Review: ‘Julie & Julia’–Traditional Filmmaking With Traditional Values

It’s rare enough these days to see a movie in which one story is well-told, much less two stories. It’s even more rare when a filmmaker is able to balance two completely different plotlines and make both equally enjoyable and compelling. Yet with her new film “Julie & Julia,” writer-director Nora Ephron (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail”) pulls off such feats so impressively that the movie could possibly wind up with an Oscar nomination at the end of the year now that the Academy has expanded the awards to ten nominations and will likely finally include a couple of comedies each year.

“Julie & Julia” follows the amusingly parallel lives of chef Julia Child (played by Meryl Streep), who achieved worldwide fame while revolutionizing the art of cooking starting in the ‘50s, and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young New York City woman searching for identity in 2002. Powell longs to be a successful writer like her friends and yet is trapped processing insurance claims from victims of the World Trade Center attacks. (more…)