Julie & Julia

Director:  Nora Ephron
Year Released:  2009
Rating:  1.5

Obnoxiously fluffy biopic documents the 'inspiration' Julia Child's life (Meryl Streep) played on N.Y. blogger Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who frowns because she works in a cubicle but beams when she's slathering veggies with butter. Neither 'half' of the film is especially compelling cinema - Powell has a bad case of middle-class blues, boo hoo and Child keeps moving from country to country, eating everything in sight, wah wah - though Streep is able to support her portion of the movie with her unending vivacity: she coos whenever something fattening and fishy and French slips down her gullet, as if every nibble was capable of giving her an orgasm. Adams' Powell is less excitable, and her brief fight with her husband and small-world drama is petty business. Real-life Child was right, too: the act of cooking 564 recipes in 1 year period is more-or-less a stunt, though it does remind me to start my own year-long project of drinking my way through The Bartender's Black Book (DTs be damned).

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