Julia Child’s life is partially depicted in the new foodie film Julie & Julia, and while it’s as much fun to see Meryl Streep portray the famous chef as it was to watch Dan Aykroyd and Bill Cosby do her back in the day, we can’t help but wish the real Child had lived long enough to star in the film herself. We also wish the whole movie was based on her autobiography, My Life in France, rather than share-adapted from both that book and Julie Powell’s blog-turned-memoir Julie & Julia.
There’s a reason Child was a hugely popular TV personality and there’s a reason why Powell was an Internet writer. Just as you’d rather only watch Sean Penn as Gene Shalit in a movie and not bother with Michael Pitt’s portrayal of lowly film blogger Christopher Campbell, you could probably do without the Amy Adams as Powell stuff in Julie & Julia.
Outside of playing herself as a foodie heroine in a chick flick, what other kinds of movies could Child have acted in? Given her OSS background, we would have loved to see her fill in for Judi Dench in the Bond films as M. Alas, that will never happen, but if our gastronomical dreams come true, perhaps we might see one of the following TV personalities in his or her own blockbuster film someday:
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I really hope that the new trailer for I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is playing ahead of prints of Julie & Julia this weekend. After all, they’re both about bloggers-turned-authors-turned movie characters. The one problem might be that the audience for a foodie chick flick has less than 1% crossover with the audience for a lewd and misogynistic dude comedy. Of course, the only other appropriate placement for this spot is ahead of the similarly themed The Hangover, but that would surely just make this thing look even worse than it is.
Based on Tucker Max’s book of the same name, or at least one story from it, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell will without a doubt be to Julie & Julia what How to Lose Friends and Alienate People was to The Devil Wears Prada. But at least How to Lose Friends featured Megan Fox, and it still couldn’t draw a crowd. So is there any hope for this? Considering how popular the trailer is on the web today, there may actually be some interest. Though we’re going to guess that after everyone has actually seen the trailer they’re not going to want to see the movie, even if they’re fans of Max’s “gonzo” tales of debauchery.
Check out other film blog responses after the jump:
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A post this morning at The Awl ruminates on The New York Times‘ apparent love affair with Nora Ephron, writer/director of Julie & Julia. The paper has taken to covering her/the movie about once every other day in the month leading up to the film’s release this week, to the point where Nikki Finke has cried conspiracy. Choire Sicha gives the paper a bit more credit; though he criticizes the Times for having “no idea what lays beyond its own fortress walls,” he sympathises with the media’s attraction to Ephron as a “charming, fun whirlwind” and a “bridge” between New York old money and Hollywood commerce.
This is all very interesting, but it would be easy to read The Awl’s post and make the dangerous inference that since The New York Times is gaga for Julie & Julia, and because The New York Times tends to “exhibit absolutely clearly that they have very little idea anymore what readers are, or even should be, interested in,” ergo, there somehow won’t be much of an appetite for Ephron’s food porn outside “their bubble,” which Sicha accurately assesses Ephron is “deep inside.” But to make such a leap of inference would both give the film too much credit, and Ephron’s extremely commercial instincts not enough. I saw the film at Traverse City over the weekend, and while I personally wish it was, well, better — imagine a movie split between post-WWII France and New York in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that actually treated its twin protagonists as engaged products of their socio-historical surroundings rather than just borderline-sitophiliac ciphers! –– the 500 elderly Midwesterners I saw it with seemed completely satisfied. It may be true that Ephron represents, as Sicha suggests, a link between New York and Hollywood that this city’s newspaper can’t resist, but The Great New York Times Ephron Splooge is probably not as much about either coast as it is about much of the country in between.
We can thank Christopher Guest for pulling her out of obscurity and casting her as a lesbian dog trainer in Best in Show. Or we can just thank her incredible talent for stealing scenes by way of riotous awkward comedy. Either way, this week we should remember to be thankful for Jane Lynch. You may have seen her recently in Role Models as the formerly coke-addicted founder of a mentoring organization. Or maybe you’ve seen her in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights or Guest’s A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration. In most of her roles, she plays opposite the best comedians in the business, yet she still supplies her films with some of their most memorable moments. I can’t wait to see how she does against Meryl Streep in next year’s Julie & Julia, when she plays the Oscar-winner’s sister.
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