Is the cast of Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters always running? It seems that way but that’s based only on a handful of scenes I’ve seen… Read More »PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS: What are they doing to Grover in a Downtown Vancouver Alley?
Continuum’s debut last night on Showcase was big. How big? 1.7 million Canadians tuned into the two airings. That makes it the #1 drama on cable this year (see press release)
Originally called Out of Time, Continuum is part sci fi, part police procedural about a future police officer Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols), who travels back in time from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, swept up in an escape by a group of terrorists — Liber8 — who plan to change the future from the past by targeting the corporations that will come to rule the world. Cameron impersonates a present-day police officer and ends up being partnered with detective Carlos Fonnegra (Victor Webster), who refuses to give her a weapon in this shootout with the terrorists, filmed in Victory Square this past January. Give her a weapon Fonnegra. She needs one.
Read More »CONTINUUM Debut is Highest-Rated Canadian Cable Drama of Year – Updated
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters crew turned SFU’s Segal Graduate Business School into First National Savings Bank of D.C. with some American flags and plaques for a scene of Logan Lerman’s Percy Jackson and Douglas Smith’s Tyson turning and running up Granville Street this morning.
After each take, Logan Lerman and Douglas Smith sauntered back to their marks to start all over again. At one point, Lerman playfully punched the wrapped-in-plastic camera lense. I didn’t get any good photographs of them running, this being Granville Street where buses get backed up with two or three waiting to turn right on Pender St., blocking all views of the action on the other side of the street. Plus dread-locked Smith seemed uncomfortable being so exposed to passersby and others with cameras. There will be more filming this afternoon but I’m not sure if it’ll be visible.
Percy and his friends head into the Sea of Monsters to find the mythical Golden Fleece to save Camp Half-Blood from attack by monsters in the second in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians franchise, a series of adventures based on Greek mythology.
Tuesday in Vancouver started out sunny but by the time I reached the Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters set in Robert Burnaby Park, a huge black cloud had covered the suburb of Burnaby and unleashed a torrential downpour. And I mean torrential — as in rain-bouncing-a-foot-high-off-the-pavement-of-Edmonds-Street torrential.
That didn’t deter a dozen fans sheltering under a tree next to the Camp Half-Blood set. Nor did the smoke machines which filled the air with their acrid smell and obscured the actors they came to see. When I stripped out most of the smoke from my photographs taken from about a soccer field away, I spotted Brandon T. Jackson and the dreadlocks of Douglas Smith at the back of the communal table in the mess hall. Alexandra Daddario must have been on set too and Logan Lerman could be the blue-shirted guy at the front of the communal table, judging from the stamina of the fans. They sure do love their Percy Jackson, as I’ve discovered from so many asking me for sightings of the actor Logan Lerman on set and downtown.
Percy Jackson and his friends head into the Sea of Monsters to find the mythical Golden Fleece and save Camp Half-Blood from attack by monsters in the second in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians franchise, a series of adventures based on Greek mythology.
In the upcoming Vancouver-as-Vancouver series Primeval: New World, primeval creatures enter our city through temporal anomolies, aka time portals, and terrorize our neighbourhoods. One such dinosaur suddenly appeared in the Olympic Village last Thursday, chasing a jogger east from the Olympic Village pedestrian bridge to the Creekside Community Centre in take after take. It was a treat to watch the guy-in-the-grey-skin-suit-carrying-a-sphere (Chuck Campbell) who will become the computer-generated-dinosaur (an Albertosauras) following this actor-jogger until the jogger suddenly stops, looks behind him, yells “Holy Shit” and leaps over a bench to try to get away. Now that’s acting. I have a feeling he doesn’t make it since the last scene of the day was a crime scene behind the green Dragon Boat portable trailers.
Read More »PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD 1×8 Dinosaur Chases Jogger in the Olympic Village – Updated
Supernatural has been tough on the Winchester brothers and their fans in season seven, taking away so much of what they love — starting with angel-turned-God Castiel (Misha Collins) in the second episode and then Bobby (Jim Beaver) before Christmas in the heart-breaking episode ten, where the fatally-shot father figure comes out of a coma briefly for a final few moments with his beloved “idjits”. Gradually though, these loved ones are returning, albeit in different forms. Castiel is back but sadly and hilariously cuckoo-bananas after too long in the cage with Lucifer. And Bobby is back but as a ghost and a potentially vengeful one at that.
So that leaves Dean’s beloved black Impala unaccounted for, missing since Halloween when two Leviathans took on the forms of Sam and Dean to drive acoss the country in their own black Impala staging a series of public mass killings in the appropriately-titled episode six, Slash Fiction.
Ever since the Impala went into hiding, I have been looking for it each time I found Supernatural filming on location, scouting the area only to discover yet another in the series of not-the-Impalas. I did enjoy the SMD license plate on the chocolate crap-car-of-the-week though. That was a nice touch.
And let’s not forget the bright orange monstrosity driven in last Friday’s There Will Be Blood.
But enough is enough. Producers assured Jensen Ackles that the Impala would be back and it seems they saved the best for last. At a season finale shoot a month ago, not far from the Supernatural studios, look what I found parked on the road.
It was one of three Impalas on set that day. Further down the road at the Nokia head office dressed as Dick Roman’s latest acquisition Sucrocorp, the second Impala Read More »Welcome Back Baby – Look What Returns for Supernatural’s Season Seven Finale – Updated
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.
Read More »Hunt for Holder on THE KILLING – Recap of Days 20 & 21
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.
Read More »SHOOT: FAIRLY LEGAL’s Judge Nicastro Ain’t Riding With Us!
Leven Rambin, last seen on the big screen as Glimmer in box office smash The Hunger Games, showed up on the set of Percy Jackson: Sea… Read More »PERCY JACKSON: SEA OF MONSTERS Films on Camp Half-Blood’s Greek Ampitheatre Set in Robert Burnaby Park
