I just watched Everything is Illuminated – based on the book of Jonathan Safran Foer. A book I found brilliant. Irreverent but serious. Funny and deeply respectful of the themes – pogroms and holocaust – which it handles. The movie works well enough, I think. The flashbacks are a bit hand-wavy, and Elijah Woods character is a bit extreme. The Alex character, however, is brilliant with his elaborate right-but-wrong english, goofy and trying to hard to be cool – but still a genuinly kind and likable person.

This is me waving shallowness in the air and shouting «hooray!» but, seriously, I get a lot more out of hollywoods treatment of human loss and betrayal than I did of the Royal Shakespear Companies.