Peter Jackson is making his hobbits and dwarves march double-time in his The Lord of the Rings prequel, which he’s shooting in a faster film speed than the Hollywood standard.

Jackson hopes the 48-frames-a-second rate – twice the 24 frames that has been the custom since the 1920s – will help bring about a gradual transition to faster speeds that can bring more life-like images and action to the screen.

Digital cameras allow for shooting at 48 frames or faster, reducing the flickery, blurry effect known as strobing that can come with 24-frame filming.

Jackson talked about his two-part adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where he premiered the documentary West of Memphis, produced by him and his wife, Hobbitco-writer Fran Walsh.

“You shoot at 48, project at 48 and you get an illusion of life that’s remarkable. You don’t realize just how strobing and how flickery 24 frames is,” The Washington Post reported Jackson as saying.

“You look at something at 48 frames, and it looks gorgeous. It looks like real life. It’s amazing.”

Jackson hoped more directors would utilise the new technology.

“I’m hoping it’ll be just the first gentle step into changing film rates because we can change them, especially with all the digital technology now. Twenty-four is irrelevant. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s just a traditional thing.

“It’s far from the best visual way to present a film.”

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will premiere on December 13 next year in Wellington and the second film, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, is set to be released on December 12 the following year.

- AP

It’s had primetime current affairs coverage and celebrity endorsements. But local movieNetherwood – a rural western thriller produced by and starring onetime Shortland Street-ers Will Hall and Owen Black – hasn’t been able to get itself a cinema run, despite selling out its sessions in Christchurch at the New Zealand International Film Festival last year.

So its makers are taking it on the road for a series of 23 one-off screenings starting at Auckland’s Academy Cinema on January 28 and ending up at the Waipara Community Hall, near where it was shot in 2009, in late February.

Hall and Black will be hosting the screenings on the whistle-stop tour entitled The Netherwood Rural Roadshow.

“We’re keen to get our film out there and have a good time while we’re at it,” says Black.

In the R16 film Black plays a drifter who wanders into rural Netherwoodand comes up against a wealthy landowner, among various other colourful locals.

For more info and tickets go to www.netherwoodmovie.com

-TimeOut

Famously gruff American actor Tommy Lee Jones is returning to New Zealand to play US General Douglas MacArthur in Emperor, a movie set in the aftermath of the Japanese surrender in World War II.

Earlier in his career Jones came here to make the 1983 adventure movieSavage Island – also known as Nate and Hayes – in which he played legendary South Seas pirate Bully Hayes. The movie was a box office flop.

Jones is a three-time Oscar nominee and one-time winner for best supporting actor in 1994′s The Fugitive and he was the lead in in 2007′s Best Picture Winner No Country for Old Men.

But he’s probably best known as Agent K from the Men in Black movies, the third of which is due for release this year and which also featuresFlight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement.

Emperor also stars Matthew Fox from television’s Lost as an officer on MacArthur’s staff who is charged with deciding on whether Emperor Hirohito should be charged with war crimes.

Cameras are due to start rolling this month in various New Zealand locations with some shooting also taking place in Japan.

It’s directed by English film-maker Peter Webber whose previous films include Girl with the Pearl Earring andSilence of the Lambsprequel Hannibal Rising.

- TimeOut

Writers James Griffin and Oscar Kightley first proposed a sequel to Sione’s Wedding back in 2006 but, despite the landmark success of that movie, nearly six years have now passed since the original was released.

Explaining that time lapse in the lives of their characters was clearly the most substantial challenge Kightley and Griffin faced in producing this sequel, and their answer comes in the catalytic events of the opening scenes, which makers South Pacific Pictures asked (very nicely) that we don’t reveal.

So we won’t, except to say it ain’t about a wedding this time.

Essentially, Sione’s 2 becomes a quest movie, sending the boys off on a mission designed to show that they’ve finally grown up.

Of course, they haven’t quite. One of the appeals of Sione’s 2 is that the entire core cast have returned, and we know their characters so well: nerdy Albert (Kightley), pants-man Michael (Robbie Magasiva), drunk Sefa (Shimpal Lelisi), impressionable Stanley (Iaheto Ah Hi) and Dave Fane’s otherworldly Bolo.

Now Michael is living offshore, Albert is living on the Shore, Sefa is unemployed and Stanley has found God and, in particular, Kirk Torrance’s entertaining and thinly disguised version of Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki.

The shared histories of those lead actors again translates well to an on-screen understanding which keeps the pace quick and the story rolling.

Despite a somewhat darker plot, it retains the resolutely cheerful, upbeat tone of Sione the first.

It also has neatly etched cameos (I do like Mario Gaoa’s saturnine cab driver) and a side attraction of location-spotting.

But some of the humour is perhaps a little insular.

I found the funniest part to be a riff by Kightley’s character Albert – tussling with the ennui of middle- aged, middle-class life away from his old mates – about the soullessness of Glenfield.

It’s a joke any Aucklander will appreciate but which may be lost in the provinces and completely meaningless to viewers further afield.

The other challenge of a five- year gap is the anticipation involved. Sione’s Wedding, fresh, genuinely funny and innovative, was something special in New Zealand cinema.

Sione’s 2 won’t and never could have attained quite that status, but seen on its own merits, it proves worth the wait.