Luke Buckmaster

The iGeneration’s Star Trek crew are back on the USS enterprise, turning dials, gawking at screens, swiveling in chairs and squinting through a layer of lens flares in director J.

Could scenes from one of the biggest movie releases of the year and one of the most expensive literary adaptations of all time have been directed via Skype? Cinetology understands blockbuster filmmaker Baz Luhrmann last year called the shots from the (cyber) director’s chair for his highly anticipated adaptation of The Great Gatsby some 16,000 kilometers from where the action was taking place.

Last night a coterie of celebrities kitted-up in their finest suits and gowns and walked the red carpet at the Australian film industry’s “night of nights”: the 2014 AACTA awards.

It took almost three decades, several thousand star ratings and countless hours of good-spirited argy-bargy, but yesterday news finally arrived that beloved Australian film reviewers David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz have officially decided to end their long-running TV program At the Movies (formerly The Movie Show).

There is a scene close to the beginning of director Ivan Reitman’s 1984 hit Ghostbusters that takes place between sleazy faux scientist Dr Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and two young subjects, a man and a woman connected to an electric shock machine.

Wars aren’t won on the battle field, as they say, but in blood-free rooms where men — at least in the movies, and at least during the days when wars were actually winnable — move pieces across boards and pin things to maps on walls.