Julie & Julia

Tonight I screened Julie & Julia, starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep.

Don't go see this film on an empty stomach. The amount of food on display throughout is enough to feed a small country and because most of what the characters talk about is food, you won't be able to put it out of your mind.

This true story begins with New Yorker Julie Powell (Adams) approaching her 30th birthday. She's married to a wonderful man (Chris Messina), but dislikes their new apartment in Queens and her dead-end job. She finds solace in cooking because there is a certainty in what will result from the mixing of the ingredients.

When one of her self-absorbed friends begins a blog, her husband encourages her to start her own—about cooking—and she decides to make a go of it. But to force herself to follow through with it (something she has trouble with), she creates her own plan to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's famous French cookbook in one year's time.

In addition to showing us Julie's journey, the film also revisits Julia Child's path to glory with an expectedly transforming Meryl Streep. The acting phenom not only nails Child's famous accent, she captures the unique spunky spirit that make the world fall in love with her. If only Director Nora Ephron had shown us more of exterior France, perhaps it would have been perfect.

And Adams as the amateur cook, hungry for fame and validation, comes across as genuinely ordinary, which can't have been easy for the Enchanted beauty. Here, she's barely a housewife, and she plays it so convincingly, you almost don't see the sparkle of her eyes behind the dishes.

All in all, the movie will make you hungry, and make you smile, but at the end of the day—it was just a blog.