~Food for thought this Earth Day.
~The awkwardness of families and politics.
~I’ll be making this again this week, just in time for summer.
~I’m a complete sucker for good branding so when I saw this cat food at the supermarket and it made me laugh, I knew it was coming home with me. It’s not cheap but it is real. My cat seemed to love it and she’s finicky. Then again, she’s a cat.
~What 39 celebrities wore to meet the Queen.
~Black Earth Rising on Netflix. Kate Ashby is a thirty something Rwandan Tutsi rescued as a little girl by human rights lawyer Eve Ashby, who raises her in London. When Eve decides to prosecute a Tutsi general who helped end the Rwandan genocide in the mid 1990’s, Kate is outraged. What follows is a complex and ultimately heartbreaking story of cruelty, evil and hope. Michaela Coel is absolutely mesmerising as Kate, exploding with her righteous anger, and John Goodman, who stars as friend and fellow lawyer to Eve is, as always, a pure joy to watch. It can be pretty clunky and a little difficult to follow at times and it’s a touch hard hitting on the symbolism. There were a handful of times in the first couple of episodes that we debated whether or not to continue, but I’m glad we did because it does become a fascinating tale filled with lots of twists and turns, and the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide is eye opening. It’s directed by Hugo Blick of The Honorable Woman and while Black Earth Rising does bear some hallmarks of that show, it doesn’t quite match the brilliance.
~The Widow on Amazon Prime. If you’re feeling under the weather and in need of an engaging but nothing-too-difficult-to-follow show, then this might just be the ticket. Kate Beckinsale turns in a perfectly decent performance as Georgia Wells whose husband died in an African airplane crash, three years earlier. Or did he? When she believes she has seen him in riot footage in Kinshasa, she heads to the Democratic Republic of Congo to track him down. Fortunately Georgia is an ex-army captain, which allows her to play the action hero with a modicum of plausibility and Alex Kingston and Charles Dance, always brilliant, both, succeed in adding some heft to what otherwise is a fairly lightweight show. It bears some similarities to Black Earth Rising, an African backdrop dense with war and political conspiracies, without the full complexity and heaviness of that show, which may or may not be a bad thing.
