Seen, Heard & Read over the (very nice, thank you) Break.

Seen:

The second Stuey from Shortland Street movie in as many years.... Torque! (Toshue!).

Large swathes of the Lord of the Rings DVDs (in bizarre order following the vagueries of a 13 year old's reading habits), so that we watched the first half of the Fellowship, then the Return of the King, and then the 2nd half of the Two Towers. It's still got it though.

Secret Window - entirely predictable thriller with Johnny Depp. Based on a Stephen King story, so you know the drill. Nice & atmospheric though.

Delovely. Already covered this a while ago, it's nice. And someone got it for Christmas.

Mr & Mrs Smith. Loud & flashy, not as good as I'd heard. Too loud & flashy really, except for the witty one-liners, which were muted, so I missed most of them.

Large chunks of Season 1 of the Sopranos, which someone also got for Christmas.

And aside from watching my brief appearance on TV3 news (although they filmed lots more than that, and inexplicably excluded my negotiations for my own gardening show, and my "method" queries about what my motivation should be for me to base my performance on, and the lengthy sequence of the dog barking at the cameraman - I'm hoping she'll appear in a future story about vicious dogs), we saw NO TV AT ALL.

Read:

The Understudy, by David Nicholls. Apparently Nicholls is a writer from the TV series Cold Feet, and this book is very amusing as you'd expect from such a CV. It's a bit like William Brandt's The Book of the Film of the Story of my Life, but perhaps not quite as good. Although that might be my parochialism showing through. And instead of a truly hopeless film maker, it concerns a truly hopeless actor, the titular understudy in fact. Stephen C McQueen (no relation) is understudy to mega star Josh Harper in a West End play about Lord Byron (Mad, Bad, and dangerous to Know). One day, the ultra vain Harper invites Stephen to a party and it's not until he gets there that Stephen realises he's not a guest, but the bar man. So he gets pissed, steals Harper's BAFTA award & Star Wars memorabila, chunders, and falls in love woth Harpers wife. Things go downhill from there. Not a single character is a call girl from Levin.

Zorro: The Novel, by Isabel Allende. Finally finished this, and it is great. It's the backstory to the real Zorro (well, not the real one, since he's fiction, I mean Anthony Hopkins' character rather than the Banderas pretender). An origin story if you like, Zorro Begins. It's also nearly as much the story of his mute blood brother, Bernardo, telling us why Bernardo is mute (mostly), how they were raised, and trained, and chronicles their youthful exploits ranging between California, Barcelona, the Caribbean, and back to California again. And as a bonus, the characters are all flawed humans, if somewhat heroic. I look forward to the miovie of this one. "Out of the Night, When the full moon is bright... Comes a horseman known as Zorro.... this bold renegade carves a Zee with his blade... a Zee that stands for Zorro...". That's the theme to the old Disney made Zorro TV series, starring Guy (Lost in Space) Williams. And that series was pretty much on the money. Except that Bernardo was too old & not as dashing, but hey, they can't get everything right.

No Opportunity Wasted, by Phil Keoghan. This... is one of those short inspirational books written by the Kiwi who started in (I think) Spot On, and went on to host & produce many successful reality TV series, and appear regularly on Oprah. Pretty much what you'd expect. Light & breezy & enthusiastic.

Heard:

Album of the break was the She Will Have her Way album, featuring a bunch of Kiwi & Ocker women covering Neil & Tim Finn songs. We're not sick of it yet, and the personal picks for best tracks go to Brooke Frazer's amazing rendition of Seven Worlds Collide (just astonishing!), and Nathalie Imbruglia's Pineapplehead.

Honourable mention goes to Shakira's new song, Don't Bother. Which we all hate, and features the inspirational lines "I'm really a cat. But I'll file my nails for you. And move to a communist country". Are we hearing this right? And we caught the video last night... which is an improvement in that it has a wet negligee in the shower scene. And let's face it, is there any music video which could not be improved by the inclusion of a wet negligee in the shower scene? But really, Don't Bother.

Also.... please note, I'm feeling really lazy about hyperlinks, you know how to use Google, I'm sure.