Summer’s Pleasant Surprises

For those in the film prognostication business, this summer’s been a bit baffling. Many people assumed Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow would be a bust, and, regardless of it’s box office numbers, the film has been a critical smash. And Emily Blunt, Cruise’s ass-kicking co-star, is perhaps the most unexpected action hero of the summer.

It wasn’t terribly surprising that X-Men: Days of Future Past would be so good,

Building Edge of Tomorrow’s Armored ExoSuits

How might a soldier be able to fight giant, sophisticated, and fantastically violent aliens with sundry razor-sharp tentacles and a taste for carnage? Simple: just create an articulated armored suit capable of protecting a soldier’s body while delivering a massive amount of firepower from weapons mounted to the carapace. This was the challenge the filmmakers behind Edge of Tomorrow created for themselves, and instead of relying on CGI to create these fantastic and fearsome combat “jackets,”

Book Shelf: Gifted Actor Stanley Tucci’s Italian Cookbook

Why, you might ask, another cookbook? Actor Stanley Tucci has a simple and elegant answer to that question, which he lets the New York Times in on in the companion video to their profile of him, found here.

Since there are only so many recipes, he says, just like there are only so many plots, it’s about how you tell the story, as opposed to the way the other guy tells the story.