Nora Ephron's 'Julie & Julia' Cassoulet

While I agree with Melinda that the talents of marvelous Meryl and adorable Amy were underutilized and ill-served by "Julie & Julia's" shifting narrative, I appreciated how director Nora Ephron, herself an impossibly integrated version of both women, figured out how to add eggs to the batter.

I would have been happy to watch Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, and Jane Lynch, as Julia's wacky sister, on a menu offering a full plate of Madame Child instead of being served tiny driblets of delicious gravy sadly missing the meatloaf. Unfortunately, the dry ingredients of "Julie & Julia" were ordered from the wrong market.

Hollywood's recipe for the foodie film required the indissoluble component of Julie Powell's 2002 gimmick-driven web log. (For those who missed the publicity blitz, Powell prepared all the recipes in Child's iconic cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," over one year and wrote a daily blog about it!)

Powell's idea was an ingenious discipline to force herself, a 30ish would-be writer, to actually write. In those pioneer days of cyber journalism, online weblogs gave novice women writers as many creative opportunities as following Child's intricate recipes once did for their grandmothers. Young writers found their candid personal voices on Internet platforms as naturally as a previous generation added boiling water to a packet of Jello. Along with Dooce, The Old Hag and a groaning sideboard of delicious home-grown women's voices, Julie Powell was one of the era's cyber publishing successes.

Powell soon got a book and movie deal based on her musings and eventually Ephron ended up with the property as the watery base for her film. The screenwriter and director folded Julia Child's masterful oeuvre (TV appearances, autobiography, and the cookbooks Alex later purchased) into the mix to thicken, then stirred in a yummy cast. Although her soufflé fell flat on many levels, Ephron summoned the creative juice to beat it into a reasonably appetizing meal.

As I watched the film's biographical nibbles of Julie Powell and Julia Child, two dissimilar women, miles and generations apart, who never even met, improbably unfold side by side, to me both Ephron's writing and her cooking mojo were apparent. (Ephron is a legendary social cook who, when her contemporaries were young brides, gave her girlfriends small collections of closely held magic recipes that had the ability to launch marriages.)

In both the kitchen and in sceenwriting, there is a true talent to making the most of available ingredients.