4VF News – Daily News Channel

REVIEW:

Grease – book, music and lyrics by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey.

Directed by Lyndee-Jane Rutherford.

Musical director Michael Nicholas Williams, choreographer Leigh Evans for Wellington Musical Theatre.

Opera House, Wellington until July 26

Oamaru’s Victorian precinct is to act as the backdrop for a Japanese television movie about the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, with filming set to take place next week.

Oamaru will represent several South American countries as well as the United States and Cuba when the cameras are rolling between July 22 and 25.

The movie is about an American man who helped bring the 1964 Olympics to the Japanese capital, titled Tokyo Olympics ’64.

Whitestone Civic Trust heritage co-ordinator Faye Ormandy says several scenes will be shot on Harbour St, the area behind Harbour St, Tees St and Itchen St.

Though Harbour St will be closed temporarily on July 23, most businesses in the area will remain open and pedestrian traffic will not be greatly affected.

Between 60 and 70 crew will be on site for the duration of filming.

Ormandy says the crew filmed in Oamaru several years ago and were aware of what the precinct had to offer.

Ican Models and Talent are seeking male and female extras with multi-ethnic backgrounds to feature in the background of several scenes, and there is also potential for small feature roles.

Ormandy says the latest film crew to visit Oamaru shows the town is becoming increasingly popular with international film-makers.

“There’s been four inquiries in June alone. I think people are recognising that Oamaru is a great place to film. We have some fantastic locations in the district.

Email [email protected] if you are interested in being involved in the movie as an extra.

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– The Timaru Herald

Gwyneth Paltrow is supposedly dating a “hot young guy”.

The 41-year-old Academy Award-winning actress announced her and husband Chris Martin’s “conscious uncoupling” in March.

And according to Page Six, Gwyneth was spotted on a date Tuesday at the Standard East Village in New York City with a man who had dirty blond hair.

“[He was] a hot young guy,” a source told the outlet.

“He had curly, shaggy hair and looked like he was in his 30s. I think they may have been holding hands.”

Since the marital separation, it’s been unclear whether Martin and Paltrow are interested in reconciling.

But it appears they are both currently embracing their newfound singledom.

Since separation news broke Martin has been spotted out enjoying time with British beauty Alexa Chung and Rihanna, with whom he collaborated on the track Princess of China in 2012.

“Chris seemed so broken by the split and rumours he begged Gwyneth not to end it, but now he appears to be embracing his freedom,” an insider told British magazine Look. “He’s realising he’s free to do what he wants. And he’s enjoying it.”

Paltrow and Martin tied the knot in December 2003 after meeting the previous year. They share two children together, daughter Apple and son Moses.

The pair may currently be taking time out, but it is thought there’s a chance the couple could reunite.

“Chris and Gwyn still love each other and their family so much. It took them a year to split up because there are still so many feelings there, and I think if Gwyn asked Chris to come back, he would,” the source added.

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– Cover Media

Who has the best guitar riff of all time

British radio station BBC2 has asked music fans that very question, giving its web users

SEX TAPE (R16)
Directed by Jake Kasdan

After a strong, attention grabbing opening, this rekindling-the-romance comedy all gets rather flaccid, resulting in a less than satisfying experience.

Initially seeming like an edgier, crasser version of This is 40 (although does every rom-com woman have to have a successful blog and the bloke work in the music industry), it ends up as a cross between Date Night and Knocked Up as it becomes less about the stresses of modern living and more about couples behaving badly.

When they first met, everything Jay (a leaner than usual Jason Segel) and Annie (Cameron Diaz) did together was another opportunity to have sex.

“There were erections everywhere,” Annie recounts on her Mommy Blog. However, if one child made that difficult, two made it impossible with the pair now reduced to trying to schedule sex days ahead.

Both claim they haven’t lost that “loving feeling”, but when a rare night alone find them unable to find just the right mood – Annie decides to take drastic action.

She suggests they film themselves trying out every position from The Joy of Sex.

The plan works, except for one minor detail. Instead of erasing the tape off his tablet, Jay synchs it to every device they’ve ever owned – including old ones they’ve given away to friends, family and the mailman. Now the race is on to find them and delete the file before they’re exposed.

With Diaz wearing an outfit to rival her eye-popping debut in The Mask (and her displaying even more cheek than usual), this is a film that seems desperately to want to be this generation’s There’s Something About Mary.

From genital mishaps to prolonged dog fights, it’s hard not to get the feeling that writers Segel, Kate Angelo (Will and Grace) and Nicholas Stoller (Muppets Most Wanted) had the Farrelly Brothers comedy in the background while they wrote.

To be fair, they generate a fair few laughs out of their increasingly madcap sex tape search, making the most of Segel and Diaz’s easy chemistry.

But like director Jake Kasdan’s last effort Bad Teacher the humour is a slightly uneasy mix of barbs, pratfalls and look-away-now cringe.

A Jack Black (Be Kind Rewind) cameo livens things up, as does a creepy Rob Lowe (Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) but one can’t help but be disturbed by the amount of product placement for a certain tech company (it is truly overwhelming – even while the film’s underlining message seems to be that proprietary software and synching is evil) and the promotion of a particular porn site (an idea clearly borrowed from Knocked Up).

Overall, the feeling is of a less-than-cheap knock-off they’ve quickly knocked out.

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– Stuff

Literary superstar Eleanor Catton will moonlight as a judge at this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival.

The Luminaries author and the youngest-ever Man Booker Prize winner will judge six finalists in the festival’s annual New Zealand’s Best short film competition.

Catton will be joined on the jury by Australian film-maker Rolf de Heer (Charlie’s Country, Ten Canoes), and Madman Entertainment representative Michael Eldred.

“Though it’s a jury of only three, we like the lineup of judges to be as diverse as the lineup of films contending for their attention,” NZIFF director Bill Gosden said.

“We aim to embrace the wider culture beyond film on the panel too, so we were delighted that Eleanor Catton agreed to join film-maker Rolf de Heer and Madman’s Michael Eldred on this year’s jury.”

They will award one film the $5000 Madman Entertainment Jury Prize and another the $3000 Friends of the Civic Short Film Award for distinctive creative achievement.

The films are Leo Woodhead’s Cold Snap, Abigail Greenwood’s Eleven, James Cunningham’s Over the Moon, Hamish Bennett’s Ross & Beth, Leon Wadham and Eli Kent’s School Night and Gregory King’s U.F.O.

They were selected by international film-maker Andrew Adamson from a short list of 12, which was prepared by Gosden and festival programmer Michael McDonnell.

The films will screen in Auckland on July 26 and winners will be announced on the closing night of the festival’s Auckland leg on August 3.

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– Stuff

Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway may have faced her toughest role yet playing a moustachioed lad in a new music video.

In drag, Hathaway stars alongside actresses Kristen Stewart and Brie Larson, of

Audiences have gone bananas over the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. In New Zealand and the United States, it’s No 1 at the box office.

But while Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox is happy – the film earned US$72.6 million (NZ$82.3m) over the weekend, 33 per cent more than the opening weekend for its predecessor Rise of the Planet of the Apes – 6700 kms away Wellington should be smiling too.

That’s because a considerable contribution to what we see in the 3-D Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, directed by American Matt Reeves, is the visual effects by Weta Digital. The Wellington-based studio – nominated for an Oscar for its work on Rise – has again created the intelligent apes, as well as other animals, for Dawn. At its height the studio employed 700 people on the project.

Weta Digital head Joe Letteri, visual effects supervisor for Dawn, says his team is keen to work on any further Apes movies.

“We are all hoping there will be a third one. We already know the studio has said there will be one and Matt [Reeves] is going to direct it, so that’s great. Everyone was pretty happy with how this film turned out – not just the finished film but the entire collaboration that went on. It seems like we’re solidly into this world now. We kind of understand what’s happening as the apes start to take over our future. We are all looking forward to it.”

The film is set 10 years after the events of Rise, with the genetically-alerted ape Caesar (Andy Serkis) living with other primates in the Muir Woods outside San Francisco. Most of the world’s human population have died from “simian flu”.

Caesar’s group encounter scouts from a small human colony in San Francisco trying to find a disused hydro electric power station. The humans, led by Malcolm (Jason Clarke), try to persuade Caesar to give them access to the power station. Meanwhile colony head Dreyfus (Gary Oldman) and ape Koba (Toby Kebbell) have other plans.

As with Rise, the apes are computer-generated. There are no humans in makeup, prosthetics and costumes or animatronic puppetry. But all of the apes are based on performances by actors, including Serkis, Kebbell, Terry Notary and Karin Konoval, using performance capture technology. Serkis with Weta Digital have been pioneers in the field, from his performance capture roles as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Kong in King Kong and Captain Haddock in The Adventures of Tintin.

Rise, set in San Francisco but largely shot in Vancouver, was significant in that Serkis and the other performance capture actors worked alongside other actors in the same scenes. Their performances weren’t inserted later, essentially making it “live action” performance capture.

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Dawn has seen Weta Digital further push at the boundaries at what can be accomplished with performance capture. While most of Rise was shot indoors using interior sets, more than 85 per cent of Dawn was shot in forests near Vancouver and New Orleans. This meant shooting performance capture on location. Weta Digital had special units of 35 people, using about 50 motion capture cameras and eight “witness capture” cameras, to film any of the actors that were an ape character. At times it would up to 50 apes.

Letteri says having a performance capture team on stage for Rise was the first of its kind in the history of film-making. Having it on location for Dawn was another big leap. “Film-making in general went through this process back in the 70s, where you finally had cameras and lenses that were lightweight enough, and film stock that was fast enough, that you could break out of the studio and you could start doing a lot of location shooting in remote locations in low or available light.

“That’s what we wanted here. We wanted that same feeling. ‘We are out in a remote location under all these dark trees. We’re going to use available light and we’re still going to get the performances captured.”

Letteri says in post-production, where Weta Digital completed the computer-generated apes in Wellington, they still kept it to match the available light that had been captured on location by the film’s cinematographer, acclaimed Kiwi Michael Seresin.

In Dawn there are several on location scenes which depict the results – and as I put it to Letteri, the visual effects are jaw-dropping. Audiences will struggle to work out what is a visual effect and what is real, such is quality of what the studio can now deliver. A memorable opening scene has weapon-carrying Caesar and other apes chase elk through the woods – echoing the hunting techniques of our own ancestors – and then encounter a grizzly bear. Apes, elks and bear all created via computer.

“The work was difficult and very hard. We had a very compressed schedule,” says Letteri on shooting on location. It wasn’t easy to get it done but we knew what the goal was of what we were shooting for.”

Rendering a bear was no different to other animals, he says. “It’s like we do with every character. We study the real ones and just try to gather as much references as we can, whether it’s of photos or skeleton measurements. Whatever we can get.”

Caesar also seems to look just a little bit more like Serkis, especially around the eyes. “We are always pushing it,” says Letteri. “The eyes were remodelled in very detail – all of the fibres in the iris were individually modelled, [as were] the layers of skin in the eyes and eyelids and around the eyes, where you get all that subtle detail. We are just always increasing the resolution of what we can put into the animation of what you can actually get rendered on the screen.”

Serkis for the past few years has been half-jokingly called the Laurence Olivier of performance capture actors and has his own London-based performance capture studio The Imaginarium. Among its projects Serkis will direct a retelling of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Besides The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Weta Digital is working on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It’s also to work on the Avatar sequels and likely, once confirmed, the second Tintin film. But would the studio put its hand up for a project like Animal Farm “Those things are possible,” says Letteri.

THE DETAILS

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is screening now.

– The Dominion Post