick to making an effective rom com is to keep the ride interesting all the up to the final, and inevitable, loving embrace between the two leads. At this “Leap Year” is only partially successful.
Adams and Goode have the lion’s share of screen time and while they are both charming, good actors, neither is doing their best work here. Where is the interesting Adams of “Sunshine Cleaning”? Or “Enchanted’s” lovable Adams? For that matter as a love interest Goode was far more effective with one-tenth of the screen time in “A Single Man, “ and generated way more heat as Charles Ryder in the generally restrained “Brideshead Revisited” from a couple of years ago. Both put up a good fight but are beaten by material that is beneath them. Amy Adams deserves better than to share a scene with a herd of unresponsive cows.
Worst of all, for actors of Adams and Goode’s stature, neither really makes the material her or his own. I could imagine any number of actors playing these parts and for this movie to really work I shouldn’t have been able to imagine that the movie would have pretty much the same if it had starred Renee Zellweger and Gerard Butler.
“Leap Year” isn’t absolutely terrible, in fact for a January rom com it’s a step up from “New in Town” or “27 Dresses”, but it is really average; just another mildly amusing, predictable entry in a generally mindless genre that badly needs a shot in the arm. If only Quentin Tarantino would make a romantic comedy…
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has a lot going for it. An appealing cast headed by Oscar winner Frances McDormand and nominee Amy Adams. Beautiful sets, costumes and an unerring eye for the beauty of prewar WWII England. Unfortunately those virtues are wasted on a story that can’t make up its mind whether it is a farce, a romance or a poignant study of the effects of age in difficult times. As a result it is all those things, but is less than the sum of its parts.
Calling itself a “fairy tale for adults” we join Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day just as the titular character, Miss Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand), is being fired from yet another job as nanny. She’s a difficult employee who isn’t good with kids, but babysitting is the only job she can get in pre-war London. If only she could hang on to the job long enough to collect a paycheck she’d be in better shape. Destitute, she wrangles her way into the job of “social secretary” for an air headed starlet named Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams). Delysia isn’t above using her feminine charms to further her career, and when a quick thinking Miss Pettigrew sorts out an inconvenient bottleneck of suitors at Delysia’s door she takes the dowdy nanny on a wild twenty four hour ride in which relationships will form and fall apart, war will start and an era comes to an end.
It’s a fanciful story, well acted—although the leading men are simply bland white knight types and little more—and steadily directed but its unwillingness to settle on a style, whether it is manic comedy or poignant character study. In the end it is neither.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day does have its charms. McDormand has corner on these kind of sad sack frumpy characters and she manages to pull the best out of Miss Pettigrew. Adams, the new Hollywood “it” girl, is all wide eyed effervescence in a performance that, thankfully, deepens as the film enters it final moments.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is an almost instantly forgettable confection—fun for a fleeting moment—but ultimately is a film whose ambitions exceeded its reach.
This weekend in “Trouble with the Curve” Clint Eastwood is playing a character he’s never tried before—sort of. He’s a baseball scout who brings his daughter along as he recruits new players. It’s his first baseball movie, but it isn’t the first time he’s played this kind of role—a man on the proverbial one last job.
The icon plays Gus, a legendary (read: old) Atlanta Braves scout. He’s regarded as a dinosaur by his colleagues, who mock him for his old school, anti-“Moneyball” approach—travelling to games, reading stats in the newspaper—as they sit behind their computer screens gathering information. His job and legacy rest on recruiting batting hotshot Bo Gentry (Joe Massingill) but old age and failing eyesight are slowing him down. His boss and oldest (and maybe only) friend Pete (John Goodman) guilts Gus’s estranged daughter Mickey (Amy Adams), named after Mickey Mantle, to accompany him on the road. It may be Gus’s last scouting trip and his last chance to patch things up with the daughter he left in the metaphorical bleachers when she was a young girl.
“The Trouble with the Curve” is the kind of harmless, predictable movie that succeeds despite the story. Pretty much everything that happens is telegraphed long in advance, the characters are the kind of people who exist only in the movies and like its lead actor, it feels like a relic from another time.
And that, in some ways, is a good thing. There isn’t a cynical bone in its body. It is a straightforward story that instead of relying on finely writ characters or unusual situations, uses star power to elevate it from “Grumpy Old Men” territory.
The Clintiness of it earns it a recommend. The iconic actor has never been shy about embracing his… er… veteran status on screen. Since “Unforgiven” he’s been acting his age, and now at age 82 he’s acting like the grandfather he is in real life, terrible jokes and all. “Get out of here before I have a heart attack trying to kill,” is a line that would have stuck in Dirty Harry’s throat, but here it’s funny with just a hint of menace.
Clint is funny, gruff and even lip-quiveringly emotional. Continuing his newfound habit of speaking to inanimate objects he does a monologue with a gravestone that is as cliché as anything thing we’ve seen in that wheelhouse, but somehow he makes it work.
As for the supporting cast, Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake have good chemistry, Matthew Lillard is an easy-to-dislike smarm-bucket and John Goodman is as comfortable as a well-worn in baseball mitt, but make no mistake, none of this would matter without the Big C at the helm.
The trouble with “Trouble with the Curve” isn’t the curves—there aren’t any, story wise, anyway—it’s that it is too by-the-book. Luckily a combo of Clint and some good old-fashioned sentimentality save it in the final innings.
As a Broadway play Doubt ran for over a year, earning four Tony awards, including Best Play and Best Actress. As a film, starring Meryl Streep, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, it is bound to earn several acting nominations come Oscar time, but I’m afraid it won’t earn awards for directing or Best Picture.
Set in the Bronx in 1964, Doubt centers on a nun, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Streep), who confronts a priest (Hoffman) after suspecting him abusing the school’s only African-American student (Joseph Foster). Of course he denies the charges and looks to Sister James (Amy Adams) for support.
Doubt starts off slowly. A little too slowly. Director, playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley takes his time establishing a sense of time and place at the expense of the movie’s momentum. We meet the characters: Hoffman’s charming down-to-earth priest, Adams’s naïve nun and Streep’s terrifying nunzilla. Each are introduced and we learn something of their lives and routines, and while some of it is interesting—there is even the odd laugh here and there—the movie doesn’t pick up steam until an hour and a quarter in, but it is worth the wait.
With the introduction of Viola Davis as Mrs. Muller, the frazzled mother of the young boy in question Doubt catches fire. Her showdown with the formidable Sister Aloysius contains some of the best written and best performed dialogue of the year. It’s an unsettling, surprising sequence that raises points about the flexibility of morality in extreme instances. Davis is on screen no more than six or seven minutes but will likely earn an Oscar nod for her work.
From that point on Doubt is one of the most compelling films of the year. Shanely carefully unveils the story to leave both the characters and the audience wondering what is true and what isn’t.
Doubt, like so many films this year, is a movie whose performances are better than the film itself. Hoffman expertly toggles back and forth between Father Flynn’s personality extremes—a controlling nature tempered by a large dollop of charm while Adams is all wide eyed naiveté.
They’re impressive, but Streep steals the show. Her Sister Aloysius is like an onion which reveals itself one layer at a time. When we first meet her she is the stereotypical strict nun, ruling her school by fear. When she calls one boy to the office for a minor infraction Father Flynn comments, “the dragon is hungry today.” She’s an anachronism, a woman whose ordered world is changing too quickly. Unable to keep up she thinks the song Frosty the Snowman espouses pagan beliefs and the ball point pen is a vehicle of change for the worse. “Every easy choice will have a consequence tomorrow.” She’s old school, but under that hard-line exterior is a deeply caring person who will not be pushed around.
When she accuses Father Flynn, her superior in the chain of command, of inappropriate behavior he says, “I can fight you!” “You will lose,” she snaps back, unafraid. It’s powerful stuff, made even more effective by Streep’s performance. The battle scenes between these two, complete with tightly written verbal warfare, are as dynamic and exciting as any action scene I’ve seen in a movie this year.
Doubt is a beautifully performed guessing game, with dynamite dialogue and thought provoking views on morality, religion and authority. It’s hard to believe that the same man who wrote this also penned Joe and the Volcano.
You may not be aware of this, but we’re living in a bissextile year. What does that mean? Well, it means today’s date, Feb. 29, didn’t exist last year. Or the year before that. In fact, you have to flip the calendar back to 2008 to find the last time February had 29 days.
But how to celebrate the year’s extra day? If you are Ja Rule, Antonio Sabato Jr., or Tony Robbins, all leap year babies, you could throw yourself a birthday party, but if not, why not rent or download (legally of course!) a movie about those rare years with 366 days?
The Amy Adams rom-com Leap Year is based on an old Irish legend that says that women can propose to men, but only on Feb. 29.
She travels to Ireland to ask for her longtime beau’s hand, only to get sidetracked in Wales by a tall handsome stranger played by Matthew Goode.
You can likely guess the rest (and if you can’t you need to go to romantic comedy school and learn how this works) but the proposal Amy finally gives is much different than the one she originally intended.
Also on the romantic side is The Leap Years, a Chinese film about a woman who meets her lover once every four years on, you guessed it, Feb. 29. The main character, Li-Ann, is played by three actresses. Beatrice Chia handles all the narration, Wong Li-lin ushers her through her 20s with Joan Chen playing her in middle age.
Rounding out our look at leap year movies are two films with nothing whatsoever to do with romance.
The strange and disturbing Ano Bisiesto was the first Mexican film to win the Camera D’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival.
The story of a lonely woman (Monica del Carmen) who marks off the days on a calendar as she reveals her true self to her lover was called “a blind leap into the void of art-house cinema du extreme, South of the Border division” by Time Out but is also a deeply felt psychological drama.
On the scary side is The Curse of February 29, a Korean horror film about a blood stained bus ticket, a vengeful ghost and a leap year murder.
Leap years at the movies offers something for everyone — love, ennui and even ghosts!
Julie & Julia isn’t a typical book adaptation, although it is based around two books. The story takes its lead from two very different tomes, one a blog inspired book by a self confessed “government drone by day, renegade foodie by night,” the other a classic by chef Julia Child. Bringing together the stories of Julie Powell, who made a name for herself on-line by blogging about her 2002 attempt to make all 536 recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just 365 days, and Julia Child’s coming of age in France in the 1950s seems like it shouldn’t work, but the mix and match of the two stories has resulted in one of the most delightful films of the year so far.
