The Week in Entertainment

Film: Kung Fu Panda 2, which was beautiful to look at and a lot of fun to watch, and even brought a few tears to my eyes along the way. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, also an enormous amount of fun (I was genuinely startled to realize it was 2.5 hours long). Transformers: Dark of the Moon, because, well, it's summer. Didn't have great expectations, but (or thus) was pleasantly surprised. Though don't get me wrong: it was still way too long, had far too many lingering shots of the female "lead"'s legs and ass, and featured too many too-loud robot battle sequences. Also: really? Sam's been out of college for 3 months and doesn't have a job yet, and his father thinks he's a failure? What world (bearing in mind that the movie's world is close enough to ours that Obama is the president) does he live in?

DVD: Deja Vu, which I had somehow managed to miss. Clever and well-acted.

TV: Still of the Night, which was not bad at all. Meryl Streep was so young back then! And Leverage, at last. Nice episode - nice Parker/Eliot bits, especially when he told her "we do the things they can't ... the things they won't." Brigadoon, always fun even though I do think Harry has a point.

Read: Finshed Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which was very good and didn't duck the problems it had set up for itself. A couple of books by a couple called Benrey, in the Royal Tunbridge Wells mystery series; the first one (Dead as a Scone) was amusing, the second (The Final Crumpet) was well-enough plotted but took a hard turn into Christian romance, complete with praying before every meeting and the "that was in the past but now you're a Christian!" speech. There are too many books that don't evangelize, so I won't be reading more of these, but if you don't mind it, they're well written. Also a funny mystery called The Alto Wore Tweed by Mark Schweizer, also the beginning of a series; I'll probably try another of them. Prompted by a misread intro in EQMM I grabbed Julius Katz and Archie by Dave Zeltserman, a pastiche of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodman, which was very funny (the misread was thinking the short story was in that series).