Julie & Julia

I saw Julie & Julia last night with family and friends, and we really enjoyed it. Well, we really enjoyed half of it - the other half was kind of meh. As you probably know by now, the movie tells how Julia Child struggled on a decade-long path from diplomat's wife to culinary master who permanently changed the way America thought about food, juxtaposing it with the story of Julie Powell, a young woman in Queens who...uh...cooked her way through Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking and blogged about it.

Yeah, those two achievements are totally identical.

Meryl Streep presents us with a warm, funny, affectionate, and thoroughly enjoyable portrayal of Julia Child, capturing Ms. Child's mannerisms and joie de vivre with such accuracy that one almost forgets that it's not The Real Julia up there on the screen. Those scenes comprise the half of the movie we really liked, and they are so much fun, in fact, that by midway through the movie I found myself wishing for more Julia in Paris and less - much less - Julie in New York (guess you can figure out which half of the movie was rated "Meh.") Amy Adams' portrayal of Julie Powell just made Powell seem like a whiney, annoying, obsessive and rather unlikeable bint.

In spite of that, it was a fun film. I can't wait for it to come out on (fast-forwardable) DVD.