I notice I also get tired a lot more easily since the brain surgery. Which has allowed me to skip things that seem too tedious, like articles I'm reading etc. Quite a liberation since I have always had a reading compulsion that made me need to read every word from the front cover of a book to the back cover, or in a magazine etc. Nice to be able to realize I don't want to read something and just stop.
It's like that with a lot of things right now. And for all I know may stay that way, which has its benefits even beyond the one I mention above. Like I watched another DVD sent to me for the awards season, this one of JULIE & JULIA, and like the one for CRAZY HEART, this one skipped too.
But only in two spots and very briefly. In the old days I'd feel compelled to go out and find another copy to see what I missed, but these post-skull-sawed-open days that seems unnecessary. I enjoyed the flick anyway, a lot. I didn't have any problem with the Amy Adams parts as some of my friends did. Although I did prefer the Meryl Streep parts only because as with IT'S COMPLICATED I again found Streep incredibly attractive as Julia Childs!
I don't know if it's the changes in my brain or what, but I never found Streep attractive before. I mean I recognized what others found physically attractive in her and I dug some of her acting, particularly her comic roles, but she just wasn't my type or anywhere near it. But her acting in IT'S COMPLICATED especially, but also in JULIE & JULIA, just made me want to wrap my arms around her and...
Anyway, it's an incredible acting job, and she gets a lot of support from Stanley Tucci playing her slightly unbelievably always loving and understanding husband. But despite the obvious distortions of reality in almost all the characters in this movie, it's still a unique take on relationships, I found, and worth watching if only for that, let alone the Oscar worthy performance by Streep.
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3 comments:
I look forward to seeing this film too and love the associations to blogging
Julie and Julia.
We saw it last week.
Amy Adams was very good in Doubt [2008], but I liked her much less here, as a ditzy young Long Island housewife. The trick or hook of using a youthful aspiring publicity groupie to tell a story about Julia Child seemed lame to us--I mean, isn't Child a significant enough subject, that we could simply see a bio of her, without the "contemporary" connection?
So it's a tame partial biography of Julia Child, her marriage to a mid-level American diplomat, and a footnote of her relationship to her sister. Pretty blah.
From what I can gather (elsewhere), Julia Child was an interesting person in her own right, and wouldn't have needed sprucing up to make her seem solid enough for a substantial character-study. Cooking may be by definition a light-weight profession, but MFK Fisher never thought of it that way. They could, for instance, have made a bit more of the sex-stereotyping that once dominated the chef-industry. Or gone into her TV days, and her relationship with other celebrity chefs, and her later years in France. Ah, well, I suppose that's all too much to ask for.
Tucci is really a terrific actor, and deserves a supporting role Oscar for this part.
Streep is a conundrum. I thought she was pretty sexy in Sophie and French Lieutenant, but lately she's begun to look flaccid and Germanic.
Amusing--Streep is actually very short, and Child was tall, so that went to considerable lengths to disguise this in the movie.
Thanks for all your positive comments Elisabeth these past weeks.
And Curtis, I hear what you're saying about JULIE & JULIA, but either the brain surgery or something else has led me to find Streep attractive in her latest two movies in a way I never found her attractive before, and accepting of the reality that yes a movie about Julia Child alone might have been interesting, but that's not the movie that got made and until it is this will have to do and as such I found it fine, including Amy Adams portrayal of a much less interesting, much more seemingly spoiled and immature contemporary woman compared to Childs, but I found that brave of Adams and the real life woman her character is based on because she had to know she would suffer in comparison with Streep's Child, which I assume is part of the point of the story. As for Streep's height, you're a little mistaken there Curtis, since I met her a few times in my Hollywood years and she seemed pretty tall to me. I'm six feet in shoes and she never seemed that much shorter. She could have been wearing very high heels but even so. Though it is true that Childs and her sister were taller and Tucci was probably partly cast because he is definitely shorter, etc.
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