where: CENTURY 14 VALLEJO in Vallejo, CA
when: Saturday, August 8ht, 2009
show: 10:30 pm
costs: $10.00 Ticket + $3.75 small Diet/Zero ( with Barq's & Cherry flavors ) Coke = $13.75
auditorium: 2
seat: 4th row, 7th column
synopsis: Two bored wives from two different generations have a common ground, French Cooking, when one of them, Julie Powell ( Amy Adams ) decides to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child's ( Meryl Streep ) book, Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, Volume One, in the span of one year, chronicling her trials and errors along the way on her blog.
miscast: Meryl Streep, at 60 years of age, is too old for the part and Stanley Tucci, at three months shy of the 49-year mark, is too young for the part. Julia Child was approximately 36 years old and her husband, Paul, was about ten years older when they moved to France.
prediction: Oscar nominations for either Meryl Streep or Amy Adams or both. And, perhaps, one for Nora Ephron as writer or director.
noteworthy scenes: 1.) The short bed; 2.) At the cubicle talking with victims/survivors of 911; 3.) The Cobb Salad lunch; 4.) The Lost Generation article; 5.) The talk about blogging; 6.) The Project; 7.) La Couronne French restaurant; 8.) Butter; 9.) Poached Eggs; 10.) The Onions; 11.) The "spy" talk at the dinner table; 12.) The Lobster killer; 13.) The "meltdowns;" 14.) The wedding; 15.) L'Ecole De Trois Gourmandes collaboration; 16.) Dan Aykroyd's Julia Child skit on SNL; 17.) The argument; 18.) The talk on commission; 19.) McCarthyism; 20.) What's for dinner? 21.) The meeting with the pen-pal; 22.) Imaginary friend; 23.) Newspaper article; 24.) The two "Hates;" 25.) Knopf Publishing; 26.) Le Duck; and 27.) The Julia Child Museum.
audience reaction: They enjoyed this movie which is a crowd pleaser and which will be a sentimental favorite come Oscar night.
recommendation: Whether or not you're into French cuisine you should go see this movie.
spoiler alert! A Cobb Salad is not a Cobb Salad without the addition of avocados and baby corn-on-the-cobb, according to the original recipe that I read a few years ago. You don't crack an egg over a boiling pot to make poached eggs. First, you should crack each one individually into a small bowl then gently pour it into the boiling water--the sharp edge of a knife facilitates in cleanly cracking an egg shell but, watch out! you don't want to have an accident like that of Dan Aykroyd. With that big pile of onions, I hope she made another French specialty: Onion Soup. When you taste-test the food that you're cooking, don't sip or lick the cooking spoon or ladle that you're using since it is quite an unsanitary habit and potentially illness-inducing. Instead, put a small amount of the food or liquid in a saucer and taste it from there--a bonus to this method is that it cools down the sample for you.
fyi: The reason why the French bed was short has to do with Napoleon Bonaparte, himself. He only chose the best, fittest and tall French men for his army. When his army was decimated, the country was left with nothing but short-statured men to re-populate it.
My French namesake and I are exactly the same height.
Napoleon Bonaparte's personal chef invented the mayonnaise. Napoleon lost the battle at Waterloo because he couldn't properly assess the battle due to diarrhea--yep! Salmonella poisoning from the mayonnaise.
Napoleon Bonaparte once said that an army marches on its stomach, meaning that it could only go for as long as its food supplies last.
Even though the French have a reputation for being great lovers, their weddings supposedly have the highest rate of unconsummation in the whole world. I guess that this is their way of "not taking the work home!"
The French invented the French Chef knife, the one used by Julia and the rest of the class to cut-up onions. But they used the knife in the wrong way. A French Chef knife is not to be used like a cleaver to chop-up stuff. Instead, it is designed to be used with a back and forth rocking motion.
Julia Child was actually a real spy working for the CIA precursor, Office of Strategic Services ( OSS ) and was sworn to secrecy all her life. She was one of nearly 24,000 Americans to work as spies for the OSS during WW II, according to a news article of August 13th of last year. She is listed in the OSS's de-classified papers kept at The National Archives.
Amy Adams is actually better looking than the real Julie Powell.
word of advice: When you sharpen a knife, don't sharpen each side of the blade at the same angle since doing so will make the knife get dull faster. When you put a knife in a knife block, have the sharp edge pointing up so it will maintain its sharpness longer as well as extend the span of the knife block's functionality . If you have to choose between a half-tang and a full-tang, make sure to only choose a knife with a full-tang. And make sure that the handles of your knives don't have gaps and cracks that could potentially harbor disease-inducing microbes.
If you want to try French cooking, the recipes which call for butter must use the fancy imported creamery butter kind, not the cheap pieces of crap that are sold at the local grocery store, mon Dieu!
tidbits: I saw this French documentary on PBS once. In one scene, it showed this man riding his bicycle with some baguettes strapped to the wire rack at the back of the bike. Two things were immediately wrong with this scene: The baguettes were as-is, free of packaging, and the bicycle didn't have fenders. Yuck! I would never want to be invited over to his place for a meal!
Dan Aykroyd's Julia Child skit is as funny now as it was when I first saw it on Saturday Night Live ( SNL ) years ago. The late Benny Hill also did something similar which was also funny.
I used to work with a French man years ago in Oakland, CA. Out of curiosity, I asked him what he and his fellow countrymen thought about the cartoon character, Pepe Le Pew. He told me that they love him in France! I didn't know that the French were such good sports and had a good sense of humor.
I tried watching Julia Child's TV show years ago. But I couldn't even watch one episode all the way through because I didn't quite understand her appeal. But I'm gonna have to buy her books one of these days if only so that I can "bone-apart" Le Duck! Oui, oui!
P.S. Is this movie trying to tell me that I started the wrong kind of blog?
