familiar – 4VF News – Daily News Channel

The origin of the latest Hollywood formula

If you’ve gone to the movies recently, you may have felt a strangely familiar feeling: You’ve seen this movie before. Not this exact movie, but some of these exact story beats: the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship); the villain who gets caught on purpose (The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star Trek Into Darkness); the moment of hopelessness and disarray a half-hour before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6)

A-listers in time for end of the world

Hollywood A-listers Simon Pegg and Martin Freeman braved the Wellington rain to walk the red carpet at the premiere of The World’s End alongside plenty of familiar faces from the Hobbit films yesterday. The pair, who star in the movie, were joined by co-star Nick Frost, and Sir Peter Jackson, Benedict Cumberbatch and James Nesbitt.

Kate Ritchie returns to Summer Bay

First there were the fluoro tops, pigtails, and imaginary friends. Then the awkward teen years – clandestine pashes behind the bike sheds, inappropriate boyfriends (including one played by Heath Ledger), plenty of angst

The Nation: NIXON TALKS

He is back among us. And, as always, in a memorable manner, both painful and poignant, sometimes illuminating, usually self-serving

Education Survey: China Scores Top Marks; U.S., France Lag

The rise of China as an economic and political juggernaut has become a familiar refrain, but now there’s another area in which the Chinese are suddenly emerging as a world power: education. In the latest Program for International Student Assessment comparative survey of the academic performance of 15-year-olds around the world — an authoritative study released every three years — Chinese teenagers from Shanghai far outscored their international peers in all three subject matters that were tested last year: reading, math and science.