Tom Stempel, House Next Door's "Understanding Screenwriting" columnist, on "Julie and Julia":
Nora Ephron loves food almost as much as Judd Apatow loves penises. All the 6,238 articles, interviews, and recipes about or by Ephron that have appeared in The New York Times in the last months have told us that, if you did not already know from her novel Heartburn. So here we have a movie about master chef Julia Child and Julie Powell, a blogger determined to cook all the recipes in Child’s cookbook in one year, all mixed together. The question is, is there anything in this film that would satisfy those of us who are happy picking up a couple of burgers at a drive-thru?... In the New York scenes, would it have killed Ephron to have at least one character who just didn’t give a shit about cooking?