Let me preface by saying that I work at a movie theatre,
so while I haven't sat down and watched it straight through,
I have, as of today, seen the entire thing.
Most of it multiple times.

That being said:
This is not a bad movie.
It is, in fact, a very well made movie.
But that doesn't mean I care one way or another about seeing it again.

Nora Ephron did a good job. The script is good, the directing is good.
Amy Adams did a good job. She is normal, and doesn't make you completely hate this narcissistic and obsessed woman, which would be very easy to do.
Julie's husband was also effective and normal.
But that's the problem - everything felt a little too real. The say that theater is life under a microscope. If that is true, Nora pulled in way too close. The ONLY thing she focused on was Julie's obsession with Julia and it really made her seem like a loon. But a loon that you work with.
Note to all future film-writers: blogs are not a good subject for a movie.

The Julia part, however, is much better. Meryl was excellent at making a cartoon character seem like a real woman, and Stanley Tucci, as always, was great.
Her struggles were much more palpable than Julie's because it felt like she was actually trying to achieve something.

If I wanted to read into this movie,
the obvious parallel would be to see how women have progressed in terms of their own standards of accomplishment. The only problem is that it doesn't feel as if Julie really accomplished anything. She was successful, that is true, but her level of heartache and effort as compared to Julia's seemed miniscule.
Maybe that's a problem with our society, but it comes off as a problem in the movie.
Ephron does an excellent job intertwining Julie and Julia's lives,
but at the end of the day I still wished it had been a Julia Child biopic.

At the end of the movie I felt like nothing had been done,
that the story had gone nowhere.
It EASILY could be trimmed,
as some of the troubles they each go through become a bit repetitive,
but making it shorter wouldn't have made it much better.

At the end of the day,
the movie had all the right ingredients,
but the final product just didn't taste great.

And yes,
I did end with a food metaphor.