The Week in Entertainment

Film: The Words, which I think, after seeing it, got some bum reviews. Not the best movie I've seen, certainly, but I didn't think it was as flawed as most reviewers did (though I could have done without the peculiarly aggressive student character played by Olivia Wilde). Jeremy Irons was great, as usual.

DVD: City of Death, a nice Doctor Who written by Douglas Adams. Tried to watch The Tree of Life, but found it too confusing and pretentious and gave up on it after about half an hour. May try again...

TV: Doctor Who is back! Yay!. I was quite upset that it started with Rory and Amy getting a divorce, but it's believable and I loved the ending - all the Daleks shouting "Doctor who? Doctor who?" Wonderful! And the second episode - "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship!" - was great, too. Loved Rory's dad, and it had such great lines ("Are you suggesting dinosaurs are flying a spaceship?" "No, that would be ridiculous. They're probably just passengers.") Leverage, caught up on last week's - cute, I enjoy the ones where they do historical dress-up, and I liked how they subverted the "Eliot will be the bad guy" expectation. This week's was good, too. Back to their real strength: taking down an arrogant crook. Please Believe Me, a funny mistaken-identity romcom from 1950 with Deborah Kerr as a presumed heiress crossing the Atlantic on a liner, and Robert Walker, Peter Lawford, and Mark Stevens as the men chasing her. I can never get used to Robert Walker as a romantic lead... And the classic The Awful Truth with Irene Dunn and Cary Grant getting a divorce and sabotaging each other's new relationships. The Fairy King of Ar, an more than acceptable children's fantasy about some American kids on vaction saving some imprisoned fairies - Corbin Bernsen and Malcolm McDowell, believe it or not (also Glynis Barber). Spinning Boris, which is a "fact-based" look at American election advisers helping Yeltsin win reelection in 1996. It was intriguing if the basing was perhaps a bit light. Hop, which was not entirely predictable, but I think will be quite forgettable.

Read: The Lives of Things, short stories by José Saramago. Also his The Tale of the Unknown Island. The Second Life of Abigail Walker, a very nice story about a girl turning her life around by walking away from the mean girls she wanted for her friends and finding friends who want her. The American Way of War, a depressing book by Tom Engelhardt. And began Dear Blue Sky, a YA about a girl who begins corresponding with an Iraqi blogger after her brother enlists in the Marines in 2006. I'm not very far into it, but it's quite good.