The Week in Entertainment

Film: Rachel Getting Married - highly recommended. An engrossing, well-acted look into a family almost destroyed by - I almost said a single act, but it's more like one shocking high (or low) point in the slow self-destruction of the middle child. And yet, the movie makes you laugh as well, makes you feel good, and ends on a note of painful hope. This film is well worth watching.

TV: The Mentalist - still good. Pushing Daisies, also still good, and at last Olive's coming home! And I hate the DVR, which occasionally just decides it doesn't like a series. Last year, SG Atlantis - this year, much worse. House. Argh. Must wait a week to find it online. Must program individual shows...) Eleventh Hour. Still liking this one, too. Finally saw Se7en - don't know why I hadn't seen it before. I think I thought it would be graphically violent. It's not - it's almost all in your own head. Damn, it's brilliant. "You know this isn't going to have a happy ending," says Morgan Freeman's character, and he's so right, but it ended the only way it could have. Chilling.

Read: Sunstorm (released in the UK as The Savage Altar though it's Solstorm in Swedish) by Åsa Larsson (had to look up how pronounce Swedish names). Very, very good. I'll be reading more by her - in fact, I just picked up her second one. And how odd that "Grill" is consided "an elegant surname"; I suppose it's because it isn't a patronymic. Another terrific Swede, Steig Larsson (no relation) - The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo (Män Som Hatar Kvinnor - Men Who Hate Women - in Swedish). An excellent first novel; unfortunately Larsson died before it was published, leaving two more completed manuscripts. As one reviewer said, we mourn and praise at the same time.