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Just what we need in these dark times: a bland, flavorless movie about a famous chef and a blogger she inspired. And while Meryl Streep is compelling even when she’s just chopping onions or boning a duck (What a naughty phrase), a ton of butter, butter, butter will not make Julie & Julia better.

The basic problem is that the heroines of the two parallel stories have no real problems. I’m sure it’s terrible to have to leave Paris for a diplomatic posting in Marseilles, but one must be brave. And how awful for Julie Powell to be married to a nice editor at an archaeology magazine who supports her plan to go through every recipe in Julia Child’s cookbook in one year and blog about it, but at least she got a book deal and a movie out of it.

Let’s run through some of the earth-shattering crises our heroines must deal with.

1. It’s 2002, Julie is employed at a government agency which helps the victims of 9/11, and she has to take a lot of angry phone calls. Oh the poor girl, she has to listen to the relatives of people who died in the towers. Why are they so angry.

2. Her husband insists that they move from a tiny flat in Brooklyn to a 900-square meter apartment in Queens. The horror, when she could be living in Provident Village, Marikina, or Cainta, or Benguet.

3. She’s on the cover of New York magazine as an ex-promising writer who hasn’t finished anything so far. . .and she’s almost 30. Yeah, euthanize her now.

4. Then she starts a blog and no one reads it. (I almost yelled, “Wala ka bang stat counter?” in the theatre, but I remembered it was 2002 so maybe they didn’t exist yet.) The ignominy! To put yourself out there and be ignored! I’m telling you, in this century, obscurity is the fate worse than death.

5. She feels that people consider her blogging self-absorbed and narcissistic. Wherever did they get that idea? Everybody knows that bloggers are selfless, modest, and devote their lives to others. They don’t want attention. Really.

6. The reporter from Christian Science Monitor cancels their interview because it’s raining hard. How can he shirk his journalistic responsibilities so casually when the world remains ignorant of the fact that someone is blogging Julia Child’s cookbook? No wonder there’s a recession.

7. Julia has nothing to do. In Paris. The most boring city on earth.

8. The nasty manager of the Cordon Bleu won’t admit her to the professional class, and the other students look down on her because she’s slow at chopping onions.

9. One of Julia’s collaborators in the writing of the cookbook isn’t doing anything. Amaaazing. We all know that when you work in a group, everyone does exactly the same amount of work.

10. It takes Julia a few years to finish her manuscript. And then it takes a while to find a publisher. What torture. A first-time author who writes a 700-page manuscript about sauces and poultry should be able to find a publisher in a snap.

11. OMG Julie has to bone a duck, like, stab it with a knife! How scary! Now if she had to put the bone back and reconstruct the whole duck, that would be a challenge.

And so on, you get my drift. Writer-director Nora Ephron does. In one scene she has Julie and her husband watch Dan Aykroyd’s Julia Child sketch on Saturday Night Live—in its entirety. Because the movie really needs it. We knew it didn’t belong there because it was actually funny.