YMMV / Julie & Julia

• Award Snub: Meryl Streep. Her umpteenth nomination.
• Designated Hero: Throughout the movie we see Julie complain about her friends, be unpleasant to her husband, and sulk a lot. But for some reason we're supposed to root for her.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In her follow-up book, Julie Powell freely admits to cheating on her husband for two years after the events depicted in the movie^note The book, Cleaving, has less to do with cooking and her newfound interest in butchery than her out-in-the-open affairs, how obsessive she became over her lover, gratuitous descriptions of her sex life and the wounds she received during sex, and how much she enjoyed it and didn't want to stop. Needless to say, the book was largely panned on its release.. Kind of hard now to watch her say that she doesn't deserve a husband as nice as him.
• Hollywood Homely: The real Julie is rather average-looking, at least compared to Amy Adams. Both Streep and Adams underwent a Beauty Inversion, ironically because they're still better looking than their real life counterparts. This makes it a case of Adaptational Attractiveness as well.
• Hollywood Pudgy: During one of her meltdowns, Julie laments that on top of all the other stress of the project, she's also getting fat from all the butter- and cream-filled dishes she's been consuming. But she's still portrayed by the same slender Amy Adams (who claims she gained a few pounds during filming but never bothered to weigh herself).
• Just Here for Godzilla: Julia Child's story is widely agreed as the main reason to watch, to the point where several viewers felt the film should've been all about her instead of splitting focus with Julie.
• One-Scene Wonder: Jane Lynch as Julia's sister.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many viewers felt that the story about how Julia Child came to write and publish her famous cookbook was the far more interesting of the film's two plots, and wished that the filmmakers had chosen to focus on it in more detail instead of interweaving it with another one. Anthony Bourdain once described the film as "half of a really good movie."
  • Also, what if Julie and Julia had met in real life?
• Unintentional Period Piece: The idea of someone starting a blog that becomes a national media sensation is a lot less relevant now than it was during the Turn of the Millennium era.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Several sources discussing the movie (such as a Cracked article and a video by Lindsay Ellis,) make a point to show how the inciting incident that encourages Julie to start the blog (dissatisfaction with her job) comes across a bit tasteless since her job was working for an organization that helped victims of the September 11th tragedy. While this was true to real life, the movie made the choice to frame it less as "pained over the constant misery and tragedy" and more as "frustration with irritating customer service calls," which had an added side-effect of making Julie come across as a bit more callous than intended.