The Week in Entertainment

Film: Live and Become (or Go, Live and Become as a strict translation would have it - Va, vis et deviens in the original) - brilliant. I did get a bit lost, time-wise, in the end of the center section of the film, when Schlomo goes to France and returns: Sarah keeps saying she's waited ten years for him, but she started when he was 13, and gets him (no spoiler this to anyone who's seen a trailer) after he comes back to Israel as a doctor, and that takes 8 and a half years in France - so it's more like 15 years. But when that's the only quibble I have with a film - one character's choice of words - I have to say the film is excellent, and this one is. It's powerful, filled with fabulous actors, especially Yaël Abecassis and Roschdy Zem as the Franco-Israeli Sephardic couple who adopt Schlomo; Yitzhak Edgar as the Falasha rabbi who becomes his mentor; and the three actors who play Schlomo himself - Moshe Agazai, Moshe Abebe, and Sirak M. Sabahat. Recommended without hesitation - an important and moving film.

DVD: got the Columbia Cary Grant boxed set for Christmas and yesterday watched The Talk of the Town, which I liked a lot, and Holiday, which is one of my favorite Cary Grant movies, and favorite Kate Hepburn movies, too.

TV: Caught a Midsomer Murders I hadn't seen before, also To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything... which is no Priscilla Queen of the Desert but which I still enjoy. Also welcomed back Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert from holiday break ... Yay!

Read: Finished up Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a good overview of the Bremer era in Baghdad, and read Rebuilt which is a fascinating account of a rubella-caused deaf man (he had minimal hearing and then, quite suddenly, lost what little he had one morning) getting a cochlear implant.