WATCHING, READING, LISTENING TO

The staff of Entertainment Manchester reveal what's been entertaining them over the last seven days...

THE WRITER

WATCHING: The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. The Mummy franchise is one of the better Indiana Jones rip-offs and this second sequel to the 1999 original is a solidly entertaining piece of fluff - despite its flaws. Rachel Weisz replacement Maria Bello is a particular problem as she grapples unconvincingly with an English accent, while Mark Millar and Alfred Gough's screenplay is limp and uninspired. Still Brendan Fraser's on top charismatic form and there are enough wildly OTT action scenes to make this a worthwhile Friday night out.

READING: Goldfinger. Last summer I decided to work my way through all twelve of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and I‘m currently on book seven: Goldfinger. I've heard that it gets a little silly towards the end (although it's hard to see anything being dafter than the giant squid at the end of Doctor No), but I'm only half-way through so far and at the moment it's quite a low-key head-to-head between 007 and Goldfinger. They've met twice, first in a Miami card game and then for a few rounds of golf, and Fleming has built a taut, gripping tale of two men trying to get the better of each other. Let's hope it doesn't slip quite as badly as its reputation suggests.

LISTENING TO: I've had two albums on my iPod recently: Coldplay's Viva La Vida and The Dark Knight soundtrack. The former is an entertaining but frustrating listen. It certainly has the variation that X&Y lacked and there are some fantastic songs on there. But it feels like the band are trying too hard to defy their critics and I'd prefer them to go back to the maligned but more satisfying 'indie schmindie' of Parachutes. Meanwhile, James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer have created another corker for The Dark Knight. It incorporates the epic grandiosity they perfected on the Batman Begins soundtrack, but fittingly for something Joker-related, it possess a vicious twist that cuts through you like a certain criminal's famous pencil trick.

THE EDITOR

WATCHING: No thanks to Richard Branson, I've been watching The Wire and Dexter on FX, which has now disappeared from Virgin's cable TV just after the new series of both of them had started. Thanks for that, Dicky. Luckily my parents are now recording them off Sky for me. The most recent episode of The Wire was awesome, and while Dexter isn't quite up to the high standards of the first series, it's still better than most other things out there.

READING: Taking a break from Sherlock Holmes, I read Grace After Midnight, the autobiography of Felicia 'Snoop' Pearson from The Wire, where she plays, erm, 'Snoop'. She was born a crack baby in Baltimore, grew up on the streets and was sent to prison for killing a woman in self-defence before getting spotted by the guy who plays Omar on the show and getting hired to basically play herself. Not your usual actor's story, then.

LISTENING TO: Sometimes, you can forget just how great an album really is, and I 'rediscovered' Curtis by Curtis Mayfield this week when it came up on my iPod. Every single track is genius personified, with powerful socio-political lyrics, funky soulful pop hooks and such dense and varied instrumentation that new sounds appear to you every time you listen to it. The man really was a legend.