CineLinkr #211: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Julie Powell set herself the task of cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's cookbook in 365 days. Julie & Julia follows the project that helped turn her into a published author. One recipe a day would leave 159 recipes unfinished. The cookbook has somehow become an overdue assignment.

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🟢 Easy: Eddie Murphy performances

Movies: The Golden Child · 48 Hrs. · Shrek · Trading Places

48 Hrs. was Eddie Murphy's film debut. He plays convict Reggie Hammond opposite Nick Nolte's cop, and Trading Places follows a year later with Murphy as Billy Ray Valentine. Two early roles, two different situations in which somebody badly underestimates how quickly he can read a room.

The Golden Child sends his social worker Chandler Jarrell on a supernatural rescue mission. Shrek lets him do the work through Donkey's voice, without Murphy appearing on screen. That is the useful expansion of the actor connection: a voice performance counts. Donkey's commentary is hardly an incidental contribution to the film.

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🟡 Medium: Cooking changes the protagonists' lives

Movies: Ratatouille · Woman on Top · Julie & Julia · Haute Cuisine

Haute Cuisine draws on Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch's time as François Mitterrand's private chef. Its fictional Hortense receives an appointment to cook for the French president. Ratatouille asks Remy to pursue an equally improbable culinary ambition, though presidential hiring has fewer immediate hygiene objections than a rat in a restaurant kitchen.

Woman on Top gives Isabella a television cooking show after she leaves Brazil, while Julie & Julia turns an amateur recipe challenge into writing work. Cooking changes the protagonists' careers or sense of themselves across the row. They do not all need to start as chefs. Julie's route through a blog is part of what keeps the connection from becoming four interchangeable restaurant stories.

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🔵 Hard: Revisionist westerns

Movies: Slow West · Hostiles · The Proposition · The Sisters Brothers

Slow West won Sundance's World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize in 2015. Its young romantic travels through a frontier where other people have considerably more practical reasons to be interested in the woman he seeks. The title sounds leisurely; the bounty hunters are paying attention.

Hostiles confronts racial hatred in a soldier's escort of a dying Cheyenne chief. The Sisters Brothers follows hired killers through the American West. The Proposition moves to the Australian outback, with a bargain that requires one brother to kill another. Nick Cave wrote that screenplay and John Hillcoat directed it. There is not much room in the arrangement for a clean conscience.

Revisionist westerns make the familiar frontier romance difficult to sustain. Violence costs people something, and the supposed heroes can have motives as ugly as the villains'. The Australian setting belongs because the connection concerns the genre's moral assumptions, rather than a rule that every horse must be standing on American soil.

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🟣 Tricky: Blind protagonists face violent attackers

Movies: Wait Until Dark · Blind Fury · See No Evil · Julia's Eyes

Wait Until Dark traps Audrey Hepburn's blind Susy in an apartment with criminals searching for a drug shipment. See No Evil follows Sarah, recently blinded, as a psychopath stalks her in the English countryside. The vulnerability is specific: the threat occupies a space the protagonist has to navigate without sight.

Blind Fury gives Rutger Hauer a very different response. His Nick Parker is a blind Vietnam veteran who fights with a sword while protecting a kidnapped man's son. The film remakes Zatoichi Challenged in a modern English-language setting. The change in tone can hide the connection if you expect four equally helpless victims.

Julia's Eyes completes the row through progressive sight loss and a period of post-operative bandaging. Julia is not permanently blind for the entire film. The reveal asks you to notice the condition under which these characters face their attackers, whether they fight back or try to escape. That precise overlap survives the jump between apartment suspense, stalking horror and action comedy.

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Wait Until Dark makes the apartment itself feel threatening. I would happily trade that room for Remy's kitchen, even knowing exactly who has been near the food.

For improbable weapons with brighter prospects, the same date's PixelLinkr puzzle includes heroes who fight with yo-yos, plus a much calmer pool-table row.