Extras! 11 November 2014

Welcome to The Extras! A daily dose of all the smaller movie related news, clips and just plain cool stuff that you might have missed!

• Yes, we’re still talking about Interstellar. Or at least, the internet is still talking about it. Although, “talk” may be too kind a word as every armchair physicist and movie expert has suddenly come out of the woodwork to crap on Chris Nolan for either not getting the science 100% correct in places or having a plot that’s too full of holes. And you know what? Nolan really doesn’t care because he’s making a movie.

“To be honest, I haven’t read whatever holes people are trying to poke, so I can speak to the validity of it. My films are always held to a weirdly high standard for those issues that isn’t applied to everybody else’s films —which I’m fine with,. People are always accusing my films of having plot holes, and I’m very aware of the plot holes in my films and very aware of when people spot them, but they generally don’t. But what were some science issues people had with the film? That was [physicist Kip Thorn’s] domain.”

[Riding the surface of a black hole] is ‘like ‘a basketball on the rim,’ which is a phrase we use! That’s completely accurate, so there’s no hole there at all. Those issues are all buttoned-up, and Kip has a book on the science of the film about what’s real and what’s speculation —because much of it is, of course, speculation. There have been a bunch of knee-jerk tweets by people who’ve only seen the film once, but to really take on the science of the film, you’re going to need to sit down with the film for a bit and probably also read Kip’s book. I know where we cheated in the way you have to cheat in movies, and I’ve made Kip aware of those things.”

• Forget all those internet haters, Chris. The actual honest to goodness, renowned scientist Neil DeGrasse-Tyson thinks your movie is actually rather swell.

• Poster of the day: Dragon Blade – there’s nothing fancy or particularly arty about this poster. I only post it because HOLY CRAP GUYS, JOHN CUSACK AND ADRIEN BRODY ARE STARRING IN A JACKIE CHAN MOVIE AND JUST LOOK AT BRODY’S FABULOUS HEAD OF HAIR!

FYI, the film, which is currently looking for a distributor at the American Film Market going down in California this week, follows “a missing legion of Roman soldiers that traveled into China in 48 B.C.”

• Oh hey there, Tom Cruise! So what did you do over the weekend? Oh, just hang on for dear life on the fuselage of a cargo plane while it was way up in the air, all for the new Mission: Impossible movie? Cool. I just got some pizza and watched a movie.

• Speaking of Tom Cruise, do you know what would make the already awesome Battlestar Galactica even more awesome? Top Gun music, of course.

• I had just about forgotten that Jason Statham’s The Mechanic, the 2011 remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson flick, had even existed. It was lost in the interchangeable haze of Cockney accents and roundhouse kicks that make up the lower tiers of Statham’s filmography. Seeing as how it just barely made a profit, you would think that the studios had forgotten about it as well. But nope, we’re getting a sequel, and that sequel now has a title and supporting cast. The Mechanic: Oil Change Resurrection will once again see the Stath as the generic movie hitman who has quit the business but keeps getting dragged back in, while Jessica Alba and Tommy Lee Jones will be joining him for all the action this time around.

• I don’t the name of the Korean genius who decided to mash-up Frozen and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but can we all just acknowledge that he/she is a genius?

• Infamously terrible video-game adaptation  Super Mario Bros is now finally out on DVD, just in case you still haven’t figured out yet what horrible prank gift you to give your nemesis this Christmas.

• I think you need to sit down for our final bit of Extras today. This is serious business. Well, as serious as a parody video about sitcom intros from Adult Swim called “Too Many Cooks” can be. Skewering just about every generation of TV, this video is…. is… well, it’s something. It’s also other things. So many, many other things. For more than 11-minutes! Trust me though, you need to watch this, just to prove how weird and wacky the internet can be.

Pro tip: You may want to take a few puffs before watching this one.

If you have anything you would like to contribute to Extras, whether it be interesting stories, funny videos, or artistic photos of yourself in morally questionable poses, feel free to drop a mail to kervyn@themovies.co.za.

Last Updated: November 11, 2014