Destination: Paris (and the Bronx)

Movie: Julie and Julia (A blogger and Julia Child)

Although everyone touts Julie and Julia as the ultimate foodie movie, it does pretty well as a travel movie, too.  After all it has lovely street shots in Paris and a few establishing shots in the streets of New York, motivation to travel to France for cooking school, and a guessing game about whether Julia Child and her husband Paul are really eating in real French restaurants.

Since the Oscars will be awarded any day now, I should be doing some great post about all the movies that make you want to travel, but I am so bummed out by the fact that Up and Away got a best picture nomination, and is called the “ultimate travel movie” that I’m trying to pretend there are not any Oscars this year. I’ll make an exception to pull for Meryl Streep as best actress in Julie and Julia.

By now, you have probably heard the elevator pitch for this movie: a bored young housewife in New York decides that she will cook her way through Julia Child‘s Mastering the Art of French Cookingin a year, and blog about it.

The  story of the real Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is intertwined with the  story of the real Julia Child (Meryl Streep), who moves to Paris with her husband Paul, falls in love with French cooking, and to assuage her boredom, goes to cooking school.  She takes on the task of re-writing a cookbook meant to make French cooking accessible to Americans and although the book takes years to find a publisher, we all know that she became the icon of French cooking in America.

Julie’s blog became the book, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. Ironically, in her blog she complained about the title, calling it lame. Wonder if she has changed her mind? Writer/director Nora Ephron builds the movie around parallel moments in the two women’s lives–birthdays, cooking disasters and triumphs, and finally publication. Meanwhile, they both have adorable, supportive husbands. As hard as Julie tries to live up to her fantasy of Julia Child, she continues to have emotional melt-downs, an indignity which never happens to the unflappable Julia.

Trivia at IMDB includes this travel tidbit: Both the Paris and Boston train terminal shots were done in the beautifully restored New Jersey Transit Hoboken Train Terminal waiting room.

And for the bloggers out there: here is the original Julie/Julia project blog [UPDATE: Salon has removed the Julie Julia blog. So sorry]. Julia is  doing another blog now, sporadically, to continue to promote the book. I was not impressed. You can Google it if you insist.  But the Julie/Julia project blog should keep you busy over the weekend. That, and watching the movie, if you have not yet done so.

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