Once Upon a Time’s press release for its San Diego Comi-Con 2012 panel confirms what we’d already guessed: Magic is coming to real-world Storybrooke (played by… Read More »Magic is Coming to ONCE UPON A TIME’s Storybrooke (and Steveston)
Vancouver Canadians fans who stayed after the game in Nat Bailey Stadium a year ago to play extras in a Psych series baseball episode can see themselves in the crowd tonight on Global TV.
Psych’s fifth epsiode — Dead Man’s Curve Ball — of the sixth season is about the mysterious death of the fictional minor league Santa Barbara Seabirds’ hitting coach, with Danny Glover (of Lethal Weapon fame), Michael Trucco (Fairly Legal/Battlestar Galactica) and Baseball Hall of Famer and 1996 World Series Champ Wade Boggs as guest stars. James Roday’s “psychic” detective Shawn Spencer infiltrates the team as a hitting coach and Dule Hill’s Burton “Gus” Buster as Sammy the Seagull, a big white bird mascot with giant yellow webbed feet (looking very much like Mascot Hall of Famer, the San Diego Chicken).
Trained tap dancer Dule Hill performs some tap dance moves in a routine that doesn’t please the fake fans but ends with him face down on a platform near the field doing the worm as his giant yellow feet flop up and down.
Michel Trucco plays the Santa Barbara Seabirds catcher and a childhood idol of Shawn Spencer’s.
Read More »PSYCH Plays Ball in Nat Bailey Stadium for 6×05 Tonight on Global TV – Updated
Who knew at a Falling Skies location shoot in Vancouver last November that we were seeing the last of John Pope’s Harley, destroyed by a beamer that night in a scene for last week’s second season premiere? Or that this could be our first and last chance to see a 2nd Mass resistance attack on the alien invaders using motorbikes?
Falling Skies crew turned the warehouses along Western Street near Pacific Central Station into a post-alien-invasion disaster zone dressed with ash, dried leaves, debris and overturned burnout cars for a scene of Colin Cunningham’s John Pope on his Harley rounding a corner from Northern Street onto Western Street, followed by new series regular Ryan Robbins’s Tector on a second bike. 2nd Mass’s new insurgent strategy was to ride the bikes fullout to draw fire from the aliens, so that the rest of the fighters could target the exposed Mechs and Skitters. I spotted the heads of Sarah Carter’s Maggie and Drew Roy’s Hal above the cab of the pickup truck as it headed towards watching fans on Western Street, and when they cleared out I spied Connor Jessup’s Ben and Dylan Authors’s Jimmy (someone I never thought I’d be lucky enough to see on location) in the back of the truck too. This must be the spot where the Harley was destroyed by the aliens, who’d learned to hone in on the heat of an engine. Sarah Carter’s Maggie and Drew Roy’s Hal started running in our direction carrying their prop guns, as if escaping from some kind of explosion, followed by the others, including Peter Sinkoda’s Dai and Mpho Koaho’s Anthony. I’m not familiar with the actors who play Beserkers yet.
I wish I’d stayed on in the bitter cold that night to see the beamer explosion with its blinding white flash and noise, which scared cast and crew alike, who hadn’t expected anything of that magnitude. I also missed the filming of a scene of Colin Cunningham’s John Pope shooting his gun at the sky next to his Harley in flames. Poor man.
But I can’t really complain much since Colin Cunnigham, the star of this long night shoot, took time out to come over and talk to us early on, posing for photos with everyone who wanted one.
Colin Cunningham and Ryan Robbins round the corner from Northern Street onto Western Street on motorcycles.
Read More »Farewell to John Pope’s Harley, Destroyed in FALLING SKIES Season 2 Premiere -Updated
Upcoming sci-fi series Primeval: New World has a little more than three weeks of filming left before wrapping its first season here, so it seems like a good time to revisit the Coal Harbour location shoots that will feature in its series premiere.
Andrew-Lee Potts, aka Conner Temple from the original British series Primeval, flew in this past March to guest star on the first episode of the Vancouver spinoff. From what I saw of a scene at Harbour Green Park in Coal Harbour, Potts’s Temple walks from the sea wall towards the crime scene and shows something to Niall Matter’s rich Vancouver software genius Evan Cross near the yellow crime scene tape. It’s all very serious, as it should be, considering the prosthetic body of a parachutist victim of some kind of flying dinosaur attack lying on a gurney by the washrooms. Matter’s Evan Cross confers with Sara Canning’s Predator Control Officer Dylan Weir and Danny Rahim’s Mac Rendell. Canning’s Weir then walks back to the fake corpse and that was it, as far as I could see.
Read More »PRIMEVAL’s Andrew-Lee Potts Has a Laugh Filming This Fall’s PRIMEVAL: NEW WORLD
On Sunday’s night’s Continuum, entitled A Test of Time, our terrorists-from-the-future Liber8 decide to test a theory that they might cease to exist if their ancestors are killed. They target Kiera Cameron’s grandmother to see what would happen to Cameron if her grandmother died.
I saw Rachel Nichols’s Kiera Cameron filming a scene for episode five in early March at The Centre dressed as fictional Pacific Coastal University in downtown Vancouver. She talks to some of the students and then puts one of them in the back of the blue uunmarked Vancouver Police Department car. When I learned the epsiode logline, I wondered if this young woman could be Kiera’s grandmother in 2012.
Read More »Who is Kiera’s Grandmother on CONTINUUM 1×05? – Updated
Hey Now! That’s Jeffrey Tambor, better known as Hank Kingsley on the Larry Sanders Show and Oscar Bluth on Arrested Development, waving at me from the Psych set in the 6100 block of Boulevard in Kerrisdale today. I’m not often starstruck but I scrambled to remember just one of his catch phrases, experienced brain freeze and ended up giving him a feeble wave back.
On tonight’s Eureka, Allison Blake’s snobby brother Marcus comes to town to meet his new Sheriff brother-in-law, Jack Carter. Fun fact: Marcus, who is prejudiced against “dumb people”, is played by Salli Richardson-Whitfield’s real-life husband Dondre Whitfield.
Marcus meets Colin Ferguson’s Sheriff Carter and Trevor Jackson’s Kevin chasing and trying to catch what will turn out to be a crazy pair of robotic legs after computer-generated effects. During the filming in downtown Chilliwack dressed as Eureka, a stunt woman in a green skinsuit and a crew member carrying a mannequin leg played this extremely agile lower torso. I can’t wait to see it.
Of course this is how the supercilious Marcus meets Carter: lying pinned to the grass by those robotic crazy legs wrapped around his neck.
Read More »Filming of Tonight’s Sheriff Carter Stunts for #Eureka – Updated
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
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.
Read More »What Neill Blomkamp’s Upcoming Sci-Fi Film ELYSIUM is About
