Weeks of Entertainment

What happened to July??? The vacation was one thing, but I came back to a heavy workload! Woof... So there's quite a few back installments in this.

Film: The new Star Trek movie, which I quite enjoyed. The new Lone Ranger which I enjoyed, too: though I realize it's a problematic film in many ways that final train-fight sequence is brilliant. Monsters University which was very amusing (though I do think you need to have seen the first one, and you need to see them in release order). Still Mine, an amazingly wonderful film. James Cromwell and Genevieve Bujold give brilliant, restrained, achingly beautiful performances.

DVD: Miss Fisher's Mysteries, an Australian tv series based on Kerry Greenwood's novels (which I have not read) about a 1920s "lady detective" in Melbourne. The show is very well-done, consistently entertaining. The last of Scarecrow and Mrs King, still holding up well. Men in Black 3 which, though I'm not prepared to say it was better than the first one, was consistently good. An old Charlie Chan (Dark Alibi), which had a tricky solution but one of those painful-to-watch turns by Mantan Moreland as Birmingham Brown, Charlie's chauffeur. His incomplete sentences routine was funny, but you (I) spend half the movie cringing, half thinking 'at least he had a pretty good job', and half contemplating the state of black characters in 30s and 40s movies...

TV: Endeavour - I like it. I like it a lot. Shaun Evans is fantastic as the young Morse, and I really enjoy the relationship he has with his boss. Futurama - this season is weak, but weak Futurama is better than strong lots of other shows.

Read: A bunch of cozies over vacation - the Books by the Bay series, which get progressively better; the Nina Quinn series, which was quite entertaining even though the protagonist was sometimes very annoying; the same author's Lucy Valentine books, which are very slight but amusing; and the same author's River of Dreams trilogy, of which the second two books weren't worth reading - they were essentially the first one over again with a different sister; Beginning with a Bash, a complicated little mystery indeed; Poison, Perennials, and a Poltergeist which was harmless if not captivating;  Grace Takes Off, the latest Manor House mystery and a good entry in the series; Duck the Halls, the next-to-latest Meg Landon, which maintains the series' high standards; and Foal Play, which has no excuse for the name and which stars the dumbest protagonist I've run across in a long time. Also some non-cozies, starting with several books in the Wool universe, the Greatfall trilogy, which is damned good.  The Cuckoo's Calling, which I had actually bought before finding out it was by JK Rowling (though that made me move it up the list), and which I enjoyed very much indeed; Neil deGrasse Tyson's memoir The Sky is Not the Limit, which is excellent; and another Kindle serial, Indexing, which has me very impatiently waiting for the next chapter. I began the well-reviewed Last Summer of the Camperdowns and quit around a third of the way through; it's just not working for me.