The Week in Entertainment

Film: Maleficent, which I loved almost unreservedly. Gorgeous to look at, with a tremendous performance by Angelina Jolie and strong supporting performances especially by Elle Fanning in the thankless role of Aurora and Sam Riley as Diaval, the crow.

DVD: Some Charlie Chans with Sidney Toler (Dangerous Money, The Trap) and a (The Chinese Ring), with a horrible Roland Winters debuting as Chan in a recycled "Mr Wong" script (ill-adapted - not that they tried - to the changes in world politics brought about between 1939 and 1947)  that featured Warren Douglas and Louise Curry as third-rate Spencer/Tracy knockoffs and included such (added) gems as "woman not made for heavy thinking but should always decorate scene like blossom of plum" and a romance that features that cop manhandling the reporter, not to mention cuffing her to a chair. We cleansed our palate with The Black Camel, a lovely early Warner Oland one with Charlie still a cop on the Honolulu police force.

Read: Continuing with Parting the Waters - I'm now deep in 1961 and the Freedom Riders and the Albany Movement and it's so hard to read about it all, though the book is definitely well written. So I took a couple of breaks and read a Hamish Macbeth mystery, Death of Yesterday, and a couple of short stories from Matthew Johnson's brilliant (well, so far it is!) collection Irregular Verbs.