Julie and Julia

Dir. Nora Ephron
2009
8.0

I don't know about you but when I get in the kitchen things start happening. If I haven't made the recipe before you can count on a lot of swearing and no! no! no!'s but an inevitable trance-like state comes over me. Perhaps it is the precision of working with a recipe mixed with a few last minute “I hope to God this comes out alright” alterations but there is something about cooking that is wholly absorbing. It's a process and one that can be either extremely rewarding or completely devastating. What is often forgotten in the age of microwave dinners and Thanksgiving leftovers is that cooking is an art; a bi-lateral interaction between person and form. That fact is at the heart of Nora Ephron's 2009 film Julie and Julia: a poignant and timely renewal of the romantic comedy with an intrinsically satisfying psychology.

The first thing that strikes the viewer about Julie and Julia is its binary narrative. Beginning after WWII in Paris, Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is a recently married upper-middle class woman who is bored. After experimenting in a few other fields Julia settles on a cooking class where she quickly eclipses her male classmates, incrementally discovering new opportunities in the world of food. Julia endeavors to design a French cookbook for “servantless” middle class Americans. On the other side of the world more than 40 years later Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is a servantless American living with her husband in Queens. Her life as a social worker in post-9/11 New York is exhausting. Nearly at her wit's end, Julie lands on her pet project which also becomes the premise for her slice of the storyline: cook the entirety of Julia Child's “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, all 524 recipes, in one year. At this point the lives of the two women, separated by thousands of miles and several decades, converge elegantly and their frequencies begin to resonate as one.

Coincidence is not a word that describes this portion of the film. Rather than inaptly suggesting a certain level of parallelism between two characters, Julie and Julia naturally weaves together key similarities between the two women. On both sides, the relationships between the characters are preformed. This is not a “boy meets girl then proceeds to wins girl over in an hour and a half” romantic comedy. When we meet Julie and Julia they are already cemented in the relationships that will carry them through to the end of the film. The dominant male aggressor, passive female recipient relationship does not exist in this film. In a genre nearly monopolized by men it is so refreshing to see strong, independent women. Not only that, these are women who, while being totally in love with their respective husbands, are enamored not with a man or even another human but with an art. For the most part men play ancillary roles. They are morally supportive, witty, and capable. Both male leads, Julie's husband Eric (Chris Messina) and Julia's husband Paul (Stanley Tucci), are nuanced and gracefully subtle characters. They have dreams and aspirations but are mature enough to realize that they are not the main characters of this story.

The drawback is that this format nearly keeps the film from having any dramatic arc at all. While Julia fights to get her book published and bring French cooking to America, struggling with her home country's pre-occupied, stay-at-home mom style of cooking which is simple, quick and entirely lifeless, Julie's presence is comparably vapid. Her lifestyle and storyline are terribly sedentary. Either she is consoling the grieved over the phone in her office, blogging on her home computer, or eating. Her drama can even be difficult to understand if one is not willing to submit themselves to the hopelessness of Julie's existence. New York is an alienating and lonely place, even when one is neither alienated nor alone. Her friends are growing up and becoming successful and she is deliberately portrayed as being younger and less mature. She is writhing under the crushing burden of a boring job which devours most of her time. Her blog, the appropriate medium of a failed writer, where she publishes her culinary introspections, paired with her cooking is her escape. Bordering on addiction she begins to neglect her husband until his misery (which is coarsely entrenched in his not getting laid) upends Julie's daydream. This is really the only point where the film borders on being unconvincing. Writer/director Ephron weaves an enthralling story out of such a plain life and keeps the viewer's attention even when it is framed next to Meryl Streep's characteristically on-point portrayal of Julia Child, that the moment in which Julie's husband leaves her we suffer from emotional whiplash. It would seem from the pacing and organic passion, built piecemeal from the ground up, that all of a sudden Ephron realized she had to insert some kind of tension or else the movie was destined to remain on one plane throughout. It is vaguely forced and quickly settled, resolving back to the film's naturally uplifting tone.

Cooking has come a long way since Julia Child first exploded onto the scene. Julia introduced to women all over America the indulging and engrossing world of home cooking. Her impact on female independence cannot be overestimated. However, Julie and Julia is not a feminist film, at least not in a textbook sense. Its more of a film about the exceptional qualities inherent in ordinary lives, a concept relatively common in art but rarely displayed as gracefully as Ephron has done here. Julie and Julia is the culmination of a measured directorial hand, precise dramatic ingredients, and a few contemporary inclusions added to enhance dramatic affect and appeal. Ephron clearly knows how to handle all of her supplies and is not afraid to experiment. The resulting fare is delicious and nourishing. Bon appetit.

I Sell the Dead

This review was originally published here on Tiny Mix Tapes.

Dir. Glenn McQuaid
2009
6.5



The term “low budget” is written all over writer/director Glenn McQuaid's debut feature film I Sell the Dead, both subtlety within the film and literally in the director's statements about it. In so many instances the term “low budget” is used as a general defense of a flawed portion or portions of a film. For instance if the cinematography seems to have been shot mostly with a Handicam or if the special effects appear to have been designed by a 15 year old boy with an unnerving idolatry of Stephen Segal movies. I Sell the Dead suffers from neither of these conditions but in a sense is still making excuses for itself. It is a study of how a film with all the potential to be perfectly good can fall by the wayside if all of its elements are not tended properly.

Like so many low budget films I Sell the Dead suffers from the theory that it is almost always easier to make a low budget comedy than a low budget drama. History has shown that a couple grand and a penchant for raunchy or corrupted dark humor can yield a noteworthy or even significant comedy. Low budget drama, on the other hand, rarely translates. Having lost the ability to turn in on itself and mock its own contemptible lack of funds, the low-budget drama tends to overdo it like a teenage drama queen with larger aspirations. It's those same aspirations and vanities that flourish in Hollywood where grit can be transformed into gold almost overnight. IStD is not a Hollywood movie but it is a highly stylish and insular piece of cinema. Starting as a manageable drama it quickly devolves into lowest common denominator comedy. It takes equally from the pulp fiction of comic books and cult nature of B-list horror films, with the built-in campiness of both. Although the film is at times tongue in cheek and at others painfully sincere its biggest hindrance is not its cast, crew, or plot but rather its director.

IStD is more an elongated montage than a film. Using the near cliché narrative device of a condemned criminal's flashbacks on a life spent in an underworld closed to the average law abiding citizen, in this case grave robbing, the methodical development of the film's protagonist, Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan), is inferred rather than shown, leaving the audience to fill in the evolutionary blank spots between his tales. As the film progresses these stories become increasingly outrageous, bordering on and finally plunging head first into fictional absurdity. The introduction of fantasy into the narrative doesn't necessarily ruin it but it is a detractor. The film also has a disagreeable tendency of being winkingly modern and inauthentic which may be more a flaw of budgetary restrictions than slack writing. Authenticity is a purchasable commodity in the film world. A big budget buys sets, experts and most importantly: time. Where Martin Scorsese has the time and financiers to make a bold period film like Gangs of New York other less fortunate (read: rightly legendary) directors have to make due with what they can get. In the end, what could have been a potentially interesting musing on life and death is turned into a farce. Still, this is not entirely uncommon in film and IStD might serve quite nicely alongside a film like Shaun of the Dead in the ever growing canon Zom-Com.

All this would have been tolerable, perhaps even seriously enjoyable if the film was not so painfully aimless. Despite being adequately cast and containing a visual ideal which at times borders on brilliantly original, the film lacks a distinct direction or message. Perhaps it is high-brow idealism to believe that a film should contain a definitive message. However it should at least have a point. Curiously similar to Albert Camus' first novel “A Happy Death”, IStD suffers from an eagerness to prove something and in the process forgets that it is supposed to be telling a story, a common syndrome of an artist's first work. Curiously what both need is to be condensed as Camus did when he ultimately re-drafted parts of that forgotten first novel into his unforgettable second “The Stranger”. If McQuaid can condense his ideas, extend his budget and knowledge, and most importantly focus inwardly on what he is trying to communicate he has a more than a fighting chance at becoming a memorable film maker. He already has the style, confidence and adept hand of an older, more experienced director. Now all he needs is to become settled. Though I Sell the Dead falls short of being a marked success due to certain aspects of it being left untended and others over cared for it is nonetheless a striking debut and an impressive film given its self-declared low-budget label.