Longwhitecloudadventures: The Hobbit

"The Hobbit" has taken New Zealand in general and Wellington in particular by the proverbial storm. International visitors are ostensibly streaming into the capital city for the premier of this long-awaited movie and stars (both of this cinematic piece and other related and unrelated films) were primping and preening themselves for the spectacular 'dance of the red carpet' which happened yesterday - basically all day!

The Hobbit plane has been used to ferry the rich and famous and even did a 'fly over' at 1000ft (which evidently is not that spectacular when one considers that a SAA boeing flew over Ellis Park MUCH lower than that with one or other World Cup Rugby Event) - Needless to say - everything and everyone kiwi has been sucked into the excitement of it all and the newspapers and television are Hobbit flavoured!

The Embassy Theatre in Wellington has had this amazing statue erected beside the hobbit doorway and we watched the huge and incredibly heavy piece being lifted and lowered into place on TV news a couple of days ago. There were some concerns about the weight of the thing being a little more than anticipated, but in the end the lift and lower went without a hitch.

A few thousand people apparently lined the red carpet - all hundreds of metres of it - and some were lucky enough to get autographs from the stars.

Sir Peter Jackson - movie mogul, director of the film and fiercely kiwi had plenty of time on the box and although he appeared a tad windswept, he always looks windswept so the windy weather didn't affect his 'do' at all! We were not all that impressed with the 'tacky' takkies! - I guess when one is as famous and can tack 'sir' onto the front of one's name, one can wear the tackiest takkies one wants to and nobody can have anything to say about it!