I don't feel I can tell you much about Changeling until closer to release next week, except that it's a grim but rewarding watch. And that Clint Eastwood was right when he said Angelina Jolie's looks get in the way of our appreciation of her dramatic talents. She is harrowingly good as Christine Cummings, a single mother in the 1920s, whose nine-year-old son goes missing, and who has a, different, strange boy foisted on her by the corrupt and autocratic LAPD. But even in the most emotive scenes you - I - get distracted by Jolie's smoky eyes and scarlet, pillowy lips.

It's probably not helped by the fact that I saw Jolie immediately afterwards up close at the press conference for the film. Well, I say press conference, but I preferred to think of it as a tete to tete in which we just started to get to know each other. If I sound as if I've lost my reason slightly where Jolie - well, I call her Angie, obviously - is concerned, I at least have the majority of the male sex, and much of the female gender, behind me. She is indecently beautiful, but also oddly normal: quite tall, whip thin (obviously) but with a reassuring embonpoint, and seemingly far less full of guile and wariness than the average visiting star. She chatted with me - us - about her kids, and Brad, and oh my God, her blue eyes brimmed with tears when she told us how she based her performance as Christine on her late mother, Marcheline (known as 'marshmallow', she said, "because she was so soft, except where her kids were concerned"). I wish I'd proffered her the (clean) handkerchief in my pocket. I could have dried Angelina Jolie's tears. Instead, I asked her how she was feeling in herself after an emotional two years (giving birth, losing her mother) and was rewarded with a dazzling smile and a "thank you!" that made my stomach lurch with clotted longing. Then I spoiled it by asking about her grief-related weight loss on the movie (she looks almost scrawny on screen - and I was writing a health-page piece about her). She looked affronted, then hurt, and the administrator shut me down, and I felt a rush of hot shame and apologised. But at the end of the press conference, the female journalist next to me whispered: "You were right. She does look thin."

Okay, sorry - the Bond quiz did appear in the paper, but only online readers of this blog got the full set of questions. And the correct answers, as I'm sure many of you worked out, were all 'c' (though I took pains to make some of the a's and b's potentially credible).

Next week I hope to give you some early views on Changeling (and also what Angelina Jolie looks like in the flesh), but today I went to see Zak (300) Effron introduce around 30 minutes of footage from Watchmen. Plans have been afoot to film this seminal graphic novel, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, ever since it first appeared in the 80s, but foundered on the story's complexity. Effron's footage wasn't entirely finished (there's some CGI tweaking to be done) but from what I saw, especially the opening ten minutes, look superb. For those who aren't comic bores like me, the story posits an alternative America where Nixon stayed president long into a rapidly-heating cold war, and where costumed heros, in the guise of two-fisted crimefighters in the 1940s, and a later group of similarly athletic but non-superhuman beings in the 1970s and 80s. Apart, that is, from Dr Manhattan, a scientist who gains near-godlike powers after a lab accident (this, as Snyder pointed out, often happens, and should be used to encourage kids to study science). After a brutal pre-credits murder, the credits brilliantly kaleidoscope much of Watchmen's backstory, putting it too in the context of Kennedy's assassination, the Moon Landing, even Studio 54.

Snyder fought to the film adult too - if Hollywood could make a picture that could be seen by everyone from five years old to 80, he said, that's the only picture they'd make, and the studios hate anything 18-rated. But Watchmen, he promised, will have "lots of really cool sexx" and violence. We didn't see much of the former, but Snyder executes the latter with awesome flair.

Elsewhere this week, I visited the new Charlotte St branch of the Clapham Japanese restaurant Tsunami (how time passes - that word was taboo two years ago) and can heartily recommend the sashimi and tempura the sliced scollops with chili and smelt egg, the saki and the excellent service. Only the seafood Toban - a clay pot dish which is supposedly a speciality - disappointed. Oh, and the Tea Tree ice cream: it just didn't taste right. The room is nice too, although the way the lights sometimes dim and brighten sometimes make you feel you've come to the end of a school disco. It cost around £50 a head, and was well worth it.

Table Manners, one third of Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquest trilogy, gripped me with the same buttock-clenching sense of mortification it did when I was a child. I still can't find it in my to feel sorry for the (admittedly) tragic lives of this upper class idiots, any more than I did when I was a youngster embarrassed by my own bourgeois upbringing. Beyond my dislike of the material though: Stephen Mangan is excllent as Norman, with fine work too from Amanda Root and the ever-watchable Paul Ritter. Fascinating too to see the Old Vic transformed into an auditorium.

finally, don't bother going out East to the 02 to see MOnkey, Journey to the West. It's a ncie idea and all, but this half-animated collision between pop sensibility and Chinese opera simply doesn't work. I just think Damon Albarn is too much of a sacred cow now for most critics to say so. The organisation at the 02 was also surprisingly shoddy - bars closed, people stumbling in the dark for their seats, and technical problems, including one poor sod on wries who was left dangling on high long after he was supposed to have been winched offstage. Pity, because I like a lot of Albarn's work, and I am an unashamed fan of hsi Monkey/Gorillaz collaborator Jamie Hewlett (see confessions of comic-nerdery above). See you next week.