Omnivore Atlanta

SPLIT SCREEN: Meryl Streep as Julia Child

Julie Powell’s blog-turned-memoir Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen blended two unlikely ingredients: gourmet cooking and online journaling. The venture originated in 2002 as “The Julie/Julia Project,” with Powell recording her attempt to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s landmark cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking within a year. Sharing food, like posting a blog entry, can provide a way to connect creatively with people, but otherwise, the two activities seem unrelated.

Julie & Julia’s film version equates eating and cooking with living. The movie implies that blogging amounts to a pale imitation of life, but that’s not writer/director Nora Ephron’s aim. The creator of toothless romantic comedies such as Sleepless in Seattle, Ephron offers a well-intentioned chick flick that focuses on food and joie de vivre, rather than the tired tropes of courtship and clothes. In depicting the relationship between two women who never meet, Julie & Julia makes Julie look less like a pupil than a shadow of Julia. It’s like comparing beef bourguignon to marshmallow fluff.

Continue reading “Meryl Streep sizzles in Julie & Julia“

(Image courtesy 2009 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.)

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SMOKE ’EM IF YOU GOT ’EM: Businessmen in Food, Inc.

The harrowing documentary Food, Inc. serves up a kind of sampler’s platter of the recent culinary exposé trend. Like Super Size Me, it touches on the physiological effects of a fast food diet and further examines the assembly line approach to restaurant service. Recapping the themes of King Corn, Food, Inc. reveals how agricultural policies enable farming practices that put corn in seemingly every item at the grocery store, including cheese, batteries and diapers. It even goes to the source of Richard Linklater’s dramatization of Fast Food Nation to explore the industrial mistreatment of cattle and cattle workers alike.

The tours of sprawling slaughterhouses and dark chicken houses can put you off your feed, but Food, Inc. leaves generous helpings of anger and despair on your plate as well. The documentary cites examples of massive, secretive corporations suing small competitors into oblivion and making indentured servants out of employees in once-prized professions. In its scope, effectiveness and unmistakable passion, it’s the must-see documentary of the bunch, if you can take the heat.

Continue reading “Food, Inc. reveals hidden costs on the menu”

(Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures)

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That’s right a brand new and improved Movies & TV page! We combined all the best parts of our other sections into a comprehensive one-stop-shop for all things Movies & TV. There’s a blog feed with all of the latest Movies & TV content from Culture Surfing (”Lost,” “24,” etc.), a search engine for movie showtimes, recent reviews, links to interesting stories around the web, Film Clips, movie trailers, and a whole section dedicated to those Hollywood Products that you love!

Check it out at clatl.com/movies_tv and leave any comments you have over on our A&E blog Culture Surfing.

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