Goofs

When Julie opens the package from a reader containing hot sauce, she takes out the accompanying letter twice.

When Julia Child and Simca enter Louisette's apartment to meet Irma Rombauer, there is a bowl of strawberries on a side table. In the next shot, Louisette is shown carrying the bowl of strawberries in from the other room.

When Paul Child is on the stool in the kitchen taking pictures of Julia stuffing the duck; the butter dish and the spoon in the bowl both move between the front & behind shots.

The magnet letters on Julie's refrigerator change in between shots. One second, they spell out "RICE", but in the next shot letters "I", "C", and "E" are scattered all over the fridge.

When Julie Powell is reading "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in bed, she is only turning the first few pages of the book. In the next shot she is almost finished.

The film has Judith Jones stand Julie Powell up due to bad weather. Jones told the Boston Globe in August 2009 that, in fact, she had wanted to meet Julie "because I wasn't sure how you put a blog together and I also wanted to talk about recipe rights", but canceled because "Julia Child looked at her blog and didn't think Julie was a serious cook. There were all these four-letter words - that isn't how you describe food if you care and if you're a good writer. Julia thought we shouldn't have anything to do with it."

When making the famous boeuf bourguignon recipe, there are carrots in the stew, but these are not in the original recipe.

In the last scene of the movie when Julia receives the published book in the mail, it is supposed to be her first book, but the book that she unwraps is the second volume.

The Childs moved to Paris in 1948, not 1949 as shown.

While it is true that Julia Child and Paul Child were early critics of Joseph McCarthy, the spat between Julia and her father over McCarthy at Dorothy's wedding reception is fiction. Although elected to the Senate in 1946, McCarthy was not a household name in 1951, when Dorothy got married, and simply did not have the kind of pull that would have forced Paul to go to Washington for questioning. Mr. McWilliams was, in fact, a supporter of Richard Nixon.

In the movie, Julie Powell wears her engagement ring before her wedding ring. While some consider this reversed, there is no set tradition for American women, and many wear their rings in this order.

In the scene where Julie Powell is writing in her blog about being stood up by Judith Jones, she is typing on her laptop. In the close-up when she decides to press the delete key, the key appears to be that of a full-size keyboard, not a laptop.

The scene involving Paul Child's photographing a food display in their kitchen, he uses a Rolleiflex camera. While shooting he winds the crank approximately one-and-a-half turns, when loaded with film the transport only requires 2/3 of a turn and stops automatic. So actually he was using an empty camera.

In most scenes Julia Child is shown to be a couple of inches taller than Paul Child. However, when they are getting up to dance following a fight with her father about Joseph McCarthy, they are side by side for a moment and Julia's shoulder is several inches below Paul's (because Meryl Streep is actually much shorter than the real Julia). However, when the movie was shown on TV, this goof had been hidden by two people dancing in the foreground.

When Julia Child is with the other 2 women in the kitchen while being lectured on how to boil an egg, she is clearly standing on a platform to make her taller than the other women, as evidenced by her ankles. However, when the movie was shown on TV, this goof had been hidden by the top rail of a chair in the foreground.

When Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is checking out the new bed, we see her kick off her shoes and lie down; the shoes in that scene are clearly not the ones she had on when she got out of the car upon their arrival, but the specially made lifts that Streep had to wear in order to appear taller. You'll notice that in many scenes the view of her legs/feet are obscured to hide the lifts, but not in this scene.

During the bruschetta making scene, there is a close up of bread being fried on a skillet, along with a sizzling sound effect. In reality, bread does not make a sound when being fried.

Julie is writing a blog entry regarding the botched boeuf bourguignon and the date on the entry says February 2001. Julie works for the LMDC post-9/11, and 9/11 happened in September of 2001 so the date should be February 2002.

Julie consistently mispronounces "boeuf bourguignon" throughout the film.

In the final scene, Julia Child opens a large envelope from her publisher with a copy of her first cookbook inside (published by Knopf, 1961). The envelope is of the Bubble-Wrap variety. Bubble-Wrap itself didn't receive the US Patent (Number 3,142,599) until July 28, 1964. Envelopes of that type started appearing in the late 70's.

The movie opens in 1949 in Paris. In several establishing shots, including the Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame Cathedral, all the buildings appear to be a light tan sandstone color. Until the cleaning projects by culture minister Andre Malreaux in the late 1960s, all the famous buildings in Paris were quite black from centuries of pollution.

In the scene when Julia Child is speaking to her French teacher in the library, she is using the word "salesperson". But this is a "gender-neutral" neologism created in the late 20th century. In 1950, an American would have used the word "saleslady" for "vendeuse".

When Paul Child is being questioned in Washington there is a pack of Lucky Strike in a green pack. Famously "Lucky Strike green went to war" because the ink contained chromium, a strategic material. Lucky Strike green never came back and the replacement design by Raymond Lowey in white which was introduced early in the war is still in use today and was in the 50s.

The library "Shakespeare and Company", where Julia is looking for a cooking book opened in 1951 under the name "Le Mistral". It became "Shakespeare and Company" only in 1964. Previously, a bookstore named "Shakespeare and Company" existed in Paris, but it closed in 1940.

At the 5 minute mark, Julie hears a truck drive by her family's new home in Queens. Julie says "What is that noise," but her lips don't move.

At the 12:05 mark, the cameraman is clearly visible for a few seconds in a reflection.

(at around 20 mins) When Julie Powell and her husband are driving in their jeep to the new apartment, you can see the camera that is secured to the car in the lower right hand corner. It is a visible shadow and you are able to see the camera lens reflection.

In the opening scenes, Julia Child and Paul Child pull up to their Paris apartment. Their Parisian apartment was at 81 Rue de l'Université (aka "Roo de Loo"). The apartment building the Childs pull up to in the film is number 10.

When at the ritual cobb salad scene, the girl that is sitting directly across from Julie, the one with the sunglasses on her head, you can see the boom mic in the reflection of the sunglasses.

When Julia Child is showing her co-authors a new recipe.

Eric quotes Douglas Adams on the subject of deadlines - then attributes the quote to "The Hitchhiker's Guide". The line was spoken by Adams in an interview it is not in "The Hitchhiker's Guide."

When cooking Julia Child's classic boeuf bourguignon, Julie Powell uses a Bordeaux or Bordeaux style wine rather than the burgundy or burgundy style wine (Pinot Noir) called for in all beef bourguignon recipes (including Child's).

When making the famous boeuf bourguignon recipe, both Julie Powell and Judith Jones use cloth towels to dry the beef, when the recipe specifically calls for paper towels. This is a minor change - and the recipe would not suffer as a result - but both women were taking care to follow Julia Child's instructions to the letter (although for very different reasons). Neither would have made the choice to change even the smallest detail of the recipe.

Julie Powell adds a whole bay leaf when cooking Julia Child's classic boeuf bourguignon when the recipe calls for a crumbled bay leaf.

In the movie, Paul Child references his work with "General Mountbatten." There was no such person in the British Army during WWII; there was however, Admiral Louis Mountbatten of the Navy.