Thursday, August 13, 2009

BitchBuzz: Julie & Julia & one unfortunate part

Yes, it's Thursday so my latest column for BitchBuzz is up, a piece on Julie & Julia, the film about Julia Child and the blogger Julie Powell, which I saw with my pal Peg last weekend.

I went with a girl friend to see the new film Julie and Julia which was just about what I had expected from the pen of Nora Ephron and from the reviews I had read up to that point.

Everyone raves about Streep as Julia Child and well they should. She's absolutely magical. Her ebullience as Child discovering the intricacies of French cooking is contagious. It's impossible not to be charmed by the fearless Child...


Read the rest to find out why this woman-friendly film nonetheless managed to annoy me.

2 comments:

Todd Mason said...

I have to wonder, as with the self-reinforcing notions of childish, schlumphy men "deserving" childish but more polished conventionally-pretty womem that pop up in films, if the environment of Hwood itself doesn't encourage a lot of mutually backstabbing women tropes, or at least flatter the perceptiveness of those who insist that they are the norm. Then again, perhaps I have a false impression of the nature of too much of the Industry community there. For their sake, I hope so.

I seem to be running into a fair amount of women of a certain age (and hear, from female friends who hear from their female acquiantances, of the complaints of some of nearly all ages) who Just Don't Like Men, despite their sexual attraction to them (us, I guess I should write, though I doubt I'm bumping up that curve much for many), whom I have to find as suspect as the Women Who Don't Like Women, the Men Who Don't Like Women, and the Men Who Don't Like Men, among other bigots, however truly unfortunate some of their experiences might be. Even understandable...just not, well, healthy. At least rather sad.

C. Margery Kempe said...

I'm really sick of people who dismiss anything or anyone on the basis of gender. People are people. It's fine to talk about tendencies in socialisation, but people are individuals. It's as annoying when people make outrageous blanket statements like that as when others allow their kids to run wild "because they're boys."

H'wood doubtless promotes backstabbing, which is likely why it seems more present to someone like Ephron, but it gets treated like a gendered activity: "of course, women stab each other in the back" instead of people in H'wood stab each other int he back to get ahead.