Julie and Julia has all of the winning ingredients of your lady-happy chick-flick, mixed with some run-of-the-mill award baiting biographical gubbins and sprinkled with a couple of ?it? leads – but this recipe is overcooked.
It's hard to find a more likeable lady in Hollywood than Amy Adams, with the innocent twinkle in her eye and an irresistible charm to her performances, she is perfectly capable here of portraying one half of this twin-bio as Julie Powell. The other half comes from Meryl Streep, in another performance for her to literally chew on in the hope it’ll shit out a few more awards. Here she jumps into some big shoes to play the hormonally challenged Julia Child.
It is really Streep?s show ? as you would expect ? managing to make a decent embodiment of Child and her eccentricities, including the voice that sounds like a drowning goat. It's a thorough performance and slaps a bit of smugness on Streep’s part (she must have had some space in her awards cupboard to fill).