The weeks in entertainment

Missed posting last week since I was traveling.

Film: The Flight of the Red Balloon. Juliette Binoche is brilliant as always in this intriguing and very French movie (despite being directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien).

DVD: The rest of the fourth series of The Last Detective.

TV: In England, the most peculiar game show - Golden Balls. This is one I hope doesn't get exported to the US, but considering it (like many Brit game shows) has a huge probability of awarding no money at all by the end, it may prove irresistible. (It finishes up with a "prisoner's dilemma" where the two remaining contestants either split the pot (which can be down to almost nothing by then) or try to steal it. If they both try to steal, neither gets anything: the first night I watched it, they lost 68 thousand pounds; the second, they split 152.5 (they were very nearly playing for 25 pence, which would have been funny.)(Yes, I watched it twice. But I don't think I could stand watching it often.) Also the Sarah Jane Adventures and Doctor Who. Volcano Day! Whoo-hoo! Good thing they didn't run into Captain Jack, not that he'd have known who they were. And quite a disconcerting insight into the way a Time Lord sees things... What a great shot of the Doctor holding out his hand. Too bad SciFi cut the last scene, but there's always the DVDs. (And I've just remembered why Peter Capaldi looked so familiar to me: The Lair of the White Worm! (Should I admit I've seen that?))

Read: A Room of One's Own (for NL: see here). The Blind Assassin by Atwood, utterly brilliant. The new one from several authors: Reginald Hill's Death Comes for the Fat Man, Peter Robinson's Friend of the Devil, Donna Leon's The Girl of his Dreams, Jonathan Kellerman's Compulsion, and Earlene Fowler's Tumbling Blocks - the first three excellent and the Kellerman pretty good. Also read Into the Small which was overrated - art not that great and story extremely sketchy. Also reading Vladimir Solovyov's book on Putin (Путин: путеводитель для неравнодуших - Putin: putevoditel' dlya neravnodushnykh (Putin: guidebook for the non-indifferent)). So far (I'm only in the second section) I'm finding it fascinating. Solovyov, a journalist, has a name for controversial publications and interviews, but he's quite close to Surkov and is pro-Putin.