I caught Julie and Julia today in a theater with all of three people (including me) while everyone else in town was at the first showing of Gamer. I wanted to see this because I was intrigued how one even goes about making a movie about a blog.
It did a pretty good job showing how the Julie character decides to do a blog and what it's like to write daily about yourself and how that can sometimes hinder your offline relationships. The concurrent storyline of Julia Child seemed truthful and sincere and overall I enjoyed it and left the theater feeling uplifted and inspired to cook.
But there was this one scene. Julie is in her cube and she's ecstatic that a post got 53 comments and she high fives her coworker, and moments later her husband calls and says he just noticed she's #3 on the most popular Salon blogs list and her arms shoot up out of her cube in victory and I began to cry tears of joy.
I sat in the theater thinking about my little blog and how it became a community large and a business small. I remembered walking into a coworker's office in December 1999, arms in the air, as I exclaimed "100!!! One hundred people hit my web server today! 100!!!" I remembered being so stoked that three thousand people hit the site in January 2000, when I won a web site of the day award. I remembered the first time a newspaper reporter called and wanted to talk to me of all people.
The tears kept rolling through the next scene and stopped after 5
minutes or so and I thought to myself how weird that I was brought to
tears by mundane shots about blogging serving as mere
story continuity to others in the theater.
Sure, it's just another romantic comedy that most people could say is forgettable date movie. But it's the first movie about blogging and the first movie that resonated in a way no other movie ever has with my own experiences. This will probably make sense to about a few dozen people with experiences similar to mine but my god did that film move me.
A Whole Lotta Nothing 
I think that’s cool! Because all of the reviews I’ve heard have said the Julie part of the story is not worth it. I guess more people have an understanding of the transformative power of cooking than blogging.
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> This will probably make sense to about a few dozen people
Count me one of the few dozen; I was doing tail -f on access_log some years before the Julie story unfolded. I thought the movie was beautifully balanced — the Julie storyline was not mere continuity for Julia in France, but a co-equal drama. Maybe you’d have to be a foodie who blogged to concur.
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Heh. Oh, yes.
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So, if you blog about a movie about blogs and then post a Youtube movie of yourself blogging about said movie about blogs, does the world become reciprocal and cave in on itself?
🙂
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Matt, two of my (other) favorite bloggers had a very similar reaction to seeing this film as you did: http://projectrungay.blogspot.com/2009/08/t-lo-saw-julie-julia.html
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remember when you started and am sure glad your have been so successful!
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I remember that scene and being insanely jealous because these days when I get 53 comments on a thread it’s usually right-wing haters. I’ve had to stop reading my own blog.
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The movie WAS good. I read both of the books when they came out. I’m a gourmet always in training, and the Proudhomme book gave me much more respect for Mrs. Child. I read Powell’s book several years ago, having started my own blog in 1998.
The movie had to play a fine line of combining the two story lines together.
Only when I saw the movie did I have a realization similar to yours… I smiled when it was obvious what power this blog was offering this young professional who had a desire to cook well.
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