Julie & Julia

Data
Title: Julie & Julia
Year: 2009
Length: 123 minutes
Director: Nora Ephron
Writer: Nora Ephron, based on books by Julie Powell and Julia Child & Alex Prud'homme
Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, Chris Messina
Music: Alexandre Desplat (and non-original music)
Distinctions: Oscar nomination for Best Actress (Streep)

My reaction
Synopsis: Julia Child writes her cookbook, and decades later someone writes a blog about cooking from it
How I saw it: online (streaming from Amazon (we had a coupon - otherwise I wouldn't see any sense in getting a digital movie from Amazon)), yesterday
Concept: Bad.
Story: Terrible. There isn't one. Just a decade in the life of a likable person, interspersed with a year in the life of a very unlikable person.
Characters: Indifferent. The Childs - great. The Powells - terrible.
Dialog: Terrible. Some of the Julia Child stuff is great, but there's far too little of it compared with the overwhelmingly-badly written Julie Powell stuff.
Pacing: Indifferent. It's not that it's slow. It just seems slow because it's so bad.
Cinematography: Good.
Special effects/design: Great.
Acting: Good. Streep's Julia Child is entertaining, but not half as entertaining as the watching real thing. Tucci is also quite good. Adams, on the other hand, does nothing to make her unlikable character watchable (aside from frequently not wearing pants).
Music: Indifferent. Great soundtrack. Terrible score. Desplat seems to be a pretty good chameleon: for Fantastic Mr. Fox he became Morricone, and for this he became Alan Silvestri. So I blame the director, for wanting Alan Silvestri.
Subjective Rating: 2/10 (Terrible). I expected the Powell stuff to be mediocre and the Child stuff to be great. Instead, the Child stuff is mediocre (maybe 6/10 territory - nice characters but with no story worth telling), and the Powell stuff is horrendous. What they were thinking when they decided to make a movie out of Julie Powell - a self-centered, emotionally immature, self-declared bitch with no (portrayed) redeeming qualities, that doesn't do anything more interesting than use a popular cookbook - is completely baffling. And on top of that, it's not just a bad character with no story, but it's also some of the worst writing I have ever seen in a film.
Objective Rating: 1.7/4 (Eh).