The Week in Entertainment

Film: Julie and Julia (and on Julia Child's birthday, too!) I enjoyed the movie a lot, particularly because I knew virtually nothing about Julia Child. Meryl Streep is fantastic (so what's new) and Stanley Tucci matches her well as Paul Child. In the other story, the one many critics hated, Amy Adams does a fine job as the Julia fan/blogger who turns her life around by cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Yes, the stories are unequal in weight, and a genuine biopick of Child would be fascinating (assuming they get Streep and Tucci!), but the inspiration for the thing was the fan's story, not the idol's. It works. It works well.

DVD: Remember WENN on what is almost certainly a somebody's-burned-from-VHS-recordings box set. But when they don't have an official one, what are you gonna do? I loved this show when it was on, and I'm loving it now, in two episode doses. One of which I don't remember having seen when it was on originally, starring Howard Rollins as a black actor who found his home on the radio - until the press wanted a picture of the new romantic lead. Also a similar set of The Fantastic Voyage, a short-lived 1977 series about travelers lost in a weird zone inside the Bermuda Triangle. It's not great, but it's not bad, and it does have Roddy McDowell!

TV: Psych. Sweet - another new season. The dig at The Mentalist was cute, and Shawn's abortive attempts to get his (er, Gus's) money's worth out of the big romantic date he set up before he asked Abigail were funny. And Ted! In fact, two Teds! "We love Nature - even when it's being mean." And that presentation! "Not having a product wasn't slowing us down at all!" And the second episode, when Phil got beaten up: "No, it was a good thing. He saw me as a threat. I am a scientist, Lem. I have been a threat to humanity, the environment, even Jupiter. Once. But never to a hot girl's boyfriend!" Leverage - well, I'd sort of thought they were going to concentrate on bankers, but this one was about sleazy, destructive "journalists" (Monica Hunter is in the fear business), and it was fun. Warehouse 13 - Still not spectacular, but entertaining enough. And I finally watched the series finale of Pushing Daisies (oh, I'm going to miss this show! Seeing Kristen Chenowith beside Chi McBride is hilarious just by itself, let alone the great Jim Dale's narration, Emerson's perfect lines and "Oh hell no"s, and Ellen Greene and Swoosie Kurtz... sigh. I really am going to miss this show.) How perfect: going out with a jumping shark! And wrapping things up so nicely into "events that should never be considered an ending, for endings, as we know, are where we begin."

Read: Painter of Battles by Pérez-Reverte. Excellent, fascinating, and unlike anything else of his I've read. Finished The Wish Maker, which was also very good, a look at modern Pakistani history with an intense undercurrenty love story and a wonderful last line. Began Bend Sinister by Nabokov.