Julie & Julia

Warning to everyone: when you finish watching this movie you will want to eat! It is a good idea to have some fruit, crackers, crue d'ete, and such waiting for you complete with a good bottle of full-bodied French Wine. I am having a sip now.
Like the Joy of Cooking, Julia Child's predecessor in the cooking world, this movie contains all the elements of the joy of movie watching. The most crucial ingredient us one of America's treasures, Meryl Streep, who seems to be having the time of her life bringing us an ebullient charicature of Julia Child. Next, we can delight in the magical illusion of cinema. Just as King Kong was 3 feet tall, so Streep is 5'6" - not nearly the alpine exaggeration of a woman's physique that was Child's 6'2". But Streep owns the frame in every scene, relentlessly physical and broad, and her stature is embellished by tricks of perspective and set dimension.
But what about the sauce for this film? Simple! Period piece in Paris. And Streep looks so fabulous in those hats. The side salad is the sumptuous and sexy Stanley Tucci as the perfect, doting, supportive, long-lashed and all knowing Mr. Child. And the bread and butter? Amy Adams, also a remarkable actress, plays Julie, the doting blogger who cooks every single recipe from Child's famous cookbook in one year, and earns fame doing it, providing both the counterpoint for Child's fantastical, imagined, eternally positive character, and also a ground in the real present.
Or is it so real?
Adams plays "straight man" to the more interesting (I think) Julia Child life-story as Julie fancies it. Julie has arguments, embarassments, and frustrations never entertained by her hero, Julia. But even the protrayal of her life is based on her book, based on her blog, and then translated by Nora Ephron into a screenplay. A memoir, a cookbook, a blog, a book, a screenplay, a film - all layers of movie construct tenderly baked together into a lovely escapist souffle! Yum!