Julie and Julia (2009) **1/2

Every once in awhile someone gets what they think is a great idea which usually isn't the beacon of greatness they think it should be. With Julie and Julia someone came up with the idea of taking two books, Julie and Julia and Julia Child's autobiography, and make a sort of hybrid film out of the two. What you get is a film where half of it is very good and the other half is blah, dragging the whole movie down the drain.

Since this review almost reads like the typical good news and bad news cliche, I'll start with the bad news. Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is sick of her life and apparently needs a task, so she decides to cook her way through the Julia Child cookbook and blogging about it. So what we get is to watch someone who actually made money and a career from writing a quirky blog, whereas the other billion schmucks out there ripping on chick flicks and pre-teen pop culture (ahem) are broke. That's that side of the film. Dull, sad, and tedious.

Now for the good news. The scenes that flashback to Julia Child's introduction to cooking are great. Meryl Streep pulls off the hyperactive Child while Stanley Tucci is much more interesting than Julie Powell's narcoleptic husband. These sequences of the film are great and were very enjoyable to watch, which leads to the problem with this film. By the midway point you really don't give a rat's ass about Julie Powell's blog or any of that crap. Whenever we cut to her cooking and pissing and moaning, you're wanting more Streep as Julia. That fact is the huge crack in this film.

The sad part is I have no idea why they did it this way. Obviously Julie Powell got some kind of big movie check for her blog this is the result. What could have been a great bio-pic about Julia Child dorwns in the whole blog story. It would have been preferable to bookend Julia's story with Powell's, instead of interweaving them together because the only link between the two is on the surface. If there was some link (or the pair of title characters actually meeting each other at some point) the film would have worked better. Instead of a very good film starring Streep and Tucci we get a to and fro mess.