The Week in Entertainment

Live: Sophie Wang in concert. She did a brilliant Beethoven Sonata in E Major, Op. 109, and one of the best versions of Liszt's Les jeux d'eaux â la Villa d'Este I've ever heard.

Film: The Karate Kid - the new one with Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan. It's genuinely moving, and the locations are wonderful. Jaden has inherited his parents' skills - he's marvelous, better than many adult actors. This is (again, meaning nothing snide) Jackie Chan's best performance: the script asks him for depth, subtlety, and nuance, and he delivers it. There's a scene between the two of them that's achingly perfect - I cried. The A-Team, which was good for what it was, an action summer flick. Actually, Copley and Cooper were very good, but Neeson was either miscast or badly directed...

DVD: Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone - you know, I'd forgotten how totally irrational his hatred for Snape was. In this first movie Snape actually saved his freakin' life. Some of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes.

TV: Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express. I have a fondness for the theatrical version with Finney, Connery, Perkins, Bacall, and the rest of them, but I don't think that's why I didn't care for this version. Instead, it's the psychological exploration they tacked onto it, with Poirot's crisis of conscience and Colonel Arbuthnot's trying to shoot Poirot and Mary Debenham's tortured realization that she'll never be free of murder... It's the extra stuff at the beginning, where instead of Poirot coming home from Murder in Mesopotamia and Appointment with Death, he's coming from a murder investigation that resulted in an innocent man's committing suicide, with Poirot blaming him for lying, and a stoning (!) in the streets of Istanbul that left him rather unmoved and pontificating about "justice"... It's how all that extra stuff meant the actual murder on the Orient Express and its investigation got rather short shrift. I was looking forward to this. Now I kind of wished I'd missed it.

Read: Supernormal Stimuli by Deirdre Barrett, a good overview of what happens when stimuli are more than nature intended. State Fair by Earlene Fowler, the best one in a while. Began In Other Rooms, Other Treasures by Daniyal Mueenuddin. The first story was excellent - I'm not sure if these are intertwined stories or if there's a coincindental same-name, but I'm looking forward to finishing it.