The Week in Entertainment

Film: A Separation which was quite a bit different what I expected (which was the wife's point of view, and about the divorce) but was intense, filled with escalating tension, ultimately devastating, and quite, quite beautiful. It's an emotional wallop, and the final credits roll over a scene that grips you with surprisingly visceral emotion. Highly recommended.

DVD: Murder by Decree, an ... interesting ... Sherlock Holmes with Christopher Plummer and James Mason, in which we discover that Jack the Ripper was a Masonic cabal defending Prince Eddy from the follies of his marriage to a (gasp!) French Catholic woman. Also a couple of Indian films: Bhoothnath (Lord of Ghosts), a remake of The Canterbury Ghost with Amitabh Bachchan as the titular ghost, which was a lot of fun and succeeded in making me teary at the end; and Paheli (Riddle), with Shah Rukh Khan as a ghost (theme night!) who falls in love with a human woman (played by the exquisite Rani Mukerji, so who can blame him?) and impersonates her husband when that one takes off on a five-year business trip immediately after the wedding. (Yes; this is Bollywood. Immediately after the wedding.) He confesses who he is to her and asks her to decide if he should stay. It's the first time in her life anyone has actually asked her what she wants, and she decides she wants him (it's Shah Rukh saying he loves her madly, so who can blame her?) The trouble starts when the husband comes home... Enjoyable fairy tale of a story, and simply beautiful to look at it.

TV: Once Upon A Time had a bit of intrigue developing - who's the writer? Does he have to be a fairy-tale person? Caught up on Downton Abbey's second season; they're plunged into the slaughterhouse of WWI, new characters and such. No real character development, and since it's now 1916, i.e. 2 years later than the end of season 1, that's a bit disappointing. There's just some "oh, Matthew is engaged now" stuff, but he - and everyone else - are exactly the same as they were. This, of course, is probably by design - and I'll watch the rest of the season, so I guess they're doing something right.

Read: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (after seeing the brilliant movie), and then I reread The Spy Who Came In From The Cold which I didn't really remember very well. I picked up an omnibus for Kindle of all three Karla novels; I haven't ever read the other two.