I am curled up in the bed after having scarfed down my Jack in the Box southwest grilled chicken salad (really excellent, but be sure they don't gyp you on the corn sticks!) and starting my movie for the night, Julie and Julia. I picked this up in the bargain section of Target where Bob and I took refuge during the showing this afternoon between 4:30 and 5:30.
What thrills me at this moment, I mean, so much so that I paused the movie to come start this blog, is that I have discovered this movie has an option to subtitle the commentary. Have I been missing out on this? I've never seen this option on a DVD, and believe me, I subtitle everything. It amuses me to see the subtitles of sound and music, plus I can catch those lines no one ever hears when people are talking over one another. I really hate when people talk over one another. My father-in-law watches these horrible news programs where it appears the main goal is to see who can shout the loudest over the other people on the panel and it makes me nuts. I digress . . .
Julie and Julia is the first movie I've discovered this charming feature on and even though I am only twenty minutes into the movie, I am absolutely delighted. You see, I like to know the knowledge imparted in intelligent commentaries, but they tend to do the same thing as those news panel shows -- the audio for the film and the audio for the commentary mix and mingle and make me crazy. So here, I'm listening to the film, but I'm getting to read the thoughts of the director as I go. Did you know they recreated Julia Child's post-war French apartment almost identically from all the pictures they had of her and Paul during that time, but the size of the one in the film is actually two rooms smaller than the gigantic thing they lived in? And that when they were scouting for all those fabulous French restaurants of the 50s that we see the Childs eating at, the best places they could find that looked like 50s era France were in New York?
The writer and director, Norah Ephron, talks about the real Julie's menagerie of three cats and a boa constrictor being too much for her to even imagine in the film (there's only the one cat). Did you know that the woman who plays the horrid Madame Brassart from the Cordon Blue is actually Joan Juliet Buck, an editor at Vogue? I loved her description of filming the scene of all 14 males cooks and Julia cooking omelets over real stoves at the same time as, she imagines, male directors must feel about filming car race scenes.
Large parts of the letters you hear Meryl Streep reading are almost word for word from Julia's actual letters she wrote to her friend, as are Paul's. His toast to her as the "butter to my bread and the breath to my life" weren't written for the movie. I'm not sure why this thrills me so, but it does.
And Amy Adams has not eaten a lobster since shooting the lobster killer scene. . .
You know how Julie dresses as Julia for her birthday dinner? The emblem she pinned on everyone's shirt is the emblem of the cooking school Julia started with her friends who collaborated with her to write her cookbook: L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, aka the school of the three big eaters.
Chris Messina actually ate 35 tums for one scene. Who keeps count of that?
That fantastic train station? Hoboken, New Jersey. It was going to run them half a million dollars for half a day's shooting at one in Paris. And later in the film, when they are supposed to be in the Boston station? Same Hoboken Station from another angle.
Meryl Streep is 5'6 and they've managed to make her convincingly 6'2 like the real Julia, whose sister was even taller at 6'4. The real Paul Childs stood on a ladder over Julia's shoulder to take the photographs to be used in her cookbook, so that they would make more sense to the cook who was following the illustrations to the recipes.
The very best commentary is late in the movie, right before Julie finds out Julia Child doesn't appreciate her blog, when Norah is describing what looks like this innocuous shot of Julie's cat: "This is one of those scenes that looks like nothing. But it's a complete nightmare. Trust me. You never want to put a cat in a movie. This one, finally, on about the 28th take, did what we wanted her to do. Or maybe it was a him. I can't remember."
What thrills me at this moment, I mean, so much so that I paused the movie to come start this blog, is that I have discovered this movie has an option to subtitle the commentary. Have I been missing out on this? I've never seen this option on a DVD, and believe me, I subtitle everything. It amuses me to see the subtitles of sound and music, plus I can catch those lines no one ever hears when people are talking over one another. I really hate when people talk over one another. My father-in-law watches these horrible news programs where it appears the main goal is to see who can shout the loudest over the other people on the panel and it makes me nuts. I digress . . .
Julie and Julia is the first movie I've discovered this charming feature on and even though I am only twenty minutes into the movie, I am absolutely delighted. You see, I like to know the knowledge imparted in intelligent commentaries, but they tend to do the same thing as those news panel shows -- the audio for the film and the audio for the commentary mix and mingle and make me crazy. So here, I'm listening to the film, but I'm getting to read the thoughts of the director as I go. Did you know they recreated Julia Child's post-war French apartment almost identically from all the pictures they had of her and Paul during that time, but the size of the one in the film is actually two rooms smaller than the gigantic thing they lived in? And that when they were scouting for all those fabulous French restaurants of the 50s that we see the Childs eating at, the best places they could find that looked like 50s era France were in New York?
The writer and director, Norah Ephron, talks about the real Julie's menagerie of three cats and a boa constrictor being too much for her to even imagine in the film (there's only the one cat). Did you know that the woman who plays the horrid Madame Brassart from the Cordon Blue is actually Joan Juliet Buck, an editor at Vogue? I loved her description of filming the scene of all 14 males cooks and Julia cooking omelets over real stoves at the same time as, she imagines, male directors must feel about filming car race scenes.
Large parts of the letters you hear Meryl Streep reading are almost word for word from Julia's actual letters she wrote to her friend, as are Paul's. His toast to her as the "butter to my bread and the breath to my life" weren't written for the movie. I'm not sure why this thrills me so, but it does.
And Amy Adams has not eaten a lobster since shooting the lobster killer scene. . .
You know how Julie dresses as Julia for her birthday dinner? The emblem she pinned on everyone's shirt is the emblem of the cooking school Julia started with her friends who collaborated with her to write her cookbook: L'Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, aka the school of the three big eaters.
Chris Messina actually ate 35 tums for one scene. Who keeps count of that?
That fantastic train station? Hoboken, New Jersey. It was going to run them half a million dollars for half a day's shooting at one in Paris. And later in the film, when they are supposed to be in the Boston station? Same Hoboken Station from another angle.
Meryl Streep is 5'6 and they've managed to make her convincingly 6'2 like the real Julia, whose sister was even taller at 6'4. The real Paul Childs stood on a ladder over Julia's shoulder to take the photographs to be used in her cookbook, so that they would make more sense to the cook who was following the illustrations to the recipes.
The very best commentary is late in the movie, right before Julie finds out Julia Child doesn't appreciate her blog, when Norah is describing what looks like this innocuous shot of Julie's cat: "This is one of those scenes that looks like nothing. But it's a complete nightmare. Trust me. You never want to put a cat in a movie. This one, finally, on about the 28th take, did what we wanted her to do. Or maybe it was a him. I can't remember."
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