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SHOOT: METALLICA THROUGH THE NEVER Stages Big Riot Scene Near Burrard Station in Downtown Vancouver

Metallica Through the Never (Working Title: CHAOS 3D) is big. A huge production for a concert movie. Crew made more smoke near Burrard Station in downtown Vancouver than thousands of tokers at a 4:20 rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery. And the size of their smoke machines (see below) made TV series Supernatural’s seem puny. All the smoke, lights, artfully constructed debris and overturned vehicles formed a backdrop for a riot scene that will be part of Metallica’s concert movie. The heavy metal band already performed the concert part in Rogers Arena for three nights in a row. Now they’re doing the movie part all over downtown in overnight shoots in Arch Alley near Victory Square, a couple of Burrard intersections and now on Dunsmuir near the Burrard station. Last night’s riot had 400 extras as rioters and riot police, things on fire and riders on horses. The horses — who we’ve seen on screen galloping in Golden Ears Park for Once Upon a Time — seemed a little spooked by the smoke, the noise and all the spectators. I’d hope to see a stunt of a horse dragging a rider through the scene but imagine that was filmed much later on when no one was about. The Metallica movie is expected to wrap sometime Sunday.

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ARROW Turns Downtown Heritage Bank Building Into Starling Trust Bank for Robbery Scenes in Ep. 1×06

Upcoming CW series Arrow started its day today filming scenes of robbers entering the rear of a downtown heritage building and former bank at 330 West Pender Street turned into Starling Trust Bank. Then shortly after morning rush hour, Vancouver Police closed both east-bound lanes in the 300 block at the front of the building so that Arrow could film scenes of prop police cruisers arriving at the robbery and Roger Cross (Continuum’s cold-blooded Liber8 killer Travis) as a police officer with a megaphone telling those inside the bank to come out with their hands up. The bank hostages emerge wearing white playing card masks. Are the robbers among the hostages? Police then storm the building. Arrow wrapped the arrival of police scene around 2 p.m., the lanes re-opened and production moved inside the building to film the robbery.

What do these bank robbery scenes remind you of? The Dark Knight? Or maybe Inside Man with Denzel Washington and Clive Owen? Arrow has big aspirations for a new TV series but from what I’ve seen of filming, it will meet them.

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What Neill Blomkamp’s Upcoming Sci-Fi Film ELYSIUM is About

So we have some scoop on what director Neill Blomkamp’s latest sci-fi project Elysium is about, after Collider.com got its hands on an advance sceening ticket which had a detailed plot synopsis. I’d worked out some of the story last summer during the film’s three-month shoot in Vancouver, which I wrote about in my YVRShoots series, but there is still a lot we don’t know.

Elysium turns out to be the name of the vast, luxurious space station constructed by Armadyne where the very rich live in the year 2159  (want-ads for Armadyne popped up at last year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, the start of a viral campaign for the movie). The rest of us– the 99% if you will — live on the over-populated, ruined planet Earth below. A bald, buff Matt Damon is Max (link to first official photo), who takes on the mission to bring equality to these polarized classes. He’s going up against Jody Foster as Minister Delacourt [corrected], a hard-line govenment official, who will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the grandiose lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium in space (Foster returned for reshoots this spring but not Damon).

Since Matt Damon was seen filming scenes in blue workmen’s garb [corrected] last summer at Vancouver Technical School, Riverview Hospital and out in Delta, could this be how Max is forced to take on the mission? And could this be how Max will save his own life? The Grouse Grinder also spent weeks filming at a mansion facade and temporarily-planted tropical garden on the vast gravel field at Kent and Boundary in Vancouver. The blue rectangles are thought to be a spaceship, the fake palm trees have no fronds, the small piles of sand seem to represent a manmade beachs and huge blue screens ringed the set. Interior scenes were filmed at the other end of Vancouver in a real-life mansion at 51st and Macdonald behind Jurassic Park-sized hedges. I’m now wondering if this mansion is on the Elysium space station, not on Earth as I originally thought.

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Hunt for Holder on THE KILLING – Recap of Days 20 & 21

Poor Holder. He so wants to be good at something. Football. Breakdancing. Turns out he’s a good cop but there’s not much reward in that on The Killing.

Last week we discovered that the person shadowing our detective duo Linden & Holder is none other than Wapi Eagle Casino security chief Roberta Drays. A rattled Linden seeks refuge for her and her son Jack at Holder’s apartment, where he cooks them some breakfast burritos and Linden finds a lead that takes her to the Wapi Indian Reservation on Day 20 of the investigation. She tells Holder to check out the Wapi Eagle casino. Uh-oh. That spells trouble.

Linden has a run-in on the reservation, some of which was filmed on Tsleil Waututh Nation land in North Vancouver, with Wapi Casino Chief Nicole Jackson who tells her, “Anything can happen on this land, detective. You’ve been warned.” Jackson and her two thugs escort her off . Holder, meantime, is chatting up a blackjack dealer and female and male hookers in the casino and making himself all kinds of conspicuous trying to get access to the mysterious under-construction 10th floor. Tribal police greet him at the elevator and handcuff him even though he tells them he’s a cop. “Not here you ain’t,” one says. They take him to a remote spot in the woods where Jackson and Drays are waiting. Jackson then calls Linden on Holder’s phone and holds it up so she can hear the Wapi thugs kicking and beating her partner while he screams.

Last night’s episode opened with Linden desperate to find Holder. She requests a police search team but is told it has to go up the chain of command. She takes her son Jack back to Holder’s apartment where she gets a call saying Lt. Carlson nixed the search party. Linden leaves Jack and storms into Carlson’s office, shouting at him about how bad it will look when Internal Affairs find out he did nothing while a cop died “out in the field”.

Linden returns to the reservation, encountering a road block in the dark. “Seattle police don’t have jurisdiction here,” casino security chief Drays says. But Carlson has taken heed of Linden’s warning and shows up with a search team telling Linden they have until dawn.

Officers find Holder’s Pez dispenser near a dump, which they search in the daylight hours of Day 21 of the investigation. That fake dump was set up on a field in Tynehead Park in Surrey in late February. I watched Mireille Enos as Linden and the police extras turn over fake garbage with a Seattle fan who’d driven up that morning to see some Vancouver filming of her show.

A little girl points and Linden looks around up at the woods. The team runs up the hill in Tynehead Park to a bigger field where they’d filmed earlier in the day. There the search dogs find a bloodied and beaten Holder lying at the foot of a tree.

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SHOOT: FAIRLY LEGAL’s Judge Nicastro Ain’t Riding With Us!

Last Friday night’s Fairly Legal episode on USA Network featured this wonderful scene of Gerald McRaney as Judge Nicastro and Sarah Shahi as Kate Reed fighting their way through transit workers extras after a contract dispute goes array, filmed at the south side of the Vancouver Art Gallery (a former courthouse) on a sunny afternoon in mid-February. As you can see, Judge Nicastro loses his temper and punches a protester near the bottom. And they did it all over again in take after take, with Shahi really getting into it. Between camera setups, the protester extras lounged in the sun with their signs, an odd sight for passersby who did double takes, wondering if this was yet another real protest in Vancouver.

Meatloaf, aka Martin Oday, played the union’s leader Charles McKay and he may have been on set at the Vancouver Art Gallery but I don’t think I photographed him. A pity. I’d love to have seen him.

We’ll have to wait several weeks to see this episode, Kiss me Kate, broadcast on Showcase in Canada.

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SEVENTH SON Starts Filming on its Mega Medieval Castle Set – Updated

After months of construction, dark fantasy movie Seventh Son started filming today on its gigantic medieval castle set at Kent Hangar field in Vancouver. In addition to the huge wooden set, I counted eight generators and several giant blue screens attached to a wall of forty-two stacked shipping containers (crew had turned one of the bottom containers into a makeshift props department).

Seventh Son is about an apprentice Tom (Ben Barnes) — the seventh son of a seventh son — to the County Spook (Jeff Bridges) who has imprisoned an evil witch Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore). A young girl tricks Tom into helping the witch escape. I don’t know who was on set today because I could only see a sliver of the filming through a gap in the blue screens, revealing an interior market and real horses tethered to wooden rails.

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