What a delightful movie!

Of course, how could you go wrong with Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. But Julie & Julia went beyond these two actresses. What a wonderful story. Just seeing the history of how Julia Child started out in cooking, went on to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking and become a household name would be good. But then you get the story of Julie Powell’s and the year she spent cooking her way through that cookbook and what it did for her life.

Writer/director Nora Ephron masterfully weaves the two stories together in a very fluid form. It never felt forced or herky-jerky, which it certainly could have since the story was separated by some forty years. It’s too bad Streep and Adams never had screen time together,  but that’s not the way the story went.

The stories of these two women are quite inspirational as they both look for their life’s calling. Julie is a writer who is adrift until her blog about her Julia Child project caught on and made her into a published author (she has a new book coming out in December). For Julia it was a matter of what to do while she was living in Paris with her diplomat husband. They both struck out into the unknown and found eventual success. I had no idea it took so long to create a cookbook, but it was a mutli-year process for Child and her co-authors. It helps put my own writing endeavors in perspective.

Go see this movie if you’d like to have an excellent time at the cinema.