Sunday night breakdown.

After a day spent in the woods I came back into town for some serious culture. It began with a visit to Wolfe Island, and reminded me why Kingston really is the best town around. A ten minute walk from home and there you are on the ferry, gliding past Fort Henry and the Thousand Islands in the distance. Twenty minutes later and you're in a teeny tiny town hall on the island, lit by Christmas lights and listening to the Great Lake Swimmers playing for you and a hundred of your new best friends. And the best part is, you're doing it for an amazing cause, the Waterkeepers. Oh, and Sarah Harmer is on your ferry, driving her incredibly shiny hybrid car.



Yep, pretty much an ideal Kingston Saturday night.

My houseguests and I woke up bright and early on Sunday with the intention of running a race, but since one of us had left one of her running shoes back home in Almonte and it was pouring rain, we decided that we'd do ourselves even more good by having breakfast at Pan Chancho.

Stuffed with grilled corn salad and lemon currant rolls I spent my day in a state of happy burrowing, and watched movies in a vain attempt to catch up with the zeitgeist. I am notoriously behind on cinematic viewing, because I am too cheap to go to the theatre, and even too cheap to rent things; I prefer to wait till the library buys them and then wait till my name comes up on the reservation list about ten years after the movie's original theatrical release, which is why it took me till just today to see Julie and Julia. MAN was this movie ever disjointed. I know a lot of critics already noted this when it was released, but this felt like two different movies, one quite charming (Meryl Streep's spot-on performance as Julia Child, the beauty of Paris in the 1950s, the sweet sexy relationship she shared with her husband, played by Stanley Tucci, whom I find incredibly attractive for some reason--I blame Big Night), the other just so annoying and trite (Amy Adams' shrill and unreasonably, unneccessarily worried civil servant-slash-blogger stereotype, complete with a one-dimensional marriage and an apartment that's supposedly really crappy but actually looks amazing and unaffordable). I absolutely loved the Julia plot, her joy and her intelligence and her incredible life. I loved the notion of someone completely defying social expectations and getting by on her own merit and passion. But I just wanted to reach through the screen and punch Julie in the face.

I actually really liked Julie Powell's original book, which was one of the first one-year-project-turned-blog-turned-book dealies; when it was published in 2005 I was just starting out in both the library and blogging worlds, and her story gave me a lot of hope for my own quasi-literary future. But I think the sheer volume of the blog-to-book products since then has sort of worn the shine off the apple. Not to mention the fact that they really cleaned up the Julie character to a degree where she completely lost her edge and her fullness. Julie in print was goofy, witty, and crass, swilling gimlets and dropping loads of F-bombs. But the script seemed to suck all that out of her character, stripping her of the ballsy, shirty attitude and leaving nothing but a sort of neurotic pile of sad garbage crying on the kitchen floor next to a burned boeuf bourgingon.

I also admit that I skipped over the parts in the book describing Julia Child's life; I found them trite and poorly researched, probably because I'd just finished reading Child's own memoir, My Life In France, and it was hard to read an overly simplified version of a life after having heard the story from the memory of the woman who lived it, I guess. I was relieved to see that Norah Ephron based the script on Child's book as well as Powell's, and I think the reason I loved the Julia plot so much was that it reminded me of the memoir, which everyone really must read. On the page, and in her own words, Julia Child just seemed so full of life and buoyancy and wit, and she lived with such conviction. I promise this book will make you feel better about something.

Really though, the most embarrassing thing is that I totally cried at the end when Julie visits the Julia Child kitchen at the Smithsonian and tells a photograph of Julia Child that she loves her and places a cube of butter down on the shelf in front of the photo like some bizarre voodoo housewife ritual. It's probably a sad testament to my flaky emotional state that butter makes me cry. Anyway, that little bit of catharsis might have made the whole viewing worth it. Nothing like a good irrational sob from time to time, especially after two hours of delicious food footage.

And just to come full circle, here's Kingston's favourite son making a mess of Julia Child.