Jacob Tremblay may only be 10 but he’s proving he has star power.

The Room actor was dubbed Best Emerging Actor for his Oscar-nominated performance in Room at the Union of British Columbia Performers and Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists Awards ceremony in Vancouver on Nov. 12.

Camille Sullivan was named Best Actress for the second year in a row for her role in the drama The Birdwatcher. She was joined by Best Actor Aleks Paunovic for his suspenseful performance in Numb.

Lee Tockar was named Best Voice for Slug and Adrien Hein was awarded Best Stunt for his work in the superhero TV show Arrow.

Two special awards were also handed out: the John Juliani Award of Excellence was presented to John Wardlow, and the Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award went to Joy Coghill. 

In all, 32 nominees were on the roster this year.

ACTRA represents 22,000 members across Canada working in the English-language film/TV industry. 

Paparazzi were staked outside of a Hastings Street building Tuesday where pop superstar Rihanna is filming scenes for the Bates Motel TV show.

Rihanna is playing Marion Crane, the iconic role played by Janet Leigh in the original Psycho, in the fifth and final season of A&E’s hit drama series that is filmed in Aldergrove and other Metro Vancouver locations.

Pop star Rihanna films a scene for A&E’s Bates Motel downtown Vancouver on Tuesday. Rihanna is playing the doomed Marion Crane in the TV adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. 

Most of the action will be inside the building, but there will be one exterior shot with an actor entering the office from the street.

The city of Vancouver has installed “no stopping” signs near the building, and a bus stop has been moved a block south to accommodate the filming.

Rihanna will be checking into the Bates Motel, but she won’t be checking out. In the original Alfred Hitchcock classic, Marion Crane  — spoiler warning — was stabbed to death in the shower by Norman Bates.

Related

• Aldergrove's Bates Motel getting some poor reviews from travellers
• Hollywood North | Rihanna checks into Bates Motel

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One Hollywood North “nightmare” ends this week in Vancouver, while another is just getting underway.

A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare, a Lifetime pilot starring Courtney Love and Dominic Monaghan (Lost, Lord of the Rings), wraps production on Friday.

A modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a horror twist, writer/creator Anthony Jaswinski’s (The Shallows) anthology series tells the story of “four young lovers who head into the woods to pursue their romantic desires, however, their plans are soon jeopardized when terrifying forces attack, using their own fantasies and secrets against them.”

We don’t know where Love fits into that plot. Is she one of the ‘young lovers’ or a ‘terrifying force’?

Meanwhile, Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation) started shooting Nightmare Time for TBS on Monday.

Along with serving as executive producer, Plaza is playing herself in the mind-bending horror-comedy pilot. The show is set in Aubrey Plaza’s Nightmare Clinic, where celebrity guests check in to overcome recurring nightmares.

“Thanks to advanced technology, we’re able to peer into their restless minds, and witness their nightmares in real time. But what is ‘real’ anyway? Maybe it’s all just a nightmare in Aubrey’s mind. One endless nightmare that could eventually destroy her and the entire world,” reads the show’s description.

Sounds kooky.

Plaza was in Vancouver last fall filming FX’s Legion, a TV spinoff from the X-Men movies/comic books from Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley.

Legion, which centres on David Haller (a.k.a. Legion), the schizophrenic but powerful son of X-Men founder Professor Charles Xavier, will air in February.

Director Peter Farrelly and actor Will Sasso are teaming up the TV comedy, Loudermilk.

Loudermilk should be big on laughs

Peter Farrelly, one half of the filmmaking Farrelly brothers (Dumb and Dumber, There is Something about Mary), is in town filming Loudermilk, a half-hour comedy series with Ron Livingston (Office Space, Swingers) and Vancouver funnyman Will Sasso (Mad-TV).

The show, co-created by Farrelly and writer Bobby Mort (Colbert Report), tells a fictionalized story of Sam Loudermilk (Livingston), a recovering alcoholic and substance abuse counsellor with an extremely bad attitude about everything. He is unapologetically uncensored — and has managed to annoy everyone in his life. Sasso will play Loudermilk’s buddy and sobriety sponsor, Ben Burns.

The 10-episode series will air in the U.S. on AT&T’s Audience network (DirectTV). We don’t know if it will air north of the border.

In this image released by Warner Bros. Pictures, Joel Kinnaman appears in a scene from “Run All Night.”

Altered Carbon will alter Kinnaman’s bank account

Production on Altered Carbon, a big-budget, 10-episode Netflix science-fiction series starring Joel Kinnaman (The Killing, Suicide Squad), got underway Monday at Surrey’s new Skydance Studios. Based on Richard K. Morgan’s popular cyberpunk novel of the same name, Kinnaman stars as a specially trained soldier who is downloaded from an off-world prison and into the body of a disgraced cop.

Earlier his year, the Swedish actor told Yahoo News that the series is Netflix’s biggest endeavour yet.

“They’re really going to be able to create a world that’s got a bigger budget than the first three seasons of Game of Thrones,” Kinnaman said. “It’s going to be something special. It’s something that’s never been done before, and I’m a big fan of intelligent sci-fi. To see a sci-fi show that’s a hard R-rated sci-fi show with a big budget, so they’re really going to be able to create this entire world … I just started drooling at that possibility.”

Apparently a healthy chunk of that budget will go toward the star’s salary. Variety reports Kinnaman will earn $350,000 per episode on Altered Carbon.

Altered Carbon will stream on Netflix sometime in 2017.

Canadian actor Molly Parker will star in the spooky Netflix movie 1922.

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Season 6 of HBO’s Girls won’t take place in Kitsilano after all, as star Lena Dunham has backtracked on her pre-election vow to move to Vancouver if Donald Trump became president.

In an Instagram post, Dunham, who publicly campaigned for Democrat Hillary Clinton, says she’s going to stick it out in Trump’s America.

“I can survive staying in this country, MY country, to fight and live and use my embarrassment of blessings to do what’s right,” she wrote. “It’s easy to joke about moving to Canada. It’s harder to see, and to love, the people who fill your mailbox with hate. It’s harder to see what needs to be done and do it. It’s harder to live, fully and painfully aware of the injustice surrounding us, to cherish and fear your country all at once. But I’m willing to try. Will you try with me?”

In April, her promised move to Vancouver didn’t seem like a joke.  Dunham, who is the creator, writer and star of Girls, a comedy-drama that follows the lives of four young women in New York City, said she had already scoped out a place to live here.

“I know a lot of people have been threatening to do this, but I really will,” Dunham said. “I know a lovely place in Vancouver and I can get my work done from there.”

Related

• 'Girls' star Lena Dunham promises to move to Vancouver if Trump becomes president
• It wouldn’t be a vacation, I’d be an expatriate’: Bryan Cranston says he’ll move to Canada if Trump wins

 Trump, who is expected to be sworn in as the United State’s 45th president on Jan. 20, was undisturbed by Dunham’s promised defection.

“Well, she’s a B-actor. You know, she has no, you know, no mojo,” he said. “I heard Whoopi Goldberg said that too – that would be a great, great thing for our country.”

Goldberg, the Academy Award-winning actress and co-host of The View, said she never had plans to move to Canada.

“I’m sorry to disillusion you, but I’m not leaving the country that I was born and raised in,” Goldberg said following the election. “My family spent years trying to get the vote and trying to do all the things that we as Americans are allowed to do. We’re allowed to protest. We’re allowed to stand up and say we disagree. You don’t get to tell me that I’m going. You don’t get to make that decision for me. I’m staying.” 

Bryan Cranston wishes Donald Trump luck.

Stars who did say they’d move to Canada if Trump won the election include Goldberg’s The View co-host Raven-Symone, actor-comedian Keegan Michael-Key, rapper Snoop Dogg, singer Ne-Yo and Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston.

Before the election, Cranston, who filmed the 2014 film Godzilla in Vancouver, was insistent that any move to British Columbia would be more than an extended vacation.

“It wouldn’t be a vacation; I’d be an expatriate, absolutely,” Cranston told host Mark Desvaux on the The Bestseller Experiment podcast.  “I would definitely move. It’s not real to me that that would happen. I hope to God it won’t.”

Cranston’s only comment since the election has been on Twitter where he wished the president-elect luck.

“Although shocked and disappointed by the outcome, I hope the pres-elect will work to unify our wounded country. I sincerely wish him success,” Cranston wrote on Nov. 9.

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Celtic Soul, a documentary that explores the fascinating fandom for the Scottish soccer club Celtic, is a history lesson stuffed into a buddy road trip movie.

The film, which has its western Canadian premiere on Friday at the Whistler Film Festival, stars Jay Baruchel, the Canadian actor and filmmaker, and Eoin O’Callaghan, an Irish journalist whose resume includes a short stint at The Vancouver Sun in 2010, as a pair of unlikely buddies who spend a week together, mostly cramped in a car, exploring sport and self.

Eoin O’Callaghan, who gained a following hosting Fox Soccer Report (2010-2012), “met” Baruchel, star of movies such as This is the End, Tropic Thunder and Knocked Up, on Twitter.

“I got this message on Twitter saying Jay Baruchel starting following me. So I followed him and sent him a message saying I was a big fan of his, and he sent me a message saying he was a big fan of mine, which kind of blew me away.  This is so bizarre. Jay must have watched Fox Soccer Report that’s the only thing I can piece together,” said Eoin O’Callaghan

They later traded ideas and collaborated on the movie pitch through conversations on Skype.

“I knew Jay was a Celtic fan and that he was a very proud Montrealer and Canadian.  I just sent him a message saying I’m doing this thing on sport and Celtic is one of the teams I am looking at.”

When he learned of Baruchel’s Irish ancestry — the actor’s family immigrated to Canada in the 1840s at the height of potato famine — O’Callaghan had the thread he needed to stitch a narrative together.

“The origin story of Celtic, this team in Glasgow, is basically the same thing.  The team was set up as a charitable deed for Irish immigrants who came to Glasgow post-famine in the 1840s. It was something for the Irish community to get behind in this new city because they didn’t have anything,” he said. “So as soon as Jay mentioned the Irish ancestry, a little bell went off in my head and I thought hang on, now only can we chart Jay’s support of the team but parallel to that maybe he can also investigate is there a genealogical or DNA reason why he supports this team. Is it to do with Irish background and his Irish heritage.”

Jay and Eoin’s awesome sports adventure starts in Montreal with a trip to the Bell Centre, the home of the Montreal Canadiens, Jay’s other favourite team, and ends in Glasgow with Baruchel fulfilling a lifetime dream of seeing his beloved team play live at hallowed Celtic Park.

“We kind of look at how certain sports franchises transcend sports for some reason and how some organizations have this inextricable pull — this allure — for certain people,” O’Callaghan said. “There is a relatively straight line that you can draw between the Habs and Celtic in terms of having this special, unique, cultural, religious place within each country’s fabric.”

While sports and fandom are the backbone of the movie, and the only reason Baruchel and O’Callaghan even met, Celtic Soul’s heart lies with the self-discovery moments that occur during the film’s extended stretch in Ireland.

“It’s not necessarily a sports film. I’m sure sports fans will have those cool moments of ‘I can’t believe they got that access’ and ‘look how cool that looks’ but on the other hand the vast majority of people will pick up on the ancestry and the personal journey and finding out where you are from,” O’Callaghan said. “One word that comes up a lot, and it’s weird because we didn’t start out to make Citizen Kane, is immigration. When we showed the movie in Toronto, we fielded a lot of questions about immigration. Here’s this kind of film and seems to be fluffy and cuddly on the outside but it’s really about finding out who you are. In the current climate, particularly in certain parts of the world, that seems to be a no-go area and that term ‘immigration’ seems to be a swear word.”

HOLLYWOOD NORTH NOTES

Russell Peters is shooting Public Schooled in Vancouver.

School is in session: Public Schooled, a comedy starring standup comic Russell Peters, Judy Greer (Jurassic World, Antman) and Grace Park (Hawaii Five-O), started filming in Vancouver last week. Public Schooled is the story of a socially awkward boy, Liam, who has been home-schooled his whole life. When Liam falls in love with a popular one-legged girl, he abandons his mother’s suffocating love and enrolls in public school – entering an eye-opening world of sex, drugs and social mayhem. Newcomer Daniel Doheny, a veteran of Bard on the Beach productions, plays Liam.

Winslet, Elba sightings: A-listers Kate Winslet (Titanic) and Idris Elba (Star Trek Beyond) have arrived in Vancouver to shoot the plane crash/survival film The Mountain Between Us. The two stars were spotted dining at Ancora on Tuesday. The Mountain Between Us, which is scheduled to begin production on Monday, is being helmed by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad.

Thunderbird adapting Decker-Lazarus novels: Vancouver’s Thunderbird Studios, makers of the upcoming Blade Runner 2049 and the Netflix cartoon Beat Bugs, are bringing Faye Kellerman’s best-selling Decker-Lazarus mystery novels to television. David Salzman (MADtv and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) will serve as executive producer. The show will focus on the first Decker-Lazarus novel The Ritual Bath. The story, set in the world of Orthodox Judaism, centres on hard-nosed LAPD Detective Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, a widow and mother of two who witnesses a brutal crime and becomes embroiled in solving it.

Nicolas Cage shops for groceries in Osoyoos.

Cage gets groceries in Osoyoos: Nicolas Cage created a stir in the Okanagan last weekend after being spotted buying fresh produce at the Osoyoos Buy-Low Foods. A photo of the movie star posing with Buy-Low staffer Denise Gray made the rounds on Facebook. Cage is in Okanagan, not for the overpriced avocados, but rather to film the sci-fi feature The Humanity Bureau. The story is set in 2030 with global warming wreaking havoc in parts of the American Midwest. In its attempt to take hold of the economic recession, a government agency called The Humanity Bureau exiles members of society deemed unproductive and banishes them to a colony known as New Eden. The Humanity Bureau is the second title in a six-picture slate deal between Minds Eye Entertainment, VMI worldwide and Bridgegate Pictures following Wesley Snipes’ The Recall, which was also shot in the Okanagan during the summer.

Space shooting: The Vancouver-made Netflix series Lost in Space, the Lionsgate update of the 1960s TV show of the same name, has been given a production start date of Jan. 23. The 10-episode family/sci-fi adventure will follow the Robinson family as they drift through space. Vancouver actress Molly Parker (Deadwood, House of Cards) will play Maureen Robinson, a role originated by June Lockhart.

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Canadian television icon Alan Thicke died Tuesday after suffering a heart attack while playing hockey. He was 69 years old. In the early 1980s, before Vancouver was a film and television production hotbed, Thicke brought Hollywood north with the Alan Thicke Show.

Before Growing Pains made him a household name in the United States, Alan Thicke was a familiar face to Canadian TV audiences thanks to a daytime talk show taped at the old BCTV studios in Vancouver.

The Alan Thicke Show ran on CTV for three seasons, 102 episodes, from 1980-1982.

A replacement for the Alan Hamel Show (1976-1979) and the predecessor of the Don Harron Show (1983-85), the talk show represented Thicke’s first significant foray in front of the camera.

Related

• Our interview with Alan Thicke, two weeks before his death
• 'Iconic' Alan Thicke remembered as a 'hungry artist'

Although he had some acting credits prior to the talk show, Thicke was best known as being a writer and creative force behind Norman Lear’s cult classic Fernwood Tonight, later titled America 2-Night, (1977-78), a mock talk show that starred Martin Mull and Fred Willard.

Before that Thicke served as a writer on variety shows for Tommy Hunter, Paul Lynde, Bobby Vinton and Richard Pryor. He also composed theme songs to several other shows including the memorable openers to Diff’rent Strokes and the Facts of Life.

On his talk show, Thicke was able to show off his natural charm and a comedic timing that later served him well during his seven-season stint as Dr. Jason Seaver on the sitcom Growing Pains.

Gil Gerard and Alan Thicke appear on The Alan Thicke Show.

On a set that featured a Vancouver skyline backdrop and some wicker furniture, Thicke interviewed a mix of Hollywood A-listers (Anthony Hopkins, Rodney Dangerfield, Merv Griffin), athletes (Wilt Chamberlain, Wayne Gretzky) and Canadian icons (Margaret Trudeau, Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, Bruno Gerussi).

And there were the musical numbers — including this one featuring Phil Esposito singing his novelty hit Hockey Sock Rock backed up by Thicke, actor Gil Gerard (Buck Rogers) and the Unknown Comic, wearing his trademark paper bag over his head.

Vancouver jazz pianist Bob Murphy, who died last November, was the show’s musical director, while local radio legend Frosty Forst served as Thicke’s announcer.

Thicke left CTV in 1983 after being handpicked by U.S. television guru Fred Silverman as the man to challenge Johnny Carson for the title of king of late night.

The syndicated Thicke of the Night, a 90-minute variety show with comic regulars including Willard, Arsenio Hall and Gilbert Gottfried, debuted with much fanfare on Sept. 5, 1983 but lasted just one season after being routinely trounced by Carson’s Tonight Show in the nightly Nielsen ratings.

Growing Pains debuted the following year and proved to be a ratings winner for ABC.

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WOMEN FIRST: Consul general Asako Okai hosted a reception recently to mark Emperor Akihito’s impending 83rd birthday on Dec. 23. Senior diplomats of two other major nations present were the U.S.A.’s Lynne Platt and the U.K.’s Nicole Davison, whose own head of state, Queen Elizabeth, is now 90. Possibly given China’s less cordial relationship with Japan, consul general Liu Fei was elsewhere. Regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership her country has signed and Donald Trump panned, Okai said: “Japan strongly believes that free trade deals like TPP can create a common base for all countries to prosper.” Noting that Japan imports uranium, copper and coal via B.C.: “I hope to add LNG (liquefied natural gas) in the near future.” Diplomatically, she made no mention of oil. While attendees patiently anticipated Japanese dishes and sake, B.C. Attorney General Suzanne Anton’s surprisingly lengthy response included: “We are not just business partners; we are friends.”

Deep Cove’s Bluhouse Café owner Jen McCarthy served vegan fare when Zoe Peled raised funds for the SAINTS rescue organization.

This 2006 photo and a Sun story about SAINTS founder Carol Hine’s hospice for elderly animals inspired Zoe Peled to begin fundraising efforts.

SAINTS ALIVE: Shoulder-to-knee tattoos reveal event-producing marketer Zoe Peled’s passions. Her right side features Saint Francis surrounded by animals. Flowers, fruits and vegetables cascade on the left. Both sides pertained at Jen McCarthy’s vegetarian Bluhouse Café in Deep Cove recently. Peled staged a vegan dinner there to benefit palliative-care nurse Carol Hine’s Senior Animals in Need Today Society, a.k.a. SAINTS. Peled learned about that Fraser Valley hospice — saintsrescue.ca — in a Dec. 19, 2006 article by Sun reporter Nicholas Read. Of loving 120 ailing animals simultaneously, Hine said: “It’s their sense of wonder and innocence. You don’t get that anywhere else in life. When I’m around them, I feel like a kid again.”

Elizabeth Reid, Lori Massini, Donya Vahidi and absent Heather Watt constitute the Boughton law firm’s entertainment practice that Massini heads.

BAR AND BEARS: With female law school students likely outnumbering males by 2017, firms naturally have all-women departments. At 47-lawyer Boughton Law, UBC grad Lori Massini’s entertainment group includes Elizabeth Reid, Donya Vahidi and Heather Watt. Without Watt, they attended a seasonal wingding for Massini’s former firm, Omnifilm Entertainment. Its productions include Wild Bear Rescue, a documentary TV series about Angelika and Peter Langden’s Smithers-based Northern Lights Wildlife Society.

PRIMING PARENTS: Redfish Kids principals Kristy Brinkley and Lorraine Kitsos should ease Dec. 22 shopping for moms with champagne and shortbread at their downtown store and beer and pizza for dads in West Van.

Montecristo jeweller Pasquale Cusano showed a $3.3 million, 10-carat diamond and a $650,000 Harry Winston watch inspired by jukeboxes. 

TWG Tea co-founder Miranda Barnes served from 1,000 varieties to Canadian model Coco Rocha at the Singapore-based chain’s opening here.

TO A TEA: No beverages ran out when Karinna and Tom James opened a franchised TWG Tea outlet at Georgia-off-Thurlow recently. The Singapore-based firm sells 650 tonnes of tea yearly, said visiting co-founder Maranda Barnes. Of its 1,000 varieties, a spicy blend enhanced the sparkling wine also served. Given her name, participating fashion model Coco Rocha might have preferred hot chocolate to the “cuppa” she received in a $110 cup-and-saucer combo from St. Petersburg’s 272-year-old Imperial Porcelain firm.

TIME OUT: Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer’s report on the Site C scheme’s many security checkpoints might amuse those who built B.C. Hydro’s Terzaghi Dam. No ritzy “lodge” served that Bridge River project’s 600 men — no women — who occupied bare-plywood bunkhouses with Lillooet-Bralorne traffic running unchecked beside them. One day, a travelling technician parked his bench-equipped vehicle and began cleaning and restoring good time to workers’ watches while his ostensible wife provided the other kind in its trailer. The project’s superintendent soon shooed them away, leaving potential clients still lovelorn and only approximately aware of the time.

Omnifilm branding-marketing director Amanda Riches, here with yoga instructor Cam Lee, took Namaste TV beyond corporate expectations.

STRETCHING: Lawyer-turned-Omnifilm Entertainment branding-and-marketing director Amanda Riches couldn’t touch her toes in 2007. But watching an episode of the firm’s Namaste Yoga TV series inspired her to become flexible. Now, as managing director of the internationally growing Namaste TV division, she gets virtual handstands from Omnifilm president Michael Chechik who could have been harpooned while filming the Genie-winning 1977 documentary Greenpeace: Voyages To Save The Whales.

A poster behind Kevin Eastwood echoes a film he made to support the BC Civil Liberties Association’s stand against penal solitary confinement. 

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: Christy Clark and John Horgan might welcome Russian hackers’ seemingly beneficial influence in their election campaigns.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Beyond

Jan. 2, 6 p.m. | ABC Spark  

A recurring part in a massive global franchise is a dream come true for any working actor. Burkely Duffield knows what it means to be so close to that you can taste it.

The Abbotsford actor was cast as Callan, the son of Anduin Lothar (Vikings’ Travis Fimmel), in the 2016 film adaptation of Warcraft. The movie take on the global gaming phenomenon has earned over US$433 million, making it the highest grossing video game film adaptation of all time. While not exactly a critical smash, you just know there will be another one, but owing to a terminal encounter, Duffield’s character is unlikely to appear.

“That universe and video game worldwide is so well known as a huge conglomerate from the movie, and other outlets,” said Duffield. “But it would take a pretty strong potion to bring me back.”

The 24 year-old will be keeping busy, however; he has the lead role of Holden Matthews in ABC Spark’s new series Beyond. After two seasons playing the character Eddie Miller in House of Anubis, the Nickelodeon adaptation of the Dutch-Belgian series billed as a teen drama/mystery soap opera, he’s certainly prepared.

“It (the show) revolves around my character Holden, who unfortunately falls into a coma for 12 long years and, miraculously, suddenly wakes up when he is 25,” he said. “His entire world has changed, with family grown up, his friends have grown up, his city is different and he doesn’t recognize anything around him. On top of that, he has these new supernatural abilities that he’s got to come to terms with.”

Add in a mysterious woman named Willa, who warns Holden that nothing is as it seems, and the story treads down a path of intrigue and surprises. Duffield says that he’s very happy with how the show has come together as he thinks it has potential to expand its audience beyond the target demographic of younger viewers.

“It’s cool, because we had the opportunity to make this really realistic view of what these powers and abilities are,” said Duffield. “They are cool, but they put him in these really dark and dangerous situations.”

Hollywood North is well known for its forays into the moody and gloomy. From The X-Files to Supernatural, the industry specializes in sci-fi fare, and local talent cuts its teeth on these shows. Duffield has plied his trade in everything from Masters of Science Fiction to Minority Report. It’s a place he’s comfortable in.

“I enjoy watching the genre, and to embody a character in any world that takes place in that sci-fi genre, well, I love it,” he said.

” …  I was in drama and the improv club when I went to Yale Secondary, and I always wanted to do musical theatre as well, but because of also seeking out acting work it was hard to go full-on into musical theatre because of the time demands.”

Music runs in the family. Duffield’s younger sister Victoria was a Top 6 competitor on season three of YTV’s The Next Star, and signed to Warner Music Canada. She released her first single Shut Up And Dance in 2011, and her most recent album, Accelerate, in 2014. Duffield says that he could never go head to head with her in a music theatre throw down.

“I’ll bet you she could go par to par with me in the acting department, but I could never do the same with her in the voice department,” he said.

“I’ve always had a passion for acting, though, and it’s really a great thing to call it my career. TV work is really something where you really get to develop your character over different situations and seasons.”

Is it different walking into the lead part?

“It’s awesome, as I’ve always wanted the opportunity to be a lead on a TV show like this,” said Duffield. “It’s a really cool project that everyone involved has shown great love for, from the writers to the directors and my co-stars. To be able to work right here, in the city that I love, is pretty awesome too.”

While Beyond is taking all of his time at the moment, Duffield is keen to keep expanding his career into other genres. With the musical La La Land possibly paving the way for film musicals making a big comeback, he might get a chance to sing and dance his way across a Hollywood North sound stage sometime soon.

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Actor Ryan Reynolds will once again be donning the red onesie and wreaking havoc on the streets of his hometown.

Deadpool 2, which carries a working title Love Machine, will begin shooting May 1 in Vancouver.

The first Deadpool, a passion project for Reynolds since he first played a variation of the character in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was the surprise smash of 2016. The Vancouver-filmed movie based on the foul-mouthed Marvel anti-hero made more than $780 million on a $58-million budget to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever.

The movie has also racked up a slew of awards nominations and is generating considerable and surprising Oscar buzz.

Along with the two Golden Globe nominations it received for best picture and for Reynolds’ performance, Deadpool has also earned a Producers Guild of America (PGA) nomination for best picture and a Writers Guild nomination for best adapted screenplay.

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members have until Jan. 13 to cast their ballots. The Oscar nominations will be announced Jan. 24 while the awards are handed out Feb. 26.

Director David Leitch (John Wick) will helm the sequel, taking over from Tim Miller who split from the franchise over reported creative differences with Reynolds and screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.

GOOD NEWS FOR DC HEROS: Deadpool isn’t the only comic book character to get some positive news this week, The CW announced Sunday that it is renewing all four of its Vancouver-shot DC Comic series — Supergirl, Arrow, The Flash, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow — along with cult favourite Supernatural, which will be back for a 13th season.

Casey Affleck will direct and star in Light of My Life.

AFFLECK IN DIRECTOR’S CHAIR: Casey Affleck, who won a Golden Globe Sunday for his performance in Manchester By Sea, will be in Vancouver this month to direct and star in the feature film Light of My Life, a survival drama about a father and young daughter who are trapped in the woods. Light of My Life is scheduled to begin shooting on Jan. 23, which means Affleck, an Oscar favourite, could be in Vancouver when the Academy Awards nominations are announced.

PREMIERE DATE FOR PRISON BREAK: Season 5 of Prison Break, the revived Fox series that was shot in metro Vancouver last year, will premiere on April 4, the network announced on Wednesday. The new nine-episode event series, which according to The Hollywood Reporter, picks up after Michael’s (Wentworth Miller) apparent death, as Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies) has moved on with her life, raising her and Michael’s child with her new husband (Mark Feuerstein).

Spoiler (but not really): Michael is still alive and he needs to broken out of a prison.

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Looking for love? Interested in being on reality TV? Well, you’re in luck because The Bachelor Canada is looking for you.

The W Network — you know, that television channel that’s home to all things Hallmark-approved and love-related — is inviting single women to put down their favourite dating app and, “take a chance on IRL love,” according to a news release. (That’s In Real Life love, for those who didn’t get that slang.) 

And while there’s no word yet on who the lucky Bachelor star will be — we’re guessing it will be nice-guy Mike Ogilvie of Winnipeg from Jasmine Lorimer’s season (you know, the guy with the killer abs who was third runner-up? Ya, THAT guy!) — the odds are he will be a marginally better catch than the guys you’ve been swiping on Tinder. 

The cross-Canada “talent” search kicks off Feb. 1 in Winnipeg and ends with a two-day stint in Toronto on Feb. 11-12. Vancouverites can vie for a coveted spot on the reality TV show Feb. 5 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at The Westin Bayshore hotel. 

Bachelorette hopefuls must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of legal age. Be sure to bring valid ID, your best one-liners — and a killer outfit (not black, white or printed, though because you can bet there will be screen tests).  

 Can’t make the in-person interview? Never fear, you still have a chance at nationally televised love. Online applications for hopeful bachelorettes can be submitted online — with a headshot and brief introduction video, of course — at wnetwork.com. 

Check out the full list of Canadian casting call details below: 

 
Winnipeg

When: Feb. 1 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Where: The Fort Garry Hotel (222 Broadway)

Calgary

When: Feb. 3 from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Where: International Hotel and Spa Calgary (220 4th Ave SW)

Vancouver

When: Feb. 5 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Where: The Westin Bayshore (1601 Bayshore Drive)

Montreal

When: Feb. 7 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Where: Loft Hotel (334 Terrasse Saint Denis)

Halifax

When: Feb. 9 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Where: The Westin Nova Scotian, 1181 Hollis Street

Toronto

When: Feb. 11 and 12, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.

Where: Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel (123 Queen St West)

With production on director Shane Black’s The Predator scheduled get underway in Vancouver next month, the cast list is starting to fill out with Thomas Jane currently in talks to join the blockbuster. 

Olivia Munn will be in Vancouver to shoot The Predator.

The Hollywood Reporter says Jane, who was in Vancouver last year shooting Stephen King’s 1922 for Netflix alongside Molly Parker, is “final negotiations” co-star with Boyd Holbrook (Narcos, Logan) and Olivia Munn (Magic Mike, The Newsroom) in the sequel to the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger action epic. 

Jane is best known for playing the anatomically gifted gym teacher who moonlighted as an escort on HBO’s Hung.

Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight) and Keegan-Michael Key (Key and Peele) are also part of The Predator ensemble, while rapper 50 Cent is also rumoured to be attached to the project. There is, however, no indication that Arnie will be involved.

According to the Directors Guild of Canada’s production list, shooting on The Predator will start Feb. 20.

STONER COMEDY: Adam Devine will film Game Over, Man — a Netflix big-screen adaptation of his Comedy Central sitcom Workaholics — in Vancouver starting in March. Devine, best known as Bumper Allen in the Pitch Perfect films, stars on Workaholics with Mail Order comedy troupe partners Blake Anderson and Anders Holm as three stoners working in a telemarketing office. Game Over, Man will be a big-budget action-comedy set in the 1980s. The movie is being co-produced by Scott Rudin (Money Ball, No Country for Old Men, Silicon Valley) and local boys Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg of Point Grey Films.

The new Reboot series will be a combination of CGI and live action.

REBOOT REBOOT: There is some good news for fans of the groundbreaking CGI-animated TV series Reboot. Production on season 1 of Reboot: Guardian Code, which is a reboot of Reboot, is slated to start Feb. 20.  Vancouver’s Rainmaker Entertainment is producing 26 half-hour episodes of the new series, which will combine live action with computer-generated animation. The original series about heroic Guardians who battled viruses inside computer systems ran on YTV from 1994 to 2001. 

Keep your eyes open for Raquel Welch, who is filming in Vancouver.

RAQUEL IN VANCOUVER: Legendary Hollywood bombshell Raquel Welch will be touching down in Vancouver to shoot episodes of Date My Dad, a sitcom that will air on the family-friendly U.S. network UPTV. Variety reports that Welch will play the mother-in-law to a widowed father who is being pushed back into the dating game by his three young daughters. Production on the series began last week and is expected to wrap in April. The series will debut in June.

SPEAKING OF ARNIE: Many Deadpool fans were disappointed when director Tim Miller dropped out of the sequel due to the creative differences with star Ryan Reynolds, but don’t feel too bad for the visual wizard because he has reportedly lined up a potentially bigger gig. According to Deadline, Miller is in talks with James Cameron to direct the latest instalment in the Terminator franchise. Cameron, who will busy over the next few years helming four sequels to Avatar, hasn’t been involved with any of Terminator films since 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day but is “godfathering” this latest entry. Deadpool 2, meanwhile, will commence shooting in May, here in Vancouver, with David Leitch (John Wick) taking over directing duties.

sbrown@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/Browniescott

HAPPIER LUNAR NEW YEAR: Some 480 folk entered the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel’s ballroom recently to dine on cured salmon, wagyu beef shortribs and poached lobster. When they left, they’d reportedly raised $2,535,274 to help B.C. Children’s Hospital acquire heart-lung machines and ventilators. The event was the Chinese Community’s 22nd annual For Children We Care gala. Presenting sponsor Peterson Group, which owns the hotel, was represented by executive chair/CEO Benjamin Yeung. Sister Jane Young (she spells the surname differently) co-chaired with Stella Chan. They noted that, of 350 B.C. babies born yearly with heart conditions, some will undergo three heart-stopping operations before age 18.

Accompanied by Witold Wardziukiewicz, Angelina Zhang sang Disney Princess’s Color Of The Wind at the For Children We Care gala.

Engaging gala-goers’ hearts differently, city-based, China-famed Angelina Zhang sang Color Of The Wind from the Disney Princess series. Echoing First Nations Virginian Pocahontas, who died in 1617, its lyrics could apply in adjacent Washington, D.C. today: “You think the only people who are people are the people who look and think like you.”

Peter Finamore was welcomed by Peterson Group head Benjamin Yeung when he came from Macau to manage the Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel.

EARNING HIS STRIPES: It was old home week when Victoria-raised Peter Finamore became Fairmont Hotels’ regional VP and Pacific Rim hotel general manager. He succeeded Philip Barnes who is now managing director of London’s Savoy hotel. Finamore was chief operating officer of hospitality with MGM China Holdings in Macau after decades of senior hotel-biz jobs globally. The old-home aspect is that his turf includes Victoria’s Empress hotel. That’s where dad Louis Finamore, as general manager, acquired a since-stolen tiger skin to help authenticate the Bengal Lounge. That room bit the dust itself when the now-109-year-old Empress’s new owners, Vancouver developer Nat Bosa and wife Flora, ordered a $30-million, top-to-bottom makeover.

Chan Hon Goh is creative director of the multi-category Global Dance Challenge Jan. 31-Feb.4 that will benefit B.C. Children’s Hospital.

ON AND OFF POINT: B.C. Children’s Hospital will benefit from a five-day event next week that should keep creative director Chan Hon Goh on her toes. The former National Ballet of Canada principal dancer and Goh Ballet Academy director is used to that, of course. This new project, The Global Dance Challenge, will have pre-professionals aged 6 to 19 compete in several categories for $100,000-worth of cash and in-kind prizes. Chinese traditional and minzu dance sub-categories should appeal during a public wrap-up concert at The Centre Feb 4, especially to Goh’s parents, Choo Chiat Goh and Lin Yee Goh, who were National Ballet of China principal dancers.

Seen here at since-razed L’Espace Dubreuil in 2006, Regis Painchaud founded the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois et francophone festival.

CHEZ NOUS: Everybody et son chien stages a film festival nowadays. Happily, that includes Quebec. Its five-locale, 11-day, 40-film Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois et francophone de Vancouver will begin Feb. 2, still run by Regis Painchaud who founded it 23 years ago. Many still lament that he couldn’t save L’Espace Dubreuil, an acoustically superb, art-stuffed performance, social-event and movie locale beneath the Granville Street Bridge. Mayor Larry Campbell held his postelection party there. Still, despite many calling the rock-solid building “magical,” city hall insisted on demolishing it to put up a parking lot. Painchaud, whose name means “hot bread,” moved to other cultural duties, and deserves toasting.

Moviemaker-restaurateur Uwe Boll might welcome the Boulder Building reflecting the appearance of his two-year-old Bauhaus at street level.

HAUS SPECIAL: Restaurant reviewers enthused in 2015 when horror-movie director Uwe Boll opened his Cordova-at-Carrall Bauhaus. The Sun’s Mia Stainsby credited Michelin-starred chef Stefan Hartmann for “food that takes you into the realm of the sublime.” Another daily paper rated Bauhaus “one of Vancouver’s best, a modern German fine-dining classic unlike anything else.”

Good for them, as Boll has challenged critics of his movies to boxing matches. Unlike those dining reviews, he’s less laudatory of the 1890-built Boulder Building where, after reportedly costing $2 million to develop, Bauhaus occupies the ground floor. The two floors above, one with a boarded-over window, may remind passersby of pre-1970s Gastown, before its historic buildings were spiffed up with stores, restaurants, offices and residences. The Boulder Building, with its innately handsome rusticated stone walls, has yet to include the luxury condominiums Boll expected to see earlier. Those concerns and others may be resolved this spring. Meanwhile, although the jeans Boll sometimes wears at Bauhaus contrast with its formal service, “the food is the star here,” as Stainsby wrote.

Brenda McAllister and Karen Carmichael co-chaired the Taste The World gala to benefit paediatric hospital patients in Laos and Myanmar.

LUCKY EIGHT: Celebrating the eighth-annual Taste The World wine-gala were John and Nina Cassils who founded it after they and others contributed $2.5 million to Cambodia’s Angkor Hospital for Children. Karen Carmichael and Brenda McAllister co-chaired the $180,000-net fundraiser that will treat some 35,000 ill children in Laos and Myanmar. Carmichael also designs and produces Jai Style jewelry (jai-style.myshopify.com) inspired by a family stay of 16 years in Southeast Asia.

TV-series presenter Anna Wallner’s animated iPhone cover looked likely to slosh red wine over her ensemble at the Taste The World gala.

BEAUNE PHONE: Taste The World attendee Anna Wallner’s red-wine glass often looked perilously close to slopping over her light-coloured ensemble. Just an illusion, though. The wobbly goblet turned out to be a Christmas-gift iPhone cover from physician friend Alison MacInnes’s daughter Lindsay. Where did the teenager find it? “No idea,” said Wallner who, with Shopping Bags TV-series partner Kristina Matisic, has enlightened many viewers on sourcing myriad goods.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: George Washington today: “I cannot tell an alternative fact.”

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Aldergrove said goodbye to its spooky piece of Hollywood real estate this week as a crews demolished The Bates Motel set.

 The fifth and final season of the A&E adaptation of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho wrapped up  filming earlier this month, so the replica Bates Motel and the menacing house that loomed above it were both torn down.

The Bates Motel, which starred Freddie Highmore as Norman Bates and Vera Farmiga as his mother Norma, told the backstory of Norman and how he evolved into a psychopathic killer.

Bates Motel starred Freddie Highmore, left, and Vera Farmiga — examines Norman Bates’s formative years and his relationship with his widowed mother.

The Bates Motel set was located in Aldergrove on 272 Street, just north of 8th Avenue, at the former Jackman Landfill.

The Bates Motel set was demolished this week.

In 2011, a TV crew recreated the famous Bates home and motel at the former Jackman Landfill site in south Aldergrove on 272nd Street.

The Bates Motel is no more.

VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation head Barbara Grantham saw the Time To Shine gala Alice Chung chaired reportedly raise $2.88 million.

DAYS OF FUTURE: At only its third running, the recent Time To Shine gala reportedly raised $2.88 million for the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation. Second-time chair Alice Chung, who’ll stand aside in 2018, saw that sum exceed 2016 donations by $1.2 million, and even top her own $2-million estimate. She and many others welcomed Viva Pharmaceuticals’ ever-philanthropic founders, Jason and Emily Ko, as title sponsors. Gala revenues will support the hospitals’ The Future of Surgery campaign.

As for present-day surgery, guests saw a video of Willie Dalagan, “who could not be kept alive by conventional means,” said Dr. John Yee, the B.C. Lung Transplant Program’s surgical director. With no donated lungs available, Dalagan and his family OK’d pump perfusion that directly oxygenated his blood for three weeks until such organs were found.

Here seen doing voluntary surgery in Togo, John Yee appeared in a Time To Shine video sustaining a patient for three weeks without lungs.

Dr. John Yee.

Far from high-tech surroundings, Dr. Yee volunteers his thoracic skills every year in rural West Africa. As gala banqueters tucked into black cod, duck foie gras, Angus beef and Hokkaido scallop, few knew that Dr. Yee had returned from Togo three weeks earlier. On his final day, he concluded an operation in what resembles an ordinary room with cinder-block walls. Four hours by dirt road later, he flew to Paris, then to Vancouver where an awaiting phone message sped him to VGH to undertake a double-lung transplant.

“In the span of 24 hours, operations were done on opposite sides of the world and at opposite sides of the technology-economic-social development scale,” Yee said. “A remarkable day to experience as a tiny human on this blue planet of ours.”

Not so tiny, many might argue.

Gynaecologist Janice Kwon and brother Brian, a spinal-cord surgeon, entertained Time to Shine gala-goers by playing twin Fazioli pianos.

KEY CONTRIBUTORS: Like summer campers around a fire, the Time to Shine gala’s many physicians entertained each other. At least they did when spinal-cord surgeon Brian Kwon and gynaecologist-sister Janice played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Liszt’s Un Sospiro (The Sigh) on matching Fazioli pianos. Earlier, camper-aged Ray Zhang and Isabelle Wang romped through The Entertainer, a 1902 ragtime hit Scott Joplin composed a century before either player was born.

Seen launching Patron premium tequila here in 2006, Canadian actor-comedian Dan Aykroyd went on to develop Crystal Head vodkas.

BOOZE BROTHER: A decade ago, Dan Aykroyd launched his Patron Silver tequila at Kitsilano’s Las Margaritas restaurant. The Canadian actor-comedian later produced Crystal Head vodka in skull-shaped bottles. A like-packaged premium version named Aurora debuted, sans Aykroyd, in the Hotel Georgia’s Prohibition bar recently. Few other body parts seem adaptable to liquor bottles, although opportunities could arise for Stand Fast whisky.

ROOSTER BOOST: While the Lunar New Year dumped white stuff on the Hyatt Regency Hotel, some $880,000-worth of green stuff piled up inside. That was when Margaret Chiu and Heather Pei Huang co-chaired the Scotiabank Feast of Fortune gala to fund specialized equipment for Mount Saint Joseph Hospital’s 60-a-day surgeries. The tally reportedly raised the fundraiser’s 10-year total to $4.7-million.

Following painful first lessons in the kite surfing that impressed Barack Obama, Sir Richard Branson relaxed beside the now-late Jim Green.

EXTRA VIRGIN: The kitesurfing prowess that Sir Richard Branson showed Barack Obama this week began in Squamish. There, in 2005, two instructors subjected tyro Branson to long, punishing routines. Easing his pains with drinks at Lift restaurant, the Virgin mogul toasted the late Jim Green whose mayoral campaign would leave him bruised, too.

Stacey Dallyn commemorated fentanyl-felled son Jack Simpson with a painting at a SoMa Gallery benefit exhibition for Covenant House.

NEVER ENDING: Cathy Jenkins recruited fellow artists Niina Chebry, Cori Creed, Tiko Kerr, David Robinson, David Tycho and others to exhibit at a fundraiser she organized with SoMa gallery director Don Macmillan. Spurred by hundreds of deaths linked to the drug fentanyl, the event benefited the child-and-youth-care agency Covenant House. The theme particularly touched exhibitor Stacey Dallyn, whose son Jack Simpson would have recognized her painting’s Whistler scene. Jack died March 26 at age 18 after receiving addiction treatment in Utah. Dallyn’s artwork was tagged $2,000, but she would have paid 100 times that not to have created it.

Backed by a David Tycho painting, Rachael Biggs presented her drug-related memoir at an art exhibition addressing the fentanyl-death crisis.

BIGGS HEARTED: Also at SoMa gallery, Tahsis-born author Rachael Biggs presented Yearning for Nothings and Nobodies. The former ghost writer’s first bylined book includes hopes for her reunited addict-mother “to be something else until the day she died and I realized the perfection of exactly what she was.” The memoir is leavened with “plenty of promiscuity, some incarceration, lots of drugs, heartbreak, some boxed wine, self-loathing, intense loneliness [and] international stripping.” That’s without bringing in British great-uncle Ronnie Biggs, the 1963 Great Train Robbery gang member who accompanied the Sex Pistols punk band to record the song No One Is Innocent.

HOME AGAIN: After publishing some 30 books, globally feted artist Parviz Tanavoli launched his European Women in Persian Houses at the Roundhouse Community Centre recently. The event helped fund the Neekoo Philanthropic Society’s student grants. Tanavoli’s 1977 book, Locks from Iran, proved prophetic last July when officials temporarily denied the Canadian-Iranian citizen’s departure from native-city Tehran.

DOWN PARRYSCOPE: La Stella winery’s description of its lightly effervescent Moscato d’Osoyoos as “culinary foreplay” may encourage some men to empty the bottle as quickly as possible and promptly fall asleep.

malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456

Hello Destroyer, the gritty B.C.-made feature film about the real-life consequences of hockey violence, has earned four nominations for Canadian Screen Awards.

Vancouver filmmaker Kevan Funk, who shot Hello Destroyer, his first feature film, in Prince George and the Lower Mainland, earned best director and best original screenplay nominations, while local actor Jared Abrahamson is nominated for best actor in a leading role and the film itself is nominated for best motion picture.

Hello Destroyer tells the story of a junior hockey player whose life is shattered by an in-game act of violence.

Staged in Toronto on March 12, the Canadian Screen Awards honour the best in Canadian TV, film and digital media.

This year’s host will be comedian and America’s Got Talent judge Howie Mandel. Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany, Schitt’s Creek leads Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara and Daniel Levy, and Sons of Anarchy alumnus Kim Coates will be among the presenters.

Related

• Xavier Dolan film and 'Orphan Black' lead Canadian Screen Award nominations

Here is the full list of B.C. nominees for Canadian Screen Awards:

Nominee: Hello Destroyer 
Best Motion Picture
Daniel Domachowski and Haydn Wazelle

Nominee: Kevan Funk
Best Director and Original Screenplay
Hello Destroyer 

Nominee: Jared Abrahamson
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Hello Destroyer 

Nominee: Old Stone
Best Motion Picture
Johnny Ma

Nominee: Molly Parker
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Weirdos

Nominee: KONELINE: our land beautiful 
Best Feature Length Documentary
Nettie Wild and Betsy Carson

Nominee: Michael Brockington 
Best Editing in a Feature Length Documentary
KONELINE: our land beautiful 

Nominee: Adrian Holmes
Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role
19-2

Nominee:  Louis Ferreira
Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role
Motive

Nominee: Carmen Moore
Best Performance by an Actress in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role
Blackstone

Nominee: Andrea Bang
Best Performance by an Actress in a Continuing Leading Comedic Role
Kim’s Convenience

Nominee: Kim’s Convenience
Best Comedy Series
Tim Gamble and Alexandra Raffé

Nominee: Blood & Water
Best Dramatic TV Series
Ben Lu

Nominee: Lauren Lee Smith
Best Actress in a Supporting  Role in a Dramatic Program or Series
This Life

Nominee: Wasted
Best Documentary Program
Helen Slinger and Maureen Palmer

Nominee: This Is High School
Best Factual Program or Series
David Paperny

Nominee: Sarah Cruise
Best Editing in a Factual Program or Series
This Is High School

Nominee: Brendan Uegama
Best Photography in a Dramatic Program or Series
The Romeo Section

Nominee: Schaun Tozer
Best Original Music Score for a Series
The Romeo Section

Nominee: Jesse Zubot
Achievement in Music – Original Score
Two Lovers and A Bear

Nominee: Alain Mayrand
Achievement in Music – Original Score
Numb

Nominee: Taymaz Sabaz
Achievement in Music – Original Score
Window Horses

Nominee: Andrew Chang
Best Local News Anchor
CBC Vancouver News at Six

Nominees: Chris Galius and Sophie Lui
Best Local News Anchor
Global BC

Nominee: Ian Hanomansing
Best National News Anchor
CBC News Network

Nominee: Dawna Friesen
Best National Newscast
Global National

Nominees: Yvette Brend, Karen Burgess, and Natalie Clancy
Best Local Reportage
CBC Vancouver News at Six,  Online Revenge Arrest

Nominees: Jill Krop, John Hua, and Doug Sydora
Best Local Reportage
Global BC, Missing Plane Found

Nominee: Ray Ferraro
Best Sports Analyst in a Sports Program or Series
IIHF World Hockey Championship Gold Medal Game

Nominee: Glen Suitor
Best Sports Analyst in a Sports Program or Series
2015 Grey Cup

Movie pitch: Ok, it’s an action-packed revenge flick starring Liam Neeson as a badass father who turns into a one-man army and takes down the baddies who harmed his child.

Investors: So it’s just like Taken?

Movie pitch: Yeah, it’s liiiiike Taken but really more like Taken 3 — except in this one he is a snowplow driver.

Investors: Sold. Here’s $40 million. Make this movie.

Hard Powder, a remake of the 2014 Norwegian film In Order of Disappearance, begins shooting in B.C. on March 20 with Neeson indeed starring as a beloved snowplow driver in a Colorado town who seeks revenge against the drug dealers who killed his son.

While Neeson will play a salt-of-the-earth everyman hero, one of the yet-to-be-cast lead villains is described as a Tesla-driving vegan. Good luck finding someone in Vancouver to play that role.

Norway’s Hans Petter Moland, who helmed the original film, will direct the action film, which will be shot in B.C. and Banff.

NO ARNIE?: The Predator, writer-director Shane Black’s reboot of the Predator franchise, begins shooting this week in Vancouver with an amazing cast that includes Boyd Holbrook (Narcos). Olivia Munn (The Newsroom), Sterling K. Brown (The People v. O.J. Simpson), Trevante Rhodes (Midnight), Keegan-Michael Key (Key and Peele), Jacob Tremblay (Room), Thomas Jane (Hung) and, possibly, rapper 50 Cent.

One actor we shouldn’t expect to see battling an alien assassin is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played Dutch in the original 1987 classic.

In an interview with WeGotThisCovered.com, Holbrook says Arnie is unlikely to appear in the reboot.

“It’s not a sequel; Shane Black has made something totally new, somehow keeping within the realm of Predator [while also being] absolutely new in terms of the story that we’re talking about today, and rooted in something real. It’s real fresh. I don’t think you’re going to see [Arnold] Schwarzenegger. It would kind of make it a gimmick. It’s horror, science-fiction and a western,” said Holbrook.

Production on The Predator started Monday with filming at UBC.

LOVE IN: Courtney Love arrives in Vancouver later this week to begin filming a Lifetime movie based on the murderous Menendez brothers.

The movie will “explore the inner lives and motivation behind the murders of entertainment executive Jose Menendez and his wife Kitty at the hands of their sons Lyle and Erik in 1989.”

Love, who was in Vancouver in November filming A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare for Lifetime, will play Kitty.

Related

• Hollywood North: Hockey film Hello Destroyer leads B.C. nominees for Canadian Screen Awards
• Hollywood North: The Bates Motel gets hit by the wrecking ball (gallery)
• Hollywood North: Busy Vancouver actor Jacob Tremblay to co-star in The Predator

COLOSSAL FUN: It was hard to get a handle on exactly what kind of movie Anne Hathaway was making last summer when she was in Vancouver.  We knew Colossal told the story of a hard-drinking slacker who developed some strange psychic connection with a Godzilla-like monster destroying cities in Asia. But was it a horror movie? Science fiction? A Kaiju romance?

The latest trailer, which depicts a dancing monster and a deadpanning Jason Sudeikis, leaves little doubt that Colossal is a comedy  — and from the looks of it, a funny one.

Colossal, which has played numerous film festivals and is sporting a 79 per cent positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, will get its wide release on April 7.

OSCAR CONNECTION: With Ontario’s Ryan Gosling nominated for his La La Land performance and Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s best director nomination for Arrival, there will be no shortage of Canadian content during Sunday’s Academy Awards broadcast.

There are a couple for B.C. connections to look for as well.

Aaron Gilbert, who founded the Vancouver-based Bron Studios with his wife Brenda, is in the running to receive a trophy for best picture. Gilbert served as executive producer on Fences, Denzel Washington’s adaptation of August Wilson’s stage play, which along with a best picture nod also earned nominations for best actor (Washington), best supporting actress (Viola Davis) and best adapted screenplay (Wilson).

Also, Vancouver director Robert Valley’s Pear Cider and Cigarettes, a 35-minute moving graphic novel that details the wild life and final days of his self-destructive friend Techno Stypes, is considered a favourite in the best-animated short category. Valley’s movie is available to watch on Vimeo.

sbrown@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/Browniescott

Heart, humour and spectacle. That’s the trinity that production designer Tyler Harron says is key to success in the locally shot DC comics universe shows The Flash, Supergirl, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow.

But bringing those four programs to air requires their creative teams to “play nice” together at a level previously not required in bringing a program to broadcast.

How this is accomplished was the subject of the WB Superheroes Mash-Up session at the Digital Days: the Future is Now conference presented by Directors Guild of Canada (B.C.), International Cinematographers Guild Local 669 and IATSE Local 891 at the Anvil Centre in New Westminster on Saturday.

“In one week, you have to come up with a 15-foot talking shark, a nine-foot super gorilla, 30-foot purple parasites and all the usual speeding, flying and time-travelling,” says visual effects supervisor and director Armen Kevorkian, stressing the importance of technology in contemporary series making.

Keeping Vancouver’s industry on top of technological developments is key to its survival in the competitive global entertainment business. Digital Days is geared toward fostering discussion around existing technologies such as the now standard HDR (high dynamic range) and 4K formats, and the coming world of digital cinematic VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality). Preparing the next generation of workers in the field requires an active and responsive training climate.

“Vancouver is a fantastic place with a vibrant industry which is gold dust when it happens,” said David Shepheard, the newly appointed Vancouver film commissioner and executive director of the Vancouver Film & Media Centre. “The importance of maintaining our talent development means getting into schools, focusing on areas such as the Asia-Pacific and we have a job fair coming.”

An MMP LLP market analysis released last week by the Motion Picture Association — Canada noted that over all five seasons, Arrow has supported 7,087 full-time equivalent jobs and brought $360.8 million in direct production expenditure to B.C. The visual-effects-heavy Star Trek Beyond came in around $70 million and the series Supernatural has spent $509 million in the province over its 11-season run. 20th Century Fox’s Deadpool spent $40 million in 58 days of filming, hiring more than 2,000 local cast, crew and extras earning more than $19 million in wages.

All of these shows are heavy on digital tech.

“There may not be another industry that has seen as major a shift in how it does business as this one has in the last decade and keeping up with the times is critical,” said IATSE 891’s Gavin Craig. “There is an incredible amount of competition and the work can move anywhere in the world. The importance of the tax credit and the value of the Canadian dollar can’t be ignored, but we also have 7,800 members making up some of the best crews in the entire world.”

Local 891 is the biggest international local, second only to Local 44 in Los Angeles. It’s members depend on companies like Aris G Films Ltd. to keep ahead of the curve supplying state-of-the-art machinery such as stabilized and non-stabilized remote heads for film cameras. The magic of those epic superhero battles comes from being able to make 600 corrections on a triple axis in seconds.

“You have to keep on top of the technology and that means sourcing from all over the world,” said company founder Aris Georgiopoulos. “I have equipment that’s still stage-of-the-art from five years ago from the U.K. as well as three week old (equipment) just arrived from Kiev. Like computers, the software is upgradeable to the point it isn’t anymore and then you need new gear.”

Not all of the digital developments come down to the latest gadgets. In a session on Digital Characters, actors Karin Konoval (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and Paul Moniz de Sá (The BFG) discussed performing in a virtual world and the skills that actors may need to consider coming into this type of work. Moderator Alvin Sanders, actor and president, UBCP/ACTRA also offered up some experiences of motion capture in the gaming industry.

“Ultimately, it’s an acting job like like any other, but becoming a mature 300-pound orangutan named Maurice means I have to believe that’s what I am,” said Konoval. “And I have to apply that to how I would move, climb up a wall, everything. There is nowhere to hide when you are being digitally captured.”

Creating the right visual esthetic is key to rendering the narrative in films such as the BFG or Planet of the Apes as well as in such acclaimed series as The Man In the High Castle. In a session on the show moderated by art director Margot Ready (The BFG, Warcraft, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol), the creative team behind the Amazon Studios and Scott Free Productions discussed their jobs. No doubt, all involved can expect to see additional demands added to their jobs as shooting VR/360 becomes more common throughout the business.

sderdeyn@postmedia.com

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Nitrogen Studios, the Vancouver animators behind the fornicating groceries in Seth Rogen’s raunchy feature hit Sausage Party, has been bought by Montreal-based Cinesite Studios, the two firms announced Tuesday.

Nitrogen, with 70 creative and production staff, is the second Vancouver acquisition for Cinesite, after the Montreal firm’s 2015 merger with local visual effects firm Image Engine (Logan, The Twilight Saga).

“This acquisition delivers to our group the same capacity in Vancouver that we already have in Montreal,” Cinesite CEO Antony Hunt said in a release. “This allows our customers to invest their production dollars in the two best locations for film making in North America.”

Details of the latest deal weren’t released.

Cinesite is developing an untitled feature animation Harold Lloyd project in partnership with the Harold Lloyd Estate, among other projects.

Nitrogen’s animation studio is currently in production on the second series of Dreamworks’ Trollhunters, from creator Guillermo del Toro, which Netflix will release later in 2017. Nitrogen is also co-producing Arkie, a CG-animated feature.

A third-party complaint to B.C.’s Employment Standards Branch against Nitrogen, filed last year by the media union Unifor Local 2000, alleges the non-union studio forced Sausage Party animators to work unpaid overtime. That complaint is still being reviewed.

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Zazie Beetz, who stars opposite Donald Glover on the FX series Atlanta, is the lucky actress who has been chosen to match wits with Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool 2.

A 26-year-old German will play Domino in the sequel to the 2016 Marvel blockbuster.

The relative newcomer won the role of the mutant mercenary with the power to manipulate luck that was rumoured to have interested Hollywood heavyweights Kerry Washington, Sienna Miller, Janelle Monae and Lizzy Caplan.

Reynolds, Deadpool himself, broke the news on Twitter on Thursday.

The next order of business for the movie’s producers will be casting Cable, the mutant super soldier from the future who has been both an enemy and ally to Deadpool in the comic books.

David Arbour, who played the sheriff Jim Hopper in Netflix’s Stranger Things, is the latest name reported to be attached to the role.  Other names in the Cable rumour mill are Pierce Brosnan (James Bond), Michael Shannon (Boardwalk Empire), and Nathan Fillion (Firefly).

Deadpool 2 is scheduled to begin filming in Vancouver on June 19, under the production name Love Machine, with David Leitch (John Wick) in the director’s chair.

The first Deadpool, based on the foul-mouthed Marvel anti-hero of the same name, made more than $780 million on a $58-million budget to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever. It’s also the No. 2 highest-grossing Vancouver-made movie ever, behind The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 ($829.7 million).

Anna Farris will star in the remake Overboard, the 1987 Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell romantic comedy.

Overboard reboot: A remake of Overboard, the 1987 romantic starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, will start shooting in Vancouver this May with funny lady Anna Faris (The House Bunny, Scary Movie 4) and Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez in the leads.

In the original, Hawn played a spoiled heiress with amnesia who is tricked into believing she is the wife of Russell, the poor carpenter who she had stiffed on a bill. (Spoiler: They end up really falling in love.)

It was high-concept stuff.

In the remake, co-written and co-directed by Rob Greenberg (How I Met Your Mother) and Bob Fisher (We’re the Millers), the gender roles will be reversed.

Devil went down to California: Lucifer, the Fox series featuring Tom Ellis as the devil who abandons hell to become a nightclub owner/crime fighter in Los Angeles, is moving production to California after shooting two seasons in Vancouver.

Ellis Tweeted out the bad news last Friday.

Deadline reporter that Lucifer, which was based on the comic book series The Sandman, was lured back to L.A. thanks to a California tax credit program.

Pilot season: Vancouver production crews are in for a busy March with six television pilots scheduled to shoot here this month, according to the Directors Guild of Canada production list.

Doomsday, an ABC pilot about a secret U.S. government think-tank tasked with dreaming up man-made disaster scenarios and their possible solutions, begins shooting Saturday.  Claire Holt (The Vampire Diaries, The Originals) and Taye Diggs (Empire) are set to star. 

Actor Jeremy Piven will be in Vancouver to shoot the pilot, Wisdom of the Crowd.

The other pilots shooting here this month are:

• Reverie, an NBC high-tech detective thriller with Sarah Shahi (Person of Interest); 

• The Good Doctor, an ABC medical drama with Bates Motel star Freddie Highmore;

• The Trustee, an ABC comedy starring Walking Dead alum Michael Cudlitz;

• The Crossing, an ABC drama about time travelling refugees starring Steve Zahn (Dallas Buyers Club);

• And Wisdom of the Crowd, a CBS drama with Jeremy Piven (Entourage) as a tech innovator who creates a cutting-edge crowdsourcing hub to solve his daughter’s murder.

sbrown@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/Browniescott

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First Dates

March 14, 5 & 8  p.m. | SLICE

After watching a preview episode of the TV show First Dates, I hugged my husband and said: “I’m so glad I don’t have to go on dates.”

To which he replied: “I’m glad you’re not going on dates, too.”

Seriously, being single looks hard. First Dates makes that abundantly clear as seemingly (it’s a TV show after all) nice singles sit down and nervously (for the most part) ask the person they are hoping could be their future partner what kind of movies they like and whether they are a dog or cat person.

“Everybody has that same thing. They are thinking this could be my last first date, and that’s our ambition,” says the show’s producer Toby Dormer.

As a viewer and someone who has been on a date, it’s hard not to feel a tinge of nerves or cringe a bit as singles arrive at the Gastown restaurant, sip a drink and make small talk with servers. These are real people, after all.

“Some people you just instantly feel for. You want them to have a good date. When they are walking into their date we as the production team get nervous,” says Dormer. “We have butterflies. We are right there with them.”

Now starting its second season, First Dates brings 300 singles together over dinner, drinks and a desire to enter into a long-term relationship. More than 1,000 Lower Mainland singles auditioned for the Vancouver-shot show.

So who are these singles? Now a cynic who has seen plenty of unscripted TV might say people on shows like this are hoping to turn a date with a stranger into a date with fame. Dormer says nope, not on his watch.

“You can tell straightaway that they are thinking this will be a way to further their career,” Dormer says of weeding out the fame-seekers. “Some of them might sneak through, but we do our best to make sure everyone here is genuinely single, genuinely looking for love and are going to come to this with the right intentions. We don’t want someone who is looking to be the next Kardashian alongside someone who is really looking for love. It’s just not fair.”

Jason looks ready for his opening line over dinner and drinks in the second season of TV’s First Dates.

The people who come to the show generally have lots of dating experience. They’ve been online dating, tried Tinder, experienced eHarmony and have exhausted all their friends’ and family’s contact lists. According to Dormer, some reported going on four to five dates a week. One woman even left a show taping to rush to another date.

“You know what? I think there are so many people out there looking for somebody special and they’re finding it really hard,” says Dormer. “The big message we got from Season 1 and Season 2 is that it’s hard out there.”

So a blind date on TV, why not?

Once the daters meet they sit down over dinner and drinks. Everyone in the room is on dates. The cameras (about 50) are all remote so there are no production staff lingering like third wheels and reminding the nervous singles that their every move is being recorded.

While not all dates go well and, yes, a tense meet up can make for good TV, Dormer says the plan is always to create couples.

Things don’t seem to be going well for Landon on this date, as he tries to find true love on the second season of TV’s First Dates.

“I’m always rooting for people. I want them to find love,” he says. “We take it very seriously. If we see a couple sharing a kiss (afterwards), outside the restaurant the whole team is high-fiving. That’s what we want, we want those matches.”

New this season is the location and the increased presence of the serving staff.

Bartender Adam Snider is one of those the camera is focusing on more this year.

Despite having never gone on a blind date himself, Snider says his years behind the bar have made him a pretty good judge of first dates.

Vancouver bartender Adam Snider is featured more in the second season of First Dates. His don’ts for dating? ‘Not dressing well, drinking too much, talking about themselves too much and generally trying too hard.’

“I can pretty much tell right away of how the date is going to end up based on body language,” says Snider, who is called upon sometimes to help a date along through either drinks or conversation.

Snider has seen it all, and he definitely has a good idea what can cause a date to crash.

“Not dressing well, drinking too much, talking about themselves too much and generally trying too hard,” he says about the don’ts of a date. “Never talk about your ex.”

See? Bartenders do give good advice.

dgee@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/dana_gee

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