The Week in Entertainment

Live: Flashdance at the Hippodrome, a lot of fun.

DVD: Dil Bole Hadippa! (Heart Says Hurray!) with Shahid Kapoor and Rani Mukerji; loosely based on "She's the Man" and - ultimately - "Twelfth Night", it's a story of a woman who wants to play cricket and ends up disguising herself as a man in order to do so. It's fun. Also Trimurti (Three Powers), with Jackie Shroff, Anil Kapoor, and a very young Shahrukh Khan as the three brothers of a framed policewoman, who reunite and avenge her in the end. The scene when Anand realizes that Romi is his brother is quite astonishingly touching - Kapoor pulls it off without a single word - and Shroff is wonderful, as always. Also, having the Himalayas as your daily view must be breathtaking. A bunch of old Philo Vance movies - I was surprised to see that Basil Rathbone had played him; I always associate Willam Powell with that role (though he was played by a quite a few others, like a very bizarrely cast Paul Lukas and Warren William of Perry Mason-movie fame (if 'fame' is the right word). It was funny in The Bishop Murder Case to see the professor call the district attorney to report a murder, and the DA immediately call Vance - no cops! (Although to be fair, the cops did show up.) All those little girls with their short skirts up to their butts - I remember that from Shirley Temple movies; even in a coat and muffler and gloves, her little legs were totally bare!

Read: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which has been on my to-read list for a few years now. I'm glad I got to it - it's a dazzling tour-de-force trip through a Dominican family's possibly cursed past and present.