Communications and Media

The movie Julie and Julia directed by Nora Ephron and starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams released last year 2009 is the story of Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams), a call canter agent in Lower Manhattan Development Corporations in New York in 2002. Her job is answering phone calls and providing assistance to all the victims of September 11 attacks and other related complaints. This movie made an impact to all people who loves to cook besides having regular work.  What makes this movie significant is that it is based on Julie Powells blog which has indeed made an impact.  Her blog eventually went on to become a book in 2005 titled Julie and Julia 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen which was later renamed Julie and Julia My Year of Cooking Dangerously when printed on paperback.  Her book, as well as that of American culinary icon Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep), My Life in France, would be the basis of the films story.

From one dream, the story itself influenced everybody. All the wonderful ideas and dreams to make it happen are really hard to do. But in this movie, the two main characters give their insight on how they make their dreams come true and they believe on it. As Julie takes on the challenge to cook all the recipes in the book of legendary chef Julia Child titled, Mastering the Art of French Cooking which was published in 1961. She plans to cook all of her 500-plus recipes within a year.  At the same time, Julie would write a blog to share her cooking progress and she also shares it to everybody through online blogging that her husband Eric taught her how to write a blog. He is a very patient husband who strongly believes in her that she is a good writer and she can accomplish the challenge.  At the same time, the scenes from the movie would shift to Julia Child, depicting the early years of her cooking career in Paris (Ephron).

On the first day of the challenge, Julie writes all her plans on that day and what kind of recipe she will cook. At first, it seems that everything awkward or strange. She also wonders if there is anybody listening on her while she is writing down her progress. From time to time, whenever she updates her blog, it seems like she is talking to herself. She is also expecting that someone would leave comments for her. One day, while she was in the office, she received the first and only comment from somebody, and she never expected that it would come from Julia Child herself, who commented that Julie must be clueless about what she is doing. Each passing day, she is having difficulty in some of the recipes because of the instruction and it also shows her aversion to eggs but she took it as a challenge to cook and eat it for the first time in her life and realized she loves it. So many days passed for her to complete the challenge, and blogging gives her a lot of devotion until she finally accomplished it. (Ephron)

Blogging is made for personal writing about ones person life, writing and updating it with whatever one wants to write, whether it is about a hobby or some other interest one would like to share with others.  When people read blogs, it would arouse their interests and from there create a chain reaction as more and more people would write a blog on a similar topic they share and sooner or later, became something worth discussing.  Blogging has a way of attracting people who share common interests and the end result is the creation of web communities.  Although this is also mirrored by real-life communities, one advantage web communities have is it is more far-reaching and can go beyond borders and touch base with anybody around the world which is virtually connected online.  This is one of the wonders of the Internet as it connects people the world over transcending borders and uniting them with a common interest.