The Week in Entertainment

Film: Megamind - yes, it's still in theaters here. Well, one theater, one screen, twice a day. I had meant to see it before, and didn't - and I'm very glad I saw it this week. Very funny movie. Tron: Legacy - I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. Maybe it wasn't great, but I loved the original and this one had lots of little homagy touches, plus Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner.

DVD: All three Toy Story movies and the last Shrek one. Also Charlie Chan in Monte Carlo and Charlie Chan on Broadway.

TV: Not much. Caught White Christmas and Miracle on 34th Street. Am trusting the DVR - and Comcast's new manage your DVR from your computer should mean the new Doctor Who special is waiting.

Read: Didn't read much, either. I just reread Master and Margarita, mostly to refresh my memory after seeing the stage version last week - and I was right; to all intents and purposes the master isn't in the first half of the book, and Margarita isn't there at all (just referred to), while he's a minor character in the second half, which is really about Margarita. I got the new translation (on Kindle), and was struck by how often they produced a rather unidiomatic bit of English that I immediately knew the Russian source of - sentences with "generally" and "precisely" where I'd have used "at all" and an it-cleft (for Russian вообще and именно). But it's a good translation, very freely faithful and as funny and biting as the Russian...