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Julia Child’s life is partially depicted in the new foodie film Julie & Julia, and while it’s as much fun to see Meryl Streep portray the famous chef as it was to watch Dan Aykroyd and Bill Cosby do her back in the day, we can’t help but wish the real Child had lived long enough to star in the film herself. We also wish the whole movie was based on her autobiography, My Life in France, rather than share-adapted from both that book and Julie Powell’s blog-turned-memoir Julie & Julia.

There’s a reason Child was a hugely popular TV personality and there’s a reason why Powell was an Internet writer. Just as you’d rather only watch Sean Penn as Gene Shalit in a movie and not bother with Michael Pitt’s portrayal of lowly film blogger Christopher Campbell, you could probably do without the Amy Adams as Powell stuff in Julie & Julia.

Outside of playing herself as a foodie heroine in a chick flick, what other kinds of movies could Child have acted in? Given her OSS background, we would have loved to see her fill in for Judi Dench in the Bond films as M. Alas, that will never happen, but if our gastronomical dreams come true, perhaps we might see one of the following TV personalities in his or her own blockbuster film someday:

Mario Batali in Iron Chef

He’s friends with Gwyneth Paltrow, who costars on Batali’s PBS series Spain…on the road Again, he voices a rabbit in Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Fox and he’s appearing in the upcoming vengeful-chef thriller Bitter Feast, so he’s already making his way into Hollywood circles. For his blockbuster-starring role, we see him capitalizing on his Iron Chef status as a culinary superhero called … Iron Chef. While driving around in Spain on one of his culinary road trips, he’s kidnapped by terrorists, from whom he escapes by making a suit made out of cast-iron skillets — a lot of them. Paltrow would costar as his personal assistant/love interest, of course.

Anthony Bourdain in From Russia with Pirozhki

Even more than having Julia Child play M in an official 007 film, we’d have loved to see her as the foodie equivalent in a spy film starring Tony Bourdain (who has previously acted in a Uwe Boll movie) in a tale of culinary espionage. As one of the few TV chefs to do more globetrotting than cooking, and since he’s such a hard-drinking, hard-rocking tough guy compared to his peers, the star of Travel Channel’s No Reservations really should get his own action film franchise in which he goes after villains doing harm to the world’s food supply. Maybe one of his missions could even be written as a fictional remake of the new dolphin-slaughter doc The Cove. And for comic relief, we propose that (against Bourdain’s wishes we’re sure) Eastern European regular Zamir play Tony’s occasional sidekick.

Alton Brown in Night at the Agropolis

Given Alton Brown’s kid-show-like quality and his penchant for historical context, we imagine him best in a family film, specifically a Night at the Museum for foodies (though with greater factual accuracy). The best place we can think of to set such a movie is the Agropolis-Museum in Montpellier, France, since it may be the most comprehensive food history museum in the world. We’re not saying the plot would have to involve food that comes to life, but we did always love such scenes in Young Sherlock Holmes and Better Off Dead as kids, and maybe children of today would enjoy something like that, too. Or, another idea would be to have the Good Eats host star in something like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, where he travels back in time and meets such early culinary figures as Apicius and Martino da Como.

Paula Deen in Attack of the 50ft. Chef

Many people joke that Paula Deen is trying to kill us with her cooking, but what if the Paula’s Best Dishes host really were attempting to give the world heart attacks, diabetes and other obesity-related afflictions? Already a veteran actress (she plays Orlando Bloom’s aunt in Elizabethtown), in this monster movie, the former agoraphobic attempts to wipe out humanity by hooking us on a diet of fried Twinkies and bacon cheeseburgers with donuts for buns. Her initial plot is foiled, though, when military scientists use a new secret weapon to destroy her. But instead of dying she grows into a monster that’s part Godzilla, part The Blob, and she proceeds to eat her way through Manhattan while also firing giant deep-fried balls of butter from her eyes.

Wylie Dufresne in The Life Gastronomic

While not quite technically a TV chef since he’s never had his own show, Wylie Dufresne has been a guest judge for a couple episodes of Top Chef and he recently competed on the spin-off Top Chef Masters. He was memorable enough in these few appearances to make us think he has a future on television, or even in film. We always thought he looked like he should be in a Wes Anderson movie, in fact, and so that’s where we’d like to see him, in an Anderson-directed sci-fi film involving Dufresne’s experimental cuisine. Think of him as a Steve Zissou of molecular gastronomy, in search of the egg dish that got away. He’d look great in one of those little red hats, too. Considering Batali’s already got an in with Anderson, he could possibly make an appearance in this, too.

Bobby Flay in FoodFellas

Never mind the stupid title (we almost went with Little Caesar Salad), the point is that Iron Chef Bobby Flay would be perfect in a gangster film. Basically it’d be like his show Throwdown! with Bobby Flay except that instead of challenging fellow chefs to a cook-off, he eliminates his culinary competition through old-fashioned mobster tactics. As much as Flay would look terrific in a pinstripe suit and holding a Tommy Gun, he could also be in a more modern crime film, maybe something from Martin Scorsese or writer Dennis Lehane (Mystic River).

Duff Goldman in The Pineapple Upside-Down Cake Express

We’re certainly not the only fans of Ace of Cakes to think most of the Charm City Cakes staff gets baked before baking. But we mean no slander; so don’t take our assumption for anything more that. Whether or not CCC owner and AoC star Jeff “Duff” Goldman is a fan of the herb, though, doesn’t matter. We still think he belongs in a stoner comedy, preferably paired up with his hilariously deadpan sidekick Geof Manthorne. In addition to having a cake-related plot (Dude, Where’s My Groom’s Cake?; Duff and Geoff Build a White Castle Cake; Up in Gum Paste…), Duff could use the opportunity to showcase his other talents by playing bass and hockey in select scenes.

Gordon Ramsay in Inglourious Custerds

What genre is best for a profanity-spewing chef like Gordon Ramsay of Kitchen Nightmares? War film, of course. Only this movie would be set in the world of mess officers, with Ramsay playing a culinary version of R. Lee Ermey’s character in Full Metal Jacket, training new cooks for a secret mission to poison as many Nazis as possible. The rest of the film’s cast can also be filled by cooking show personalities, including the military chefs of the Pentagon Channel’s The Grill Sergeants and our favorite French chef, Eric Ripert, as a member of a cook for the Resistance.

Rachael Ray in When Harry Met Sally’s 30-Minute Meal…

America’s favorite girl-next-door chef is obviously most suited for a romantic comedy, and considering everyone knows that the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, there really should be more foodie rom-coms. There’s no way she can out-cute Waitress or out-humor the lobster scene from Annie Hall, but Rachael Ray’s popularity would surely allow her to outdo both of those films in terms of box office gross. Maybe she can head a story similar to that of When Harry Met Sally… in which each stage of her relationship with Harry involves a different 30-minute meal she prepares for him. One of them being orgasmic, of course.

Justin Wilson in FryLight

We’re going to make an exception for the most entertaining TV chef of all time, Lousiana Cookin host Justin Wilson, despite the fact that he’s been dead for eight years. With the magic of special effects he could certainly be resurrected, a la Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, especially for such an appropriate role as an undead Cajun chef. Sponsored by the British cooking spray to capitalize on the Twilight craze (and featuring Ruffles product placement as an homage to his memorable commercials), Frylight would star Wilson as a humorous vampire — living in Louisiana like most — who prefers crawfish and okra to blood. It might not be as big as True Blood or Twilight, but it’ll be a hit, we gar-on-tee!

Honorable Mention: We didn’t include Martha Stewart because she’s much, much more than a just a TV chef, and besides she’s presumably too busy to star in a movie. But who wouldn’t like to see her at least self-mockingly cameo in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel, Money Never Sleeps?

Under discussion:

Beeswax  (2009)

Kevin Lee’s vigorous defense of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax in reaction to its reception at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival included a thematic interpretation of the film’s title. He wrote that Beeswax, a picture which has nothing directly to do with either bees or wax, was titled as such as “a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.” It’s right to shine a light on Beeswax as a film about a community’s interconnectedness — and probable that the nuances of that specific community, Austin, might feel like flat, mundane Americana to an eye hoping for a retread of the classically cool “disaffected rocker in black and white” vibe of Mutual Appreciation. But the title also seems like something of a multi-layered reference to the film’s ambitious leap ahead of Bujalski’s previous filmography. Having built a following based on two finely calibrated odes to linguistic imprecision, Bujalski’s third film moves away from messy, non-committal “mumbling”, in order to cleverly examine the double-speak of slang, simile and idiom that flows through American conversation without interrogation. As a moniker for this crayon-colorful (and beautifully shot by regular DP Matthias Grunsky) comedy steeped in colloquial American English, the title Beeswax feels less like a metaphor for anything bees do in public, than a veiled reference to private lives - as in, “mind your own beeswax.”

Bujalski built the script around actual twin sisters Maggie and Tilly Hatcher, who play twin sisters Lauren and Jeannie; both non-actors, the former appeared in the director’s student thesis film at Harvard, and the latter’s real-life use of a wheelchair makes it into the film. Jeannie’s disability is never specified or commented on in Beeswax, but the fact of it informs much of the incidental action and its ultimate themes. The sisters are exceptionally unwilling to let men dictate the course of their sexual relationships, and though highly characterized, the male presence in this film is essentially reduced to boyfriend roles, all given over to Austin-based filmmakers. David and Nathan Zellner, the masterminds of Goliath and the recent batshit insane web series Fiddlestixx, respectively play Lauren’s ex and his weirdly flirtatious brother, who sets Lauren up with a last-minute job offer in Kenya. Alex Karpovsky, whose oddly fascinating improv comedy concert film Trust Us, This is All Made Up premiered at SXSW this year, plays Jeannie’s ex-boyfriend Merill, a fledgling lawyer who thrives on solving his former love’s every crisis.

Jeannie is having a falling out with the old friend with whom she owns a vintage shop, and worried that her business partner is getting litigious, Jeannie contacts Merrill for advice. An evening spent decoding the language of a business contract resolves, as Jeannie puts it semi-ironically, in “hot sex,” and soon Merrill is back in her life, actively angling for a more substantial relationship while trying to make Jeannie’s business problems disappear. It’s some kind of reconciliation romance, but Beeswax is more complicated than your average comedy of remarriage. It slowly emerges that Jeannie might have called Merrill not just because she was in crisis, but because she knew he’d be attracted to her crisis, and her need is thus, in a way, a gift to him, something to fill up his own need. As the narrative unfolds, Jeannie’s lacks (her inability to decipher a business contract, her inability to walk) are balanced out by her the lacks of those around her: her sister’s fear of commitment, her sometime-boyfriend’s emotional neediness, her business partner’s inability to equally participate in the business. Though literally crippled, Jeannie emerges as the bravest, most capable person on screen.

In vocal cadence if not body language, Karpovsky’s playing a character that one could easily imagine Bujalski, who does not appear in Beeswax, having taken for himself in one of his earlier films. If Beeswax is, as I suspect, above all else a film about language, than Merrill, though deprived of real agency in his relationship with Jeannie, is a crucial player because he sets much of the linguistic action into motion. Not only do he and Jeannie turn the interpretation of documents into a kind of foreplay, but in blurting out something accidentally horrible and then devoting exponentially more words to detailing his remorse, he sets the tone for the film’s second half, in which the precise application of words — particularly, unexpectedly bold statements and idiosyncratic metaphors like “shit sandwich” — has the force of small bombs, perhaps not causing irrevocable damage but definitely altering space, time and perception in the moment.

In creating a uniquely cerebral film in which the bulk of the drama is based on which words will fly out of mouths and what they’ll really mean, Bujalski has made a “talky” film that lovingly critiques the mysteries of speech. At the film’s climax, two of our heroes look at a letter, and one asks the other, “You like that language?” The response: “Beautiful.” It is.

This review appeared in slightly different form during the SXSW Film Festival. Beeswax opens at Film Forum in New York on Friday.