The Peregrinations of a Wandering Mind

I am excited by the return of all my favorite cable series for the summer:

• Psych
• White Collar
• The Closer
• Friday Night Lights
• Merlin
• Burn Notice
• True Blood
• and favorite of them all, Eureka

A question: Does anybody else think this season of Burn Notice has lost a step or two this season?

Just finished watching the final series of The Tudors. I was kind of hoping they were going to continue with the reigns of the children, but I thought the final episodes were especially well done, and they set up so well Mary Tudor’s growing isolation and religious mania, that I think they are losing a compelling dramatic opportunity that has been rarely explored in other than a cartoonish way. Imagine making Bloody Mary human and even sympathetic!

As for movies I have hit a few of  the blockbusters–Robin Hood, The Clash of the Titans, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, and today (7/1/10) The Last Airbender (see blog review), but mostly I’ve been sticking to DVDs. I think my favorite in the last 3-4 months was The Young Victoria with Emily Blount, but I did enjoy the new interpretation of the Robin Hood legend by Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe. In an interesting way they have tied together both ands of the legend of Robin as a yeoman commoner and as a nobleman wronged.

As for Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, at the time not having read the books but strangely intrigued by the trailer, I thought Chris Columbus outdid himself. Not falling into the trap he fell into with the first two Harry Potter movies, being slavishly faithful, he created an equally believable and engaging world, while maintaining the fast-pace and sustained tension the genre demands. I have since read the series, and found that for the first of Rick Riordan’s series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I prefer the movie.

Other DVD films I’ve liked this spring: An Education, Leap Year, Alice in Wonderland, When in Rome, Bright Star and Invictus. Through instant watching: Avatar: The Last Airbender.