The Week in Entertainment

Film: The Kids Are All Right, which we found very enjoyable. Annette Benning was excellent, as were the two kids (Josh Hutcherson is becoming a fine actor) and in fact the whole cast.

DVD: A few more of the Dalziel & Pascoe series. Word to producers & writers: when you get rid of a major character, one who's been around for seven years, you should at least mention why he's gone. Something like "What luck for Wieldy, inheriting all that money/winning the lottery/getting that promotion/transfer to Europol/fabulously wealthy boyfriend" or even, though this would be much less satisfactory, "I still can't believe Wieldy was shot/hit by a bus/fell off that cliff." Tell us what happened to him. Don't expect us to forget him. Kthxbai! Also, began watching the Russian miniseries The Idiot, which is (one episode in) sumptuous, well acted, and faithful to the book.

TV: Leverage - the mid-season finale went out on a pivotal point: Nate & the crew deciding to go over Moreau on their own (and the Italian happy about it). Eliot and Hardison were crazy good as cops - I love how they squabble - and that fight in the back room was shot really nicely. Also Psych's summer finale (and yay that they're coming back in November!) - ending on an emotional cliffhanger, this episode was heavier on character than plot; James Roday had two major speeches (to Gus: I want to be happy, too, and I can't see that happening without Juliet; and to Juliet: Go, make memories, be happy) and he nailed them both.

Read: Taroko Gorge by Jacob Ritari, a very fine first novel. Ritari showed a gift for characterization - chapters in differing first-person, which you could always identify, as well as well-observed portraits of the others - as well as for story telling. There was one odd thing in his writing, though. When the two Americans first arrive in Taiwan, they talk to some teenage girls at a temple school, and a point is made about the t-shirt one of the girls is wearing. Later, one of the students in the park is given a t-shirt from lost and found to replace hers, and it's the same one as the earlier girl had been wearing. I kept waiting for that to mean something, but it didn't. In real life it wouldn't be at all unusual to see the same t-shirt over and over, but in the confined world of a novel, such things are distractions. Oh, well, it's such a tiny flaw. I also read José Saramago's The Elephant's Journey (translated by Margaret Jull Costa). My relationship with Saramago is fraught - I absolutely adored and devoured Death with Interruptions and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, yet Blindness and The Cave left me cold and repulsed. (And it's not the translator's fault (if fault it is) Costa translated The Cave and Death, and Giovanni Pontiero did both Ricardo Reis and Blindness). But The Elephant's Journey was another joy. And finally, Peter Robinson's latest - Bad Boy, not a bad novel if not his best.