The Week(s) in Entertainment

Hmmm ... I missed this last week.

Film: Letters from Iwo Jima - I really liked this movie. Ken Watanabe is, as usual, nothing short of brilliant, but both Kazunari Ninomiya and Tsuyoshi Ihara (as Saigo and Nishi) are just as good. This film's focus is the people doing the fighting, and though you don't ever quite want them to win, but you don't want them to die (and you know, if you know anything about that battle, that most of them will die). What we see here is why the projected three days to take the island became very nearly a month, the mindset of people who fight to the death knowing that victory is not an option. There's a scene where a children's chorus sings a song to the Japanese soldiers that chills.

DVD: Stranger than Fiction, which I never got to in the theaters. It's very good - Will Ferrel is going to move to my list of actors I like but whose movies I usually don't - emphasis on the 'usually'. This one was a lot deeper and more thoughtful than I expected, with an ending that was unexpected and satisfying.

TV: Veronica Mars, Scrubs, Heroes, some Poirot

Read: God: the Failed Hypothesis, a well-argued book. A Hole in Juan and The End of Tom, both nice entries in the series. Pelagia and the White Bulldog - Boris Akunin's new series, also set in 19th century Russia, this time in a provincial capital instead of Moscow or Petersburg, very well-written (as usual).