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Victory Square

CULT’s Stacey Farber Films in Downtown Vancouver’s Victory Square With Fake Palm Tree – Updated

Cult crew had to rent a fake palm tree and sweep up fall leaves in Victory Square today to film a scene set in Santa Monica. Vancouver’s endless summer came to an abrupt halt late last week so it will be tougher and chillier for Cult to fake southern California in the two-plus months left of filming for The CW series expected to air next year.

Cult is about an investigative journalist named Jeff (Matt Davis of The Vampire Diaries) searching for his brother whose disappearance may be linked to the fans of a horror TV series called Cult recreating what they’ve seen on the show. Jeff enlists the help of a production assistant (Jessica Lucas) from the show-within-a-show. “When the line between the imagined and reality is broken” is the meta tagline.

Tech person E.J. (Stacey Farber)

Read More »CULT’s Stacey Farber Films in Downtown Vancouver’s Victory Square With Fake Palm Tree – Updated

SHOOT: Youngest in RED WIDOW’s Mob Family Does Own Stunt at Vancouver’s Victory Square – Updated

Inspired by a popular Dutch TV show, midseason ABC series Red Widow is about a San Francisco mobster’s widow, Marta Walraven, forced to replace her husband as head of a crime syndicate after his murder. She does this to protect her three children, two of whom were on set today at Victory Square in downtown Vancouver. The youngest — Jakob Salvati as Boris Walraven — did an impressive stunt for such a young actor in take after take. A crew member drew a mark in the centre of Hamilton Street where he would walk to with his TV sister — Erin Moriarty as Natalie Walraven — and then stop as a motorcycle turns the corner in front of them. Moriarity keeps walking as Salvati stays put, looking up at the motorcycle as a red car turns the corner next. Moriarity returns and pulls Salvati to the sidewalk as a blue van turns behind them. On the first take, Moriarity pulled a little too hard and ended up dragging Salvati to the sidewalk. He wasn’t hurt and seemed to enjoy himself as they did the scene over and over again with different camera setups.

Read More »SHOOT: Youngest in RED WIDOW’s Mob Family Does Own Stunt at Vancouver’s Victory Square – Updated

BIG READ: Vancouver Productions Working the Comic-Con Craziness

Published July 9th, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

How’s this for Comic-Con craziness? Comic-Con tweeted Twilight fans today asking them not to start lining up outside the San Diego Convention Center three days before the convention starts on Thursday like they did last year. The anual geekfest doesn’t want them to erect another Camp Twilight tent city either. Any Twihard or TwiMom who tries to line up earlier than tomorrow or brings more than a chair and a sleeping bag with them, risks not being among the six thousand-plus lucky enough to get into the final vampires & werewolves panel at lunchtime on Thursday. If asked to leave, they’ll miss seeing exclusive footage from the mainly Vancouver-shot The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 and celebrity trio Kristin Stewart, Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner in person. Organizers have scheduled the final Twilight movie as the first official panel in marquee Hall H so that Twilight teens and their Moms can’t ruin Comic-Con like they have in the past.

[Update: A Twilight fan who’d been camping outside the San Diego Convention Center since Sunday was struck and killed by an SUV on Tuesday morning while rushing to cross the street to get back to the lineup which Comic-Con organizers were moving. Fellow fans are trying to organize a moment of silence in her honour during the Breaking Dawn 2 panel.]

Once the Twihards have gone home, Comic-Con is free to fly its geek flag until Sunday night, epitomized by what could be 2012’s hottest panel — the 10th Anniversary reunion of the cast (and creator) of space western Firefly, featuring Canada’s own browncoat Nathan “Captain Tightpants” Fillion. Is cult TV once again dominating big budget movies at Comic-Con with Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and The Big Bang Theory panels all in high demand too?

Maybe, maybe not. Iron Man 3 is a hot ticket, as are the Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures and Sony Pictures panels in Hall H. Who doesn’t want to see footage from The Hobbit, which just wrapped filming in New Zealand? Or get a first look at two other mainly Vancouver-shot movies: the upcoming Superman reboot Man of Steel starring Henry Cavill (seen below filming a shirtless green screen rescue scene in North Vancouver) as part of the Warner Bros. panel on Saturday afternoon and mysterious space station movie Elysium starring Matt Damon (link to first official photo) and Jody Foster as part of the Sony panel on Friday afternoon. Vancouver director Neill Blomkamp will be on hand with his stars to answer questions about the followup to his Oscar-nominated first feature District 9. It turns out Elysium is the name of a vast space station constructed by a company called Armadyne where the very rich live in the year 2159  (want-ads for Armadyne  popped up at last year’s Comic-Con, 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  Damon is Max, who goes up against Foster as hard-line government official Minister Delacourt [corrected], who will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the grandious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium in space (the mansion set below on Kent Hangar field could be on the space station).

Read More »BIG READ: Vancouver Productions Working the Comic-Con Craziness

BIG READ: THE KILLING Reveals Who Killed Rosie Larsen

Published June 18, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

After a two-season investigation into the murder of Seattle teen Rosie Larsen, The Killing finally revealed who did it on last night’s season finale. Our dynamic detective duo Sarah Linden and Stephen Holder had a tough time of it in the second season as they closed in on the killer: starting with Joel Kinnaman’s Holder finding out he’d been set up to frame Seattle mayoral candidate Darren Richond with a doctored toll booth photo and then getting beat up by thugs at the Wapi Eagle casino and left for dead, while Mireille Enos’s Linden ditched her fiance, was suspended, lost custody of her son, got bashed on the head at the casino and committed to a psych ward for a day.

On the lam from their own Seattle police force, Linden & Holder strike an on-the-spot deal with Mayor Lesley Adams on Day 24 of the investigation to let them pursue two suspects (whom Holder dubbed “Donny and Marie”) from the rival Richmond campaign: campaign manager Jamie Wright and campaign adviser Gwen Eaton. After an interview with Wright’s grandfather, Kinnaman’s Holder is subjected to one more indignity while walking back to his beater car in an alley off Victory Square. The dreaded Vancouver rain tower.

Of course it wouldn’t be The Killing if the leads didn’t get completely soaked from time to time but I bet Joel Kinnaman regrets joking to EW magazine last year that one of the privileges of going to Swedish acting school is doing two months of rain tower. He was doused in take after take by a spectacular deluge, so spectacular I had to strip out some of the fake rain from my photographs so that you could see him.

Yet the second season has been nowhere near as damp or morose as the first thanks to Kinnaman’s Holder, who has single-handedly turned The Killing from a dead serious drama into an occasional dramedy. Apart from last night’s finale of course, which turned out to be nothing but sombre for Linden & Holder. Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know who killed Rosie Larsen.

Holder’s funniest moment had to be the one on Day 22 of the investigation when the motormouth provided a distractionRead More »BIG READ: THE KILLING Reveals Who Killed Rosie Larsen

CONTINUUM Debut is Highest-Rated Canadian Cable Drama of Year – Updated

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

BIG READ: Vancouver Cop-From-The-Future Series CONTINUUM Debuts This Sunday

Published May 24, 2012 on Vancouver is Awesome

How did Continuum creator Simon Barry conceive of a Vancouver in 2077 which has become North America’s financial centre in a world where corporations have taken over failed governments? By reading and watching the news, of course. He calls it more science fact than science fiction. In this dystopian future, rising seas from global climate change have wiped out the east coast but Vancouver is protected by a dam across English Bay.

So why hasn’t the Lions Gate Bridge been dealt with in 2077?, joked one of the Continuum panel at Vancouver Fan Expo in April. Is the city all bike lanes in the future?, joked a fan during the Q&A, prompting Barry to respond that there are no cars at all in his future Vancouver. And apparently no horses either.

Continuum, originally called Out of Time in his pilot script, is part sci fi, part police procedural about a future police officer Kiera Cameron, played by Rachel Nichols, who travels back in time from Vancouver in the year 2077 to Vancouver in the year 2012, chasing a group of terrorists who plan to change the future from the past by targeting the corporations that will come to rule the world. But are they really terrorists? Perhaps they are freedom fighters?

One such corporation is fictional Exotrol, where Continuum staged an Occupy Vancouver-style protest at CBC Vancouver in mid-March for an upcoming episode. Rachel Nichols and Victor Webster, as her 2012 Vancouver police detectuve partner Carlos Fonnegra, arrived on the scene in an unmarked blue police car.

Read More »BIG READ: Vancouver Cop-From-The-Future Series CONTINUUM Debuts This Sunday

THE KILLING – Recap of Days Seventeen to Nineteen of the Investigation

Linden & Holder. The dynamic detective duo are back together for days seventeen to nineteen of The Killing investigation into the death of Seattle teenager Rosie Larsen. And it’s wonderful to watch and listen to them. I got to see quite a bit of Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman filming these scenes inside lead homicide detective Sarah Linden’s silver car in various spots around Vancouver-as-Seattle’s downtown and downtown eastside, but couldn’t hear any of their often funny dialogue.

Day Sixteen ends with Linden & Holder staking out the Larsen residence and Holder attempting to explain his actions to her: “Linden, I thought the [Darren] Richmond photo was legit. Kay. I mean Gil saved my life. I had 10 days in when I met him.” Linden is having none of it: “I don’t care. We’re in the middle of a shit storm because of you.” They follow an S.A. Larsen truck to Janek’s restaurant. Holder points out they’re not Stan Larsen’s guys: “They don’t got the overalls.”

The next day, the detective duo meet up with a mob expert with the FBI, who shows them a photo of the body of a man hands-bound with a single shot to his head in the trunk of a car and tells them that it was Stan Larsen who whacked him. Back at the police station, it’s another fun food conversation with Linden asking Holder: “Mmmmm is that bacon?” He replies: “Nah this is ham, eggs and sausage.” Linden: “What happened your whole lacto ova vegan thing?” Holder: “Nothing. I’m just ready to embrace meat again.” And then after a while, Holder brainstorms: “Maybe Rosie’s BFF knows about tattoo boy?”

After first stopping in to see the widow of the man killed by Stan Larsen, Linden & Holder go to Rosie’s school to ask her BFF, played by Vancouver’s own Kacey Rohl, what she knows about the Boy with the Manga Tattoo. She confirms seeing this boy hanging around Rosie’s place but that’s all.

They go to a juvenile hall to question the tattoo artist and discover the boy was a foster kid, Alexi Giffords, who lived three blocks from the Larsens. And then onto the stakeout scenes I saw being filmed in Strathcona. It was a long one and Holder got on Linden’s nerves to the point she made him get out of the car and left.

I couldn’t help but laugh. He was so Holder: “Yo I gotta piss. So Rosie likes bad boys like her father.” Linden doesn’t buy it but Holder presses on: “It’s in the DNA…sins of the fathers.” Linden: “Did you read that in O magazine?”

Then he teases her about the FBI Mob guy: “Oh snap, Linden rocked a booty call. Dial 1-900-Linden.” Linden replies: “It’s not even enough numbers.”  But when Holder starts pushing her Foster kid buttons she snaps. He reminds her she was a runner in her day and she gives him a warning look but he continues on: “I’m just making conversation since we’re wasting our time anyway.” Linden barks: “You’re right this is a waste of time. Get out!” Holder: “Come on Linden. What am I supposed to do out here?”. Linden: “Your job.” Holder: “Least we’re back to normal.” They are.

Linden goes to see Regi to ask to read a file on an ex-foster kid. The Regi and Linden talking on the dock scenes were filmed in late January at the Quayside Marina in Yaletown. Here are my photographs of Mireille Enos and Annie Corley being battered by wind and rain on their way to set and on set.

Meanwhile Holder is taking a piss when Alexi returns home. He chases him but can’t manage the fence. And Linden gets a peek at the file which tells her Alexi is the son of the man Stan Larsen whacked.

Read More »THE KILLING – Recap of Days Seventeen to Nineteen of the Investigation