Day: December 23, 2010

You know, as a joke, it’s pretty funny. I haven’t seen the film or read the original book myself, but my understanding is that only the “Julia” parts are actually worth watching. (In fact, someone out there must have created a cut of the film that excises Julie Powell altogether, right?) But to actually do this? Watch the same movie every day for 365 days in a row? That way lies madness. [via]

Like pop music and playing center field, slapstick is a young man’s game. Nobody wants to be a fiftysomething Jerry Lewis in Hardly Working, yet Larger Than Life persists in having Murray flail his way through dispiriting pratfalls and physical comedy. In his early comedies, Murray’s deadpan under-reactions felt like an inveterate anarchist’s passive-aggressive rebellion against corrupt authority. Here, they merely broadcast Murray’s understandable lack of engagement with his material. Murray wears a simultaneously bored and humiliated look throughout the film that says, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

After a woman living in a hotel in Florida was raped, viciously beaten, and left for dead near the Everglades in 2005, the police investigation quickly went cold. But when the victim sued the Airport Regency, the hotel’s private detective, Ken Brennan, became obsessed with the case: how had the 21-year-old blonde disappeared from her room, unseen by security cameras? The author follows Brennan’s trail as the P.I. worked a chilling hunch that would lead him to other states, other crimes, and a man nobody else suspected.