Cinema Hype

When you’re a little kid, people like to tell you that two wrongs don’t make a right. They’re right, I suppose, if we’re doing moral math. I can’t think of a time when a wrong plus another wrong yielded a right, though I admit I don’t really go around classifying events as “wrongs” and “rights.” Sadly, now that I’m all grown up (heh), I’m also finding that I may have been lied to. Turns out that two rights may not add up to a right, either. For example:

Right #1: Julie and Julia, by Julie Powell. This is one of my favorite books of the past few years, something I picked up as light reading that somehow managed to attach itself to my psyche. It’s nonfiction: sometime around the turn of the century, a melodramatic, vegetarian executive assistant named Julie Powell decided, for no real reason, to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, and keep a blog about it. The book deal came later, and what we get includes snippets of the blog, but mostly behind-the-scenes commentary from Powell’s tiny Brooklyn apartment. It’s funny and snarky, and there’s a whole chapter about aspic (which, when you think about it, is an endlessly hilarious word, not to mention concept), and it’s just…well, it’s great. It’s a Right.

Right #2: Amy Adams. I’m not sure whether I’ve given proper space to my recent affection for Adams. I loved her commitment to adorability in Enchanted—she might well have won the Golden Globe for her performance, had the show, you know, gone on—but I mostly like her because I look at her filmography and think that anyone who starts out with Drop Dead Gorgeous and gets broken up with on a booze cruise on The Office must be the kind of girl I’d like to hang out with. She is also a Right.

So why am I so wary about the recent news that Amy Adams is set to play Julie Powell in the film of Julie and Julia? I think it’s because, in my mind, Julie Powell may actually be the Anti-Adams. Or, rather, she’s the Anti-Adams-on-screen. She’s nerdy and moody and she and her husband like to eat pizza with jalapeno and bacon while watching Buffy. Her biggest celebrity crush is David Strathairn. Sometimes, she’s not very nice. Other times, she’s downright awful. She’s the kind of girl some of us turn out to be, once we realize that we won’t be making a profession of looking like a Disney princess, and so it stings a little to see the role played by someone who has made a profession of looking like a Disney princess. It’s the kind of casting that makes me excited for Adams, who could probably stand a job where she gets to be something other than 100% adorable (and, frankly, it kind of makes me like her even more), but it makes me a little sad for the rest of us, who hold out hope that sometimes just writing, or cooking, or writing about cooking, or doing whatever it is that we do, makes us a little bit of a supermodel/rockstar, even if we’re doing it in some tiny kitchen somewhere.

(On another note, though: Residual sadness aside, such a dream team! Adams, Meryl Streep, and Stanley Tucci; written by Nora Ephron! The heart, it pounds!)

Julie and Julia, Julie/Julia Project, Amy Adams, Julie Powell, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, Nora Ephron