Julie & Julia, 3.5 stars

A bland crab cake of a movie like this is disappointing on many levels, because it has such potential. The plot follows Julie Powell, who in a year cooked all 500+ recipes in Julia Child's French cookbook, and Julia Child herself, who is shown discovering her passion for food in postwar France. The movie clearly should have been a conventional biopic of Child, whose life is rich enough for two movies and doesn't need the sagging support of the underdeveloped and somnolent Julie Powell chapters. It seems simply unfair to throw Meryl Streep and Amy Adams together as the protagonists of parallel stories and expect the stories to stand up as equals. The effect the movie leaves is of having been in a room papered half in red leather and half in garish children's wallpaper, and being flung between the halves regularly for two hours.

You can't really blame Amy Adams too much for doing her best with what is clearly an underwritten afterthought to the Julia Child story. Adams makes Julie as appealing as possible (the facts we are given through the screenplay make it impossible to see her as much more than a spoiled child out of her league). The Paris scenes with Child, however, sparkle with a wit and sense of place that the movie's other half lacks. It is encouraging to see Julia and her husband living with gusto and verve and remaining sexually active for their entire lives together, a portrait of marriage not often seen in a conventional Hollywood film. If this had been Julia's movie, it would have been encouraging, new and fresh. However, much like Julie's versions of Julia's food, I can't help feeling that her chapters are a lame and uninspired rehash.