Two group pieces proved pleasantly athletic.
Johnson, a former security chief at the jail, proved pleasantly adept at clearing a room, obeying orders and keeping pace with my character.
Unfairly mismarketed as Reese Witherspoon's version of The Blind Side, Philippe Falardeau's The Good Lie (Entertainment One, 12) takes the "better than it looks" prize for the week: fears that this true story of Sudanese rufugees in Kansas will be derailed into white-saviour territory by Witherspoon's feisty southern employment counsellor prove pleasantly unfounded.
As Pulitzer-prize winning political commentator George Will once put it, "The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised".
Still, the production proved more pleasantly befuddling than aggressively confounding.
I was pleasantly surprised as this proves that Hungary's judiciary is still independent," Móra says.
What the menu called "Ninja seafood fritters," small warm pancakes laced with diced scallion and finely chopped seafood, proved a pleasantly doughy sponge for a sweet-sour ponzu sauce.
But the notoriously secretive former staffer has proved a pleasantly acerbic surprise.
– as a cradle of home-grown fundamentalism and a place that the book's back cover claims has "always acted as a litmus test for the state of racial tension in Britain", proves to be a quiet, pleasantly humdrum town.
Generally, if a diner's first thought when trying a new restaurant is, Is this a chain?, the subsequent meal proves to be, if a little boring, pleasantly safe — reassuring whether in New York, Kansas City, or Seattle.
