Day 50 - Random Actor Tuesday: Linda Emond

Day 50.

Today, I finally crossed the 100-hr mark of my quest to watch Julie & Julia every day for a year. And how do I feel about reaching this pointless milestone? Super, super lame. What kind of loser asshole really has 100+ hours of his life to dedicate to watching Julie & Julia? At this point, I'm pretty sure I've even seen this movie more times than most of the people involved in the production itself, save for maybe the film's editors or something (I plan on eclipsing them soon). Definitely more times than Amy Adams or Meryl. Not Mark Ruffalo might've seen it more than 50 times though. I can't imagine he'd have anything else to do. God, I hate myself.

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Today's featured Random Actor Tuesday guest is Linda Emond, who plays Simone Beck a.k.a. "Simca," one of Julia Child's close friends and confidantes, as well as one of the co-authors of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Linda also frequently stands next to Meryl to further the idea that Julia Child was a giant.

I realize that Linda Emond is not really a random actor in Julie & Julia--quite the contrary, actually. She has a juicy part and is billed 5th in the credits, right after the big four heavy-hitters (Streep, Adams, Tucci, NMR) and I actually really enjoy her performance as Simone Beck. She gives Julia a much-needed foil, someone to really play off of, thus upping their combined delightfulness levels by a factor of 7. Emond also has some of the best one-liners in the film.

Some context: their cookbook has just been rejected from Houghton-Mifflin and Beck is reading from a cookbook that the publisher recommended they use as an example. The joke here is that the example cookbook SUCKS BIG FUCKING DICK and uses frivolous ingredients such as marshmallow fluff, further illustration the French's superiority over the U.S. Trust me, it's sort of funny in the movie (and I will take any kind of joke after 20 min of Amy Adams crying).

But my favorite scene with Linda Emond is the one where the three collaborators on the cookbook--Julia, Simone and Louisette--gather together to discuss how much authorship credit/royalties each of them deserves. Julia and Simone have effectively staged a coup to force Louisette out and to justify their actions, Simone just tells Louisette straight up to her face that "You're not doing zee wooork!"

The subtitles don't do the accent justice at all.

I only find it funny because of her bizarre intonation when she says the line (you'll know what I mean if you've seen the film). Her delivery is super French or something (I wish there was a youtube clip) and she inflects her voice like 5 times in that one sentence. To top it all off, she says a variation on the line (But she doesn't do zee wooork. You don't do zee wooooork. You're not doing zee wooooork.) for a total of 3 times. I think it's just the way she says "wooooork" that gets me.

I wonder if she does the woooork...?

So during each viewing, 1 hour and 25 minutes in, I always catch myself reciting these lines with Ms. Emond in a drawn-out ridiculous accent and it never fails to amuse me. Once you've seen this movie 50 times, you learn to take the little victories along the way.

Only 315 more days to finish my wooooork. 

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Julie & Julia Quote of the Day: "Jean-Luc is leaving me."