Tuesday various

Thursday various

  • “Julie Powell managed to cook/blog her way through all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s cookbook in a year, learning valuable life lessons along the way. I hope to learn as much, if not more, by watching the film Julie & Julia every day for a year.”

    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]

  • Nathan Rabin on Bill Murray in Larger Than Life:

    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.”

  • The Case of the Vanishing Blonde [via]:

    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.

  • You know, I’m not particularly looking forward to the new Thor movie, but here’s one good thing to come out of it: its casting has outraged hate groups. For that reason alone, I applaud casting Idris Elba as a Norse god.
  • And finally, I for one welcome our new Jeopardy-solving robot overlords.

Monday various