Meryl Streep and Amy Adams cook up great fun in 'Julie & Julia'

Fluffy, sweet and deliciously delightful, "Julie & Julia" is a hoot of a movie and a surefire recipe for a good time, assuming of course you can do without robots, superheroes and comics who curse.

What you get here instead are two women who love to cook. One would be the world-famous cookbook author and TV chef Julia Child (Meryl Streep), the other would be the complete nobody-at-the-time Julie Powell (Amy Adams).

The two never meet; but each turns a passion for that most traditional and domestic undertaking -- cooking -- into an empowering, life-changing adventure.

Writer-director Nora Ephron ("You've Got Mail," "Sleepless in Seattle") runs their stories side by side, flipping back and forth across the years, seamlessly. And to her great credit she doesn't try to make more out of the connections between their lives than what's simply there. This is not the stuff of great drama. It's the stuff of great fun, with drama peeking through at times.

Julie is working a bureaucratic job that offers little satisfaction in modern-day New York City, wondering where she's going in a life that has been filled with incomplete projects. Then she stumbles on an idea -- what if she tried to cook every recipe in Child's most famed French cookbook within a year's time? And what if she blogged about it daily?

(By the way, Ephron was the first screenwriter to make big hay out of e-mail with "Mail," and now she's apparently the first to do a blog movie. This reflects a certain grasp of the obvious that is a bona fide gift.)

As Julie begins her adventures in cooking, the film travels back to the 1950s, when Child arrives in Paris with her diplomat husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci). Enamored of French cooking, Child decides to go to school and learn how to be a French chef.

Then she meets up with a couple of like-minded ladies and they decide to write a cookbook about French cooking for Americans. This turns into a momentous project that goes on for years.

Meanwhile, Julie is back in her tiny apartment in Queens, nightly preparing some of the fanciest foods imaginable for her (mostly) patient husband, Eric (Chris Messina).

And her blog starts catching on. Fans begin sending her culinary gifts; a news article appears; the idea of turning the blog into a book surfaces. Julie has found salvation through the recipes of Julia Child.

Streep's work here is every bit the stacked delight you'd imagine. Somehow she widens her shoulders and fully takes on Child's towering physicality -- which included, apparently, a frank sexuality -- and trills through sentences with that voice familiar to any baby boomer. She embraces Child's eccentricities but never makes fun of them.

Quite simply, she makes you love Julia Child.

Adams has the far less flashy role, but she shows why she's been picked to co-star with Streep in two films within a year's time (last year's "Doubt" being the other). She has a pixie air as Julie, and there are some very funny physical moments that she capitalizes on perfectly.

Quibbles are few, although Julie's groupie-like adoration of Child wears a bit thin. Still, Ephron crams a surprising amount of stuff into this film -- notions of feminism, idealization, modern media and dark politics all get their moments -- while still making sure everybody has a good time.

Hey, it's Streep doing Julia Child. You'd be nuts not to go see it. "Julie & Julia" hits the spot.

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