The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Ben Stiller is an actor I really like, but he has a real penchant for making movies I can't stand. Here's one of the exceptions: Greenberg. "You like me so much more than you think you do," Florence says to him, and the funny thing is that although you don't care for Greenberg much through most of the movie, that's how you feel about him: it turns out you like him much more than you think you do.

TV: Caught up on Futurama - 2 eps; and the one where Bender is searching for Inspector 5 was actually sweet. Psych - very funny. "I've heard it b- -- No, I haven't." And the client asking if they're UFO chasers. "Nothing so ridiculous. We're psychic detectives." Against my better judgement, after the extremely disappointing Murder on the Orient Express, I watched Poirot: Appointment with Death because of the casting (Tim Curry and John Hannah!). Unlike MOE, if you totally forget the book (one of my very favorite Poirots ever) this one's not bad (though I could have done without the huge anti-adoption lecture). But zomg did they butcher it; why have an archaeologist husband (!) and the severed head of John the Baptist? Why change the weapon? Why turn the victim from a small-town bitch into a big noise from New York? Why did they get rid of Lennox's wife and make him not Mrs Boynton's son? Why get rid of the book's killer (at least it meant I had to guess)? Why do we have a nanny? Why a Polish nun?? Why (though I am not complaining!) did Dr Gerard turn from a middle-aged Frenchman into John Hannah? Why, oh why didn't they just call it something else altogether? Since it wasn't objectively bad, I decided to go ahead and watch Third Girl, since I find that an unsatisfactory novel; this one they actually improved, not least by changing it to a pre-WWII setting instead of a '60s one. Of course, they played merry hob with all the characters and the plot, so it's not really Third Girl at all, but that's no loss. Of the three, it's the best.

Read: A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi. Lebanon 1981 through the eyes of an 8-yr-old Maronite girl in a broken family - not a divorced one, but one broken by more than the war. It's excellent. Highly recommended.