Archives for August 2009

Julie & Jula: Mastering The Art of Great Chick Flicks

Amy Adams and Meryl Streep are together again after their Oscar nominated performances in Doubt. But even though they play the title characters in Julie and Julia, they don’t have any scenes together. As a matter of fact, they are separated not only by an ocean, but by more than 30 years.

Julie

Julie & Julia is the story of one woman who is inspired by another women to achieve her dreams. It tells the parallel stories of Julie Powell and Julia Child. Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams),is a frustrated employee at a government bureaucracy who decides to write a blog. And like most bloggers, she writes about her passion, which happens to be cooking. She uses Julia Child as the inspiration for her blog, The Julie/Julia Project.

“Government drone by day, renegade foodie by night. Too old for theatre, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge. And in the Julie/Julia project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats’ well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment.

365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.

How far will it go? We can only wait. And wait. And wait…..
The Julie/Julia Project. Coming soon to a computer terminal near you.”

She decides to chronicle her experience of cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in just one year. Think of it, that is more than 500 recipes! That’s makes me feel bad, because some days after slaving over a hot keyboard, working the man every night & day, I can just gather enough strength to make a peanut butter sandwich for dinner. I guess its good, I write about movies on my blog. There are good days and bad days. All the while she gains a few pounds (its all that butter) and some insights into herself and gets a book deal. I really like the blogging parts of the movie. I understand her, because I have learned a lot about myself since I have been writing this blog. I don’t have a book deal and there isn’t a movie about my life on the horizon (but if there ever is, I want Halle Berry to play me-I’m just sayin’), but the more I do this the more I learn. Oh yeah…the review… So she cooks all this wonderful food.

Julia

Julia Child, played by Meryl Streep is the wife of a diplomat living in France. Meryl’s The Devil Wear Prada co-star Stanley Tucci plays her husband, Paul Child. After working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII and traveling the near east, she was used to a little adventure. The 6′ 2″, Julia was not content to be a housewife. She eventually decides to follow her passion for French food. She learned to cook, wrote a monumental cookbook and changed everything. I am not sure , but I think Julia Child was the first celebrity chef. Her PBS television series, The French Chef was part cooking lesson and part comedy due to Julia’s personality.

Nora Ephron directed Julia and Julia, which is based on Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously and Julia Childs’ My Life in France. Meryl Streep does a wonderful job of portraying the larger than life Julia Child. I really enjoyed this movie for the way it told the stories of two women who were searching for way to improve themselves and who both found themselves in food.

I have been complaining asking for better chick flicks for a while now. I am on a campaign to let the world know that chick flicks don’t have to be sappy love stories about love starved females. They should be movies that appeal to women and tell our stories in an entertaining way. Julie & Julia satisfied my appetite for a really good chick flick.

One last word of advice: Don’t watch this movie on an empty stomach. After watching Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci consume sumptuous meals and Amy Adams prepare Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon, Chocolate Souffle’ and the list goes on. Well, all I can says is, my friend and I left the theater with an overwhelming desire for CAKE!

Read the book: My Life in France by Julia Child

Mastering The Art of French Cooking

New Chick Flicks on DVD This Week: August 25th

Love on the Rocks

After the release of the Time Traveler’s Wife and Julie & Julia, there is a slight lull in release of chick flicks at the theaters. But here are a few new DVDs that deal with a variety of relationship problems. Let’s watch Julia Roberts and Beyonce show us how to handle ‘love on the rocks‘.

Duplicity

Clive Owen and Julia Roberts star in the smart and funny caper movie, Duplicity. They play Claire Stenwick and Robert Koval, corporate spies with a steamy past who team up to steal top secret research about a personal care products from rival corporations. As former spies, Claire and Robert have difficulty trusting each other, which makes for some really funny scenes between the two stars.

Obsessed

Beyoncé stars with Idris Elba and Ali Larter in Obsessed. A successful business man (Elba) with a beautiful wife (Knowles) becomes the target of a female stalker (Larter). How can you not compare this movie to Fatal Attraction? But this time the wife is played by Beyonce’, who doesn’t like it when someone messes with her man.

Working Girls

A good job is hard to find, but look how these ladies handle their business. One solves crimes and the other cleans up after them.

Sunshine Cleaning

Sunshine Cleaning stars Amy Adams (Julie & Julia, Doubt) as a single-mom and former ex-cheerleader who is now cleaning houses. She is desperate to earn enough money to pay her son’s school tuition. When her on-again, off again boyfriend Mac (Steve Zahn), a police detective, tells her how much money there is in crime-scene cleanup, she enlists her sister, played by Emily Blunt to join her in the gory and unusual business. Did I mention it is a comedy? This charming movie comes from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine and was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival.

The No. 1 Ladie’s Detective Agency

Neo- Soul singer Jill Scott, who was excellent in Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married, stars in her own series on HBO. Based on the best-selling novels of Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency follows the adventures Precious Ramotswe as she solves mysteries in her native country, Botswana. Filmed in Botswana and parts of South Africa, the The No. 1 Ladie’s Detective Agency is as faithful as it can be to the books.

Read the book: The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

Catch up with your favorite TV series

This one brings back memories: thirtysomething: The 1st Season

Hayden Panettiere and Zachary Quinto (the sexy Spock in this summer action hit, Star Trek) are back with all your other favorites in Heroes – Season Three

The ladies of Wisteria Lane are as desperate as ever in Desperate Housewives: The 5thSeason

5 Reasons You Should Watch Mad Men

OK, this is a site dedicated to Chick Flicks. But since I am trying to redefine the meaning of that term, I am going to talk about one of the best shows on TV, AMC’s original series, Mad Men. Mad Men takes place in the 1960’s. Before the Woman’s Movement, Civil Rights or pantyhose. It is compelling to watch this reconstructed 1960’s world through our 21st-century eyes.

The show looks back on the Kennedy-Nixon Presidential race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Civil Rights Movement with an unapologetic eye. It’s also interesting to see how Madison Avenue tries to sell products that are brand new but are not yet household names. For instance, the dilemma of how to market Clearasil. “That’s for teenagers with bad skin. Who cares about them.”

In the world of Mad Men, a woman’s place is at home. If you are one of those women who have to work, expect to live and die as a secretary. Not an admin or executive assistant, but a secretary. A secretary who types on a typewriter makes her boss’s phone calls, takes shorthand, and mixes his drinks. Also expect to be pinched, ogled, hit on and generally sexualized by the men in the office. And you take it because the term sexual harassment is 30 years in your future. Remember the dark ages ladies, when you had good ideas and told them to your male boss and he took credit for all your hard work. But the beauty of this show is we know how this is all going to change and we are watching it unfold in a brilliantly written and wonderfully acted series.

If you are not watching this incredible show, let me tell you what you are missing.

Don Draper

The handsome actor Jon Hamm plays the lead character, Donald Draper. A successful advertising executive working on Madison Avenue, with a beautiful Barbie doll of a wife, two cute children and a boatload of issues, Don Draper is a charming womanizer, with a brilliant creative mind and a secret past. This super-confident ladies man is actually Dick Whitman, the illegitimate son of a prostitute.

Don Draper is the man all the women want and all the men want to be. Jon Hamm plays him perfectly and he delivers Don Draperisms through a wisp of cigarette smoke with a shot of scotch, and the cynicism of a man with nothing to lose.

Betty Draper

January Jones is the perfect blond Barbie-Doll housewife, Betty Draper. She has everything any woman in 1962 could ask for: a big house in the suburbs, 2.5 kids (Bobby and Sally and one on the way) a handsome and successful husband and yet she is not happy. Betty is a complicated woman, trying to be what people expect of her, but there is a fire in her eyes. A fire that will be burning bras in about 10 years.

Peggy Olsen

Elizabeth Moss plays the naive young career girl Peggy Olsen. She starts out as the secretary of Don Draper. After Peggy comes up with a slogan for a lipstick campaign, Don Draper promotes her to jr. Copywriter. What a commotion that caused in the office.

Is she sleeping with Don? Who does she think she is? A woman copywriter? That’s the gossip going around the steno-pool.

The other women in the office aren’t so happy about Peggy’s new position either. They show her what they think of her by setting up her office in the supply closet with the new (very large and very loud) Xerox machine. Peggy is smart and ambitious and dying to escape her strict Catholic upbringing.

Joan Holloway

Joan Holloway is a woman who knows how to use her assets. Christina Hendricks plays the sexy, shapely executive secretary Joan Holloway, a smart woman who understands the ins and outs of the Sterling Cooper Agency. Joan is the person that makes things happen in the office. However, because she is a gorgeous redhead with the body of Marilyn Monroe, she is stuck in that role.

For instance, when Harry needed an assistant to help with ad campaigns for the newly formed television division, Joan pitched some really great ideas. You just knew she was hoping for the kind of job upgrade Peggy Olsen had, but they hired a man to fill the position. Well, you guessed it. Back poor Joan went to her typewriter, but only after she trained the man who was replacing her.

The Fashion

Talk about retro. The vintage 1960’s clothes on Mad Men are to die for. These were the days when women dressed up to go shopping and men wore suits, ties, and hats. You could scour every vintage store in town and not find the incredible blue form-fitting dress that Joan wore in Season 1; or the gorgeous chiffon cocktail dress that Betty wore when she and Don had dinner Barretts.

Designer Janie Bryant’s attention to detail makes you think you are really in the 60’s. The hairstyles, clothes and even the body type of the actresses are totally in line with the times. I read an article recently that said the producers of the show want January Jones to gain more weight because women were curvier and voluptuous in those days. If only they could bring back the old days.

Get a quick 4-minute Summery of Mad Men-Season 2

Step back into the 60’s with Don, Peggy, and the other Mad Men. Watch Mad Men on Netflix or you can rent the full series on Amazon Prime.

Mad Men Season 1
Mad Men Season 2
Mad Men: Season 3
Mad Men: Season 4
Mad Men: Season 5
Mad Men: Season 6

Photos by Frank Ockenfels 3

A Story of Boy Meets Girl: 500 Days of Summer

Refreshing!

That’s the first word I thought of when I saw (500) Days of Summer. The movie stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel as unlikely lovers in this off beat and refreshing romantic comedy.

This is a boy meets girl story. It is not a love story.

(500) Days of Summer tells the story of Tom Hansen (Gordon-Levitt), a young greeting card artist and wanna-be architect who longs to meet the perfect girl, fall in love and get married. See what I mean about refreshing? Enter Summer… Summer Finn, that is. Zooey Deschanel’s Summer is the “girl next door” that all the guys seem to fall for. She’s cute and funny and quirky and if she wasn’t so dang much fun, she would be the kind of girl who all the other girls hate. So naturally Tom falls for Summer. But as the narrator says (did I mention there is a narrator?) , this is not a love story.

The thing that makes Summer a very different Chick Flick character is she doesn’t believe in love. Gasp! She just wants to date, have fun with no commitments. (I think I heard applause from the men in the audience). (500) Days of Summer follows the couple as things go from idyllic to horrific in a series of non-linear vignettes.

One of the other refreshing things about 500 Days of Summer, is that it is musical. No, its not a musical, but the way music is used in the movie it helps to carry the story along. For instance, Tom starts to fall for Summer when he learns that they share a love of The Smiths. He is listening to “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want“. Or when he walks to work, feeling on top of the world, the morning after (well, you know) and bursts into dance to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True”. Regina Spektor’s “Us” runs throughout the movie as we watch poor Tom go through the highs and lows of (you guessed it) 500 days of Summer. You really should check out the soundtrack.

This type of film making certainly is not main stream, but again the word refreshing comes to mind. Take this scene, where after breaking up with Tom, Summer invites him to a party. He is desperate to get her back and imagines how the evening will go. (Yeah right…like you haven’t rehearsed an important date in your mind 100 times before hand?) There is a split screen of the party.

Expectation vs. Reality

Best known for directing music videos, Marc Webb has made a funny and entertaining movie that doesn’t follow a traditional style of story telling. But you never get bored, which is more than I can say for some movies I’ve seen recently. And somehow I couldn’t help hoping that things might work out for Summer and Tom. Maybe it just the romantic in me. I love a happy ending. But it does have a happy ending, just not the one you expect.

Have you seen 500 Days of Summer? What did you think?

The Ugly Truth About Dating: He’s Just Not That Into You

I was planning to go the movies to see the Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler, in The Ugly Truth. The movie looked like the perfect, although formulaic chick flick.

But before Saturday had even rolled around, I read not one, but six BAD reviews about The Ugly Truth. In fact, I couldn’t find a blog, website, newspaper or person who had one good thing to say about his movie.

Apparently there is a scene involving vibrating panties and a business meeting that cause a few chuckles.

Really? Is this what passes for romantic comedy these days? The same old cliche’ of the hard-nosed career woman falling for the charms of a rough macho man are just plain tired.

Come on people….We want better Chick Flicks! Say it with me…WE WANT BETTER CHICK FLICKS!!!

Required Reading: Dating 101

So I saved myself $10.00 and pulled from my Netflix que, He’s Just Not That Into You. Somehow I missed this movie when it was in the theaters. But now I want to buy it. The movie stars Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, Justin Long, Bradley Cooper, Kevin Connelly, and Scarlett Johanson who are facing various relationship problems in the modern world.

The movie is loosely based on the book of the same name by Greg Behrendt. The movie starts with one of the truest and most influential scenes ever filmed. Women are indoctrinated with an insidious lie that makes many of us fall victim to the wrong guy over and over again.

From childhood we are told that if a guy ignores you, is mean to you, treats you badly, doesn’t call you when he says he will, or in any other way acts like a real jerk–Well, it’s obvious, he likes you. Of course, he likes me. That’s right, he likes me so much and he is afraid of the intimacy, so he is ignoring me. What a load of bull%#@ (ohhh wait, this is a PG blog).

This is one of the many things I liked about He’s Just Not That Into You. It’s not the typical Chick Flick. In fact, take a look at the short promotion trailer in my sidebar, featuring 3 of the male stars that gives 10 typical chick flick clichés that the movie does not contain.

The story centers around Gigi, played by Ginnifer Goodwin (Once Upon A Time). Gigi is like many of us. She goes out with a guy, has a nice time and when he says “I’ll call you sometime”. She foolishly believes he will call. In fact, poor Gigi waits by the phone, constantly checks her voice mail and even drops by his favorite bar hoping to “accidentally” run into him. Why am I saying foolish? Like you haven’t done at least one of these things (or worse)?

Anyway… while under the pretense of returning a lost pen, Gigi meets the Alex who is played by Justin Long. (You may know him as the MAC guy in the PC vs. MAC commercials. I remember him from the Star Trek spoof, Galaxy Quest). Alex sets Gigi straight on the way men think. If a guy doesn’t call you, he is not interested. Plain and simple.

A few years ago, I had a similar conversation with a male friend who I was hoping would turn into a boyfriend, but unlike Gigi, I refused to believe it can be that simple. Please…Ladies, Chicas, Girlfriends… Believe me… it’s that simple. We are not the exception, we are the rule.

Other story lines follow Scarlett Johanson as an aspiring singer who becomes involved with a married record company executive, played by Bradley Cooper (recently seen in The Hangover); Jennifer Aniston, who is in a 7-year relationship with Ben Affleck, a man who doesn’t believe in the institution of marriage. Drew Barrymore’s character is an advertising sales rep at a magazine geared towards the gay community who is having difficulty with dating in this technology driven world.

“I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”

The movie takes each of their relationships through some twists and turns, and while its not a perfect movie, I really enjoyed He’s Just Not That Into You.

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