Julie and Julia, dealing as it does with food, required a lot of artistry. Not, as one might expect, of the mashed-potato-sundae, corn-syrup-painted-raw-turkey varietal, either: this was real food, top quality, that the actors had to eat. Says writer-director Nora Ephron, who tasted everything, in the New York Times, "I wanted that sole to look to the audience the way it had looked to Julia when it caused her famous epiphany," about cooking for life.

The stylist, Susan Spungen (Martha Stewart's former food editor, so no stranger to perfection) and a host of other stylists, share some trade secrets, from catering to the vegetarian character actor who went meat-eating Method on set, to the trials of crafting mock meat for those veggies more committed to their lifestyle. Of course there are practical concerns, too: apparently J&J called for mock lobster-boiling, created through illusion and the auspices of a vigilant animal-cruelty monitor.

There are plenty of great food movies: Big Night; Babette's Feast; Eat, Drink, Man, Woman; Like Water for Chocolate and Willy Wonka usually rank pretty high for hungry cinephiles, while even those who deplored Marie Antoinette as an extended music video can appreciate the glory of the skyscrapers of Laduree macarons. There are some - Chocolat, No Reservations - that fail, in my opinion, to make anything remotely appetizing.

Here are a few of my favorites:

A Night at the Opera Specifically, the steerage dinner scene. This involves mountains of spaghetti which, as a little kid, basically seemed like nirvana to me. Nuff said.

Fried Green Tomatoes Everything looks really good at the Whistle Stop, especially the FGT. Hell, they can even make barbecued abusive redneck tasty.

A Christmas in Connecticut. You know the part where Barbara Stanwyck goes to Felix's restaurant downstairs and he has some kind of 1940s Hungarian buffet? That always appealed to me. There's a very similar resto in The Babe Ruth Story but the ambiance is somewhat lacking.

Naughty Marietta. A dark horse, yes. But the scene where they go to the little restaurant and have fresh bread and shrimp with garlic? Delish.

Cold Comfort Farm. Both the tea room's offerings and the country fare at the end of the wedding are scrumptious-looking; I have a weakness for cream cakes.

Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) The scene where Roxane's maid gets that huge bag of fresh pastries to distract her was extremely distracting to those of us who had to watch it in French class the period before lunch.

Your turn.

Film Food, Ready For Its ‘Bon Appetit' [NY Times]

The cinematic events which apparently heralded this sea change were Sex and the City: the Movie, Twilight, and Mamma Mia. In other words, women had promiscuous sex, had sex in the city, and didn't have sex with vampires, and amidst financial turmoil and political change, we ate it up.

However, all this is positively Bergman-esque compared to 2009's distaff-themed offerings. Says the FT,

This year women will be targeted even more precisely. One sub-sub-genre to emerge is feature films adapted from self-help books, notably French Women Don't Get Fat, which instructs women they can stay slim while still scoffing the air in the éclair choux pastry, and He's Just Not that Into You , which proffers advice such as that if a man runs away from a woman he is not in love with her.

The article quotes one feminist's dismayed response to this trend: "Self-help books send out the message women need to improve themselves instead of being happy with who they are." Well, that seems a tad unfair. For one thing, as self-help books go, these two are fairly common-sensical: both were remarkably short of psychco-babble and long on clearing up misconceptions, albeit obvious ones. There's a reason these books were such runaway bestsellers that they caught Hollywood's roving eye, and it's more than just numbers. Self-help offends people by its lack of artifice, its vulgarity, but chick lit and women's fiction hews to a similar formula of control-wresting and triumph. After all, a film like Sex and the City or Mamma Mia is no more virtuous for wrapping its self-help cliche's in shoes and ABBA; the self-help films will simply make no bones about it. The irony is, the end result will probably not be too different from what Hollywood's already turning out.

However, it will be interesting to note whether the stigmas of self-help carry over to its cinemazation. After all, a woman who can justify seeing Sex and the City for a laugh or Twilight in the name of cultural anthropology - no small class of women, I'd wager - might have a harder time pulling the trigger for French Women Don't Get Fat in widescreen. We like to be silly, not to feel stupid. Whether or not one finds the self-help film trend dismaying in itself, one can't deny that the "woman/smart " divide is being made nakedly stark. In removing all the artifice from what have essentially been self-help movies all along, Hollywood's ironically respecting our intelligence. And I wonder if that might not, also ironically, result in a backlash of denial - not the kind of escapism anyone wants.

Year of Women [FT]

Savage was known primarily as a familiar face in B-movies, in recent years earning a cult following as the femme fatale villainess in the 1945 noir Detour. Says one critic of the role, "She's vicious and predatory. She's been called a harpy from hell, and in the film, too, she's very sexually aggressive, and he's very, very passive. It's very unusual for a '40s film to have a woman come on that strong." Last year, Savage was cast in Guy Maddin's indie film My Winnipeg, her last role. [AP]

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