Julie & Julia

Over one year, a blogger (Amy Adams) attempts to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s (Meryl Streep) Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Notable for being Nora Ephron’s last work, and the first (and only?) film adapted from a blog. It’s basically a two-hander comedy biopic, half Julia Child’s life and half Julie Powell’s.

Streep’s scenes are good hearted and appealing. Stanley Tucci plays her much-shorter-than-her husband and together they make for a charming couple that is novel and fun to watch. Maybe Streep over-eggs the accent a little bit but Julia Child did speak weird, so who am I to judge.

The Amy Adams bits are harder to get along with. They try to make for a novel structure and indeed it largely reflects the blog. Eventually though being stuck in that flat the whole time just gets a little monotonous. I suspect it was a bit of a difficult birth of a script and I probably would have considered a re-think. Someone cooking and typing into a computer is a hard sell next to someone finding their true self in postwar France.

In fact, if you read up on Julia Child you discover a woman who not only wrote one of the first English language books on French cookery (out of boredom), but also worked in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. Her life here was only declassified in 2008 so it’s possible this film was already in the can at that point, but it does feel like there’s an untold story that we missed out on because this film wanted to be an adaptation of a blog.

Still, not a bad last hurrah for Nora Ephron. Some very watchable Sunday-afternoon fodder.