Be at Politics

I have just been to the movie Julie & Julia. A film based on two true stories. One is about the life of Julia Child, an American icon of cooking. And the other is about the life of Julie Powell, who writes a blog about cooking Julia Child’s recipes for 365 days. The subject is not very exciting. The film is too long and you wonder what the point of the film is. But Meryl Streep is wonderful in her role as Julia Child.

Julia Child’s story shows she had a remarkably loving relationship, a great personality, an interesting life as an expat in the 1950’s in China, France, Sweden and the US. She remained childless, which caused her much pain. And she struggled for years before she got her cookbook published and found fame.

The other part of the film follows thirty-year-old Julie (played by Amy Adams). She moves to Queens with her husband and is unhappy throughout the whole film with no clear reason. Just that she is thirty and has not ‘made’ it yet as a writer. To make her life less miserable she decides to start blogging about cooking a recipe from Julia Child’s cookbook every day for 365 days. After the 365 days of cooking the blogging Julie signs a book deal with a publisher and gets her story turned into a Hollywood movie.

This proves exactly the problem of what Julie and others of her generation have. They achieve things too easily and when fame and fortune doesn’t happen fast enough they get depressed and moan.

This films makes you feel that women in the 1950’s fought for what they wanted and had a jolly good time. However women in the noughties seem to be weak and moan about everything and have not much joy at all. And what do we do to make life better? We creep behind our laptop and blog instead of leading a real life. Are we really that sad?

What director Nora Ephron should have done was just filming the life of Julia Child. It would have made a wonderful film on its own. Surely someone could have turned her life in to great feel-good-movie without making us, the thirty-somethings, look so miserable?

I have just been to the official opening of a wonderful fundraising event Pandamonium organised by the WWF and Selfridges.

WWF : “Pandamonium is a visually stunning collection of unique works by some of the UK’s leading artists – including Sir Peter Blake, Tracey Emin, Jim Lambie, Rachel Whiteread and Paul Smith – all based on WWF’s old panda collection boxes.”

And they truly are unique and stunning! The panda bears are made by famous artists and will be sold in an auction at Selfridges on the 12th of October. One of the organisers admitted that the bad economic times have made it hard to organise this event.

But  I hope there are still some people (even bankers) left in London with enough money to buy a Panda and save our planet a little bit more.

Because you can’t hate nature, can you.

I went to see District 9 this weekend in The Electric cinema. It is the new sci-fi film everybody is raving about. It is a South African movie about an alien space ship that gets stranded above Johannesburg. The South Africans put the aliens in a camp / slum in district 9 outside Johannesburg. The aliens get out of control and the government sets up a plan to deport all the aliens to a concentration camp in the desert. A civil servant is given the task to lead the deportation. And as most civil servants do, he does the job thoroughly and according to the bureaucratic rules (immediately you think of Eichmann, who started a similar job some 60 years ago). Of course everything goes massively wrong and there the movie turns into a proper sci-fi / action movie. The action is brilliantly done, very grim and dark but not too bloody.

The first 15 minutes of the movie give you the feeling that the intention of the director is to address the concepts of apartheid and immigration. But I think most reviewers want the film to be more then it is. Probably because it isn’t a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster but a South-African film with a South-African hero, who isn’t a real hero to begin with. It is a good movie though and the theme is very relevant in many countries at the moment: are we willing to take in strangers and how much can we take.

Go and see it!