Julie & Julia

Nora Ephron built her screenplay from two books: Julia Child’s Paris memoir, written with Alex Prud’homme, and Julie Powell’s account of cooking 524 recipes in a year. It began as the blog The Julie/Julia Project. Meryl Streep insisted on playing Child at her real height. By Ephron’s account she announced she would be 6 feet 2 inches tall, so the production rebuilt Child’s cramped Paris kitchen at reduced scale to make the proportion read. The modern strand is heavier than the packaging suggests: Julie’s day job is a call centre at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, taking relatives of September 11 victims and complaints about rebuilding the World Trade Center. Later a journalist tells her Child was critical of the blog. Streep won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, one of two nominations she had in the category that night, the other for It’s Complicated; the film was nominated for Best Picture, Musical or Comedy. Her Best Actress nomination at the 82nd Academy Awards lost to Sandra Bullock. It was Ephron’s last film. A good fit if you want to catch the scale trick and accept two lives joined by a cookbook. Not for anyone who would rather the cooking were not cut against call centre shifts and a marriage strained by a blog.