Tag Archives: Julie and Julia

by

At The Theater #42: Today’s Special

My primary interest in seeing Today’s Special was that it starred Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show. I really like him on The Daily Show, not enough to see The Last Airbender, but enough to head to the nearby Brooklyn Heights Cinema to see him in Today’s Special, a low budget comedy for foodies.

I make fun of this movie, but if I wasn’t such a snob, maybe I wouldn’t be so behind on movies right now.

Aasif leaves his acerbic character from The Daily Show behind in Today’s Special, where he plays Samir, a frustrated New York City sous chef. He quits his job after being passed over for promotion one too many times and plans to study in France until a family emergency causes him to take over his father’s failing Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens. Samir hires Akbar, a taxi driver who claims to be a former chef from Mumbai. Akbar teaches Samir to cook not only with head, but with his heart and stomach too, and sometimes with his groin. Thankfully, no one has sex with a pie in this movie.

Watching Today’s Special made me remember my love of Indian food, especially good Indian food. Growing up I had a lot of Indian friends, even being dubbed an “honorary Indian” by one because of my spice tolerance. Having a lot of Indian friends growing up meant eating a lot of Indian food at their houses. Akbar’s cooking in Today’s Special reminded me of those meals. On the off chance that Mrs. Shah ever reads this, I want her to know that I’ve never had Tandori chicken as good as hers.

Kevin Corrigan, the good-for-nothing brother from Grounded for Life, is great in the small part he has in this movie as one of Samir’s work buddies. Kevin Corrigan is one of those actors that makes me smile whenever he shows up on screen because he does comedy really well.

Also great in Today’s Special is Naseeruddin Shah, who plays Akbar, the taxi driving chef who is the Merlin to Samir’s Arthur. Watching this guy will make you want to go into your kitchen as soon as you get home and just start experimenting.

Akbar will make you want to cook Indian food and wish you looked as cool as he does in a hat.

Today’s Special succeeds where Julie and Julia failed for me. I thought Julie from Julie and Julia was an obnoxious whiner. On the other hand, Samir is a very sympathetic character in Today’s Special. Like Julie, he dreams of being a chef. Unlike Julie, I didn’t want to strangle him by the end of the movie.

If you like food and you like comedy, you should go out and see Today’s Special while it’s in theaters. I have a feeling that this is going to be a movie that nobody sees in the theater, but gains a following on DVD and cable. So If you want to impress your friends a few years from now, go see it now. They will be in awe of you…eventually. For now, their reaction will probably be “What movie?”

by

On The Couch #5: Julie & Julia

I need to apologize to anyone who ever watches a movie with me that has location shoots in any places that mean anything to me. There we’ll be, quietly watching a movie together, like say Julie & Julia, and a character gets off the subway at 45 Road/Courthouse Square in Queens and I yell out “Hey! That’s Long Island City!” This is followed by confused silence from my movie-watching companions. “That’s grandma’s old building in the background; the red brick one! And there’s the diner!” Which is usually given the sarcastic response of “Great…” or the non-sarcastic response of “Uh huh, so?” Amy Adams’ Julie Powell gets on and off that subway stop a few times in Julie & Julia, so…sorry.

-“Look! It’s Long Island City!”
-“Um, great.”

I thought Julie & Julia was quite good. Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, who starts a blog about going through every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. There are 524 recipes in the book and she gives herself a deadline of 1 year, so she has her work cut out for her. She’s motivated by her dissatisfaction with her job and and of her apartment in Queens. I get the job bit; that job looked torturous. But Queens? Come on. She acts like it’s Staten Island.

Meryl Streep was excellent as Julia Child. This performance has me circling her name in any Oscar pool I’m in this year. The two storylines dovetail well together, often playing off the same themes, and, as this is a movie about one person writing the same cookbook the other is reading, the same recipes.

The book that started it all.
But even more so than Streep, how awesome in Stanley Tucci? In this movie, he plays Julia Child’s husband Paul. He’s great here, but what I really mean is how awesome is her in every movie? He wins the Tuesday Night Movies J.K. Simmons Award for Making Whatever Movie He’s in Better. So congratulations, Stanley. You deserve it.

A toast…to Tucci.

Worst part of the movie? Amy Adams’s haircut. I get it. The filmmakers don’t want her to be glamorous Amy Adams, they want her to be everyday woman Julie Powell. But man, that was one unflattering haircut. Then I think about it some more and remember how bad my hair looked in 2002 and 2003 and I really get it. They weren’t trying to make Amy Adams look dumpy. They were commenting on how ugly hairstyles were in the early part of the last decade. Well played Nora Ephron.

The blu-ray for Julie & Julia is packed with content, maybe too much content. The cooking videos with Julia Child were very cool, spotlighting Julia’s take on recipes that were used in the movie, but the behind-the-scenes featurette on the movie was way too long. I say this mainly because I couldn’t sit through the whole thing. I don’t know how much more I had left to go with it, but I think I was about 20 minutes in and the end looked far off.

Someone once asked if this blog was inspired by watching Julie & Julia and my answer was “Huh?” At the time, the only things I knew about the movie was that Meryl Streep was receiving rave reviews for her portrayal of Julia Child, and that Amy Adams played a woman who was going through all the recipes in Julia Childs’ cookbook. “And she blogs about it,” I was told. Oh. Right. No, this blog wasn’t inspired by Julie & Julia. But it did inspire an idea I had for a continuation of this blog in 2011. It would be much more challenging than my 52 movies in the theater and 52 movies at home challenge, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s a good idea. Before I reveal on how I want to make this harder for myself, maybe I get through this current challenge first. So, more to come on that on a later date…maybe.