I just caught the movie "Julie and Julia" about a week back, and have to say, I enjoyed it. This is not the usual blockbuster kind of action movie that lack real substance but attracts crowds. It is more of a movie which after viewing...provides food for thought for the viewer.
On one hand, the movie portrays of the famous Julia Child(aptly played by the maginificent Meryl Streep), her trials and tribulations to getting her book published. On the other hand, the story of Julie Powell is played by the lovable Amy Adams, whose character decides to cook all 524 dishes in 365 days, and blog her progress in the process.
I believe the relevant aspect of how advertising could be applied in this movie is of how the character of Julie Powell had unknowingly advertised herself as a blogging phenomenon whom people looked forward to reading. Because of the attention she got as each blog post was uploaded, Julie knew that she had to watch what she typed in order not to get herself into trouble. For instance, there was a day when she did not have time to preapare the day's recipe unless she skipped work. Hence, she called in sick and reflected it on her blog that she was not feeling well. This perhaps in a way reflects advertising in the real world, where puffery and lies are told to capture the audiences' attention and impress them.
How another form of advertising (or lackthereof in this case) that could be found in the movie was when Julia Child and her co-writers had difficulty finding publishers who would publish their cook book. Perhaps it might have been a much easier and faster process should Julia had promoted herself and her cook book more appropriately to the publishers so as to impress them as much as possible. In this case perhaps, the lack of promoting and advertising skills were proven to be sorely lacking.
One aspect of the movie which i would like to focus on and still have no real answer to it is if the whole idea of publishing the cook book was because there was no such cook books in the market then, or because it so happened to be a novel idea at that point in time and a eagle-eyed publisher found her by sheer luck. While I would have liked to think that it was the former, the possibiity for the later seems higher, as research for such academic work seemed irrelevant at that time. As such, I would like to stress that in order to make a product work, we should look at the market and identify issues that cause trouble or can be improved, and then work towards creating a product which would help solve the matter.
All in all, I really enjoyed the movie, not only because of the perhaps subtle hints of advertising found in the movie, but also for the many other factors that make the movie such a joy to watch, such as the hardships and happiness of the different characters, how things were then and now, and the importance and cherishment of the people around you.
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