Amy Adams is, more often than not, a delightful addition to any movie, bringing a certain effervescence coupled with grounded and impressive character work. This is evident in her rather meteoric rise not only to fame but also to critical acclaim, amassing five Academy Award nominations since 2005, a feat rivaled only by Meryl Streep. However in the Amy Adams filmography there exists one glaring stain, a time when her presence in a movie was not merely bad but completely unnecessary; that film, Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, attempted to find parallels between the life of Julia Child and that of a New York blogger cooking her way through Child’s Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. It is a film that stands proudly as a relic of the go-go 2009’s, when a blog could become a movie and a Twitter-feed could become a television show, and that sort of synergy seemed like a good idea. Mostly, though, it serves to shoehorn scenes of Adams’ unpleasant, self-involved character into a perfectly good Julia Child biopic.
Fear not, however, for vigilante filmmaker Adam Goldman—creator and director of the acclaimed web series The Outs—has taken it upon himself to excise every frame of celluloid occupied by Adams from the film. The new cut, simply titled & Julia, is available on Vimeo in its full 60 minute length, existing as wish fulfillment for those who had hoped for a film focused purely on Child. Since few, if any, actresses would be better cast in the role of Julia Child than Streep, Goldman’s editing has helped to preserve the best possible version of the film. Think of it as a slightly less neckbearded version of that Star Wars: Despecialized Edition.
UPDATED: The video has been removed from Vimeo.