Julie & Julia

I'm hard to please when it comes to movies proving themselves worth my time. But I'm easy to please when it comes to movies pleasing me in a basic sort of a way. Yet Julie & Julia whiffed so hard in both directions I had to stop it halfway. Maybe it was my concurrent dogsitting duties that got under my skin, but it might have also been Meryl Streep's incessant yipping. Look, I admire her, and maybe her Julia Child impression was hilarious for anyone familiar with Julia Child. I am not such a one, and can't vouch for the mimicry, so what I got was an alarmingly irritating performance. I say alarming because I don't think I'm easily annoyed by such things. When she joined forces with her sister (Jane Lynch) and they amplified each other like the inside of a laser... well, that's when I turned it off. I don't think the white noise of a thousand crying babies would sound very different from that scene, so meshed were these scraping overtones.

I am also not easily bored, yet I was having a hard time even before that scene. You might say the movie was just a repetition of the book, therefore unexciting for me, but Hannah beside me had not read the book and called out the movie as boring. I think it was just a boring movie. Besides, it's true that it was a tired repetition of the book. It stole some basic elements and depicted them without soul, like Sauron in his many guises.

I want to specifically call out how it lost all of the humor of the book. It depicted many of the same scenes, even in voiceover, so I'm not sure how it failed to communicate the bountiful humor in Powell's literary voice.