Julia Roberts Turns a Temple in India Into a Closed Set

Pretty woman? Make that goddess
And so to India, where Julia Roberts is filming the adaptation of Eat, Pray, Love, that bestselling travel memoir of airport-novel spirituality, wherein the author comes to impressively certain answers to questions that have defeated minds from Thomas Aquinas to René Descartes, much in the manner of most people who have had "done" India. Those of us confined to the world of Wash, Work, Drink can only imagine the enlightenment of it all.

Anyway, Julia is now on location near Delhi, and according to news agency reports is being protected by 350 guards, including 40 gunmen, while being driven in bulletproof cars tailed by a helicopter. (At what point does set security officially cross the line into private army? Perhaps someone with the sufficient diplomatic clout – Geri Halliwell, basically – could ask the Indian government for clarification on this.)

All has been passing off relatively without incident, until this week, when a temple was sealed off for filming on one of the nine days of Navratri, when Hindus worship the Goddess Durga. "Entry for devotees is barred," one outraged villager told the Daily Telegraph. "We were not allowed to enter and pray in the morning by security." A fellow worshipper took up the case. "I am going to barge in for the evening aarti [ritual]. Let's see who stops me."

How this daring mission unfolded remains tantalizingly unclear, but it's great to finally have a de facto ruling on that most pressing question of the age: who is the most powerful, movie goddesses or actual goddesses? Barring any thunderbolt-related tragedies in the coming days, I'm thrilled to tell you that Hollywood totally edges it.