Home Entertainment Extras! 22 April 2014

Extras! 22 April 2014

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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!

  • Movies get pirated. This is unfortunately just what happens nowadays. How studios/filmmakers respond to these one-eyed internet surfers varies, but this response from filmmaker Jerome Sable (via Movies.com) may just be one of the best. The indie filmmaker’s weirdly good looking horror-musical, Stage Fright, recently showed up on infamous torrent site Pirate Bay. Instead of frothing at the mouth over the development, he took to the comments section on the torrent for his film and left this rather humurous message:

“Hello there!

Jerome Sable here, writer-director of Stage Fright. For those of you who may be interested in downloading our bizarre little indie movie: I’m excited to share the movie with you, and I’m glad there are people out there interested to see this film, which so many people worked hard on.

I have mixed feelings about pirating, because if you were someone who’s really stoked to see this film but, let’s say, just so happen to live in an impoverished Botswana village and can’t afford to pay for it — well, I want you to see it!

If, on the other hand, you can afford to pay for the movie, I encourage you to do so. It took us years to secure the funding for the film, and pirating hurts the success of the movie, and ultimately our ability to fund our next project.

So to recap, unless you are:

– in a third-world country and have to choose between this movie and your next meal, or
– are a real Somali pirate, or
– simply believe in “doing the wrong thing” for reasons you would rather not disclose, or
– have a lifelong vendetta against me because of some offhanded comment I accidentally made in middle school,

…then please consider purchasing the movie from iTunes, YouTube, or On-Demand. Thanks and enjoy Stage Fright!

-jerome”

  • Although I wasn’t too enamoured (read: it stunk worse than skunk farts) with his last big-budget action film, Chinese Zodiac, I’m such a huge fan of Kung-Fu fighting human-monkey hybrid Jackie Chan, that I’m always excited for more. And it seems that his next project could just be a return to form. Chan will be starring in historical epic Dragon Blade, alongside an as yet unknown “big name, A-list Hollywood star” that rumour has it is none other than Mel Gibson.

Written and directed by Daniel Lee (Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon), Dragon Blade tells the based-on-true-evidence story of Roman soldiers lost in Ancient China during the Han Dynasty. Chan will play a military leader, Huo An, a role that he has been wanting to do for seven years, after first learning of documents detailing Roman descendants and Roman ruins in a Northwest Chinese village.

  • Rapidly rising star Michael B. Jordan continues his trend of starring in all the movies, as the young Fruitvale Station and soon to be Fantastic Four star has signed on to lead Men Who Kill, a new  action-thriller from Fox developed specifically for the young star. Plot details are still being kept under wraps, but the project is being described as “an international Bad Boys”.
  • As I mentioned, Michael B. Jordan will soon be playing Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four. This would make him the second actor in three movies in just over 10 years to play the character. That’s about 2 actors, three movies and 10 years more than any of the characters on Empire’s list of 20 Not Super-Men That Won’t Star In A Film Anytime Soon will probably ever get.
  • My personal favorite shot in cinema (because every film geek needs to have one) is undoubtedly the long take. Here are 12 of the best of them in film history.

Two things: the other shot from Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men – the 7-minute long battle sequence through an entire city – needs to be on this list, and their description really doesn’t give full justice as to why the car scene is hands down the winner. That single take didn’t just move the camera around in the car, it did stuff that should have been impossible, into spaces where the camera should possibly be able to go. To do this, they modified the “car” the characters are driving to have no roof or windscreen, both of which were later added in digitally. This allowed the camera rig a massive amount of mobility. But Cuaron didn’t just stop there. To get the shots where the camera swings into a position that a few seconds earlier had just been occupied by a passenger and their car seat, the car was built so that at the touch of a button, the side of the car opened up, and the seat, with passenger and all, would slide out on a track, allowing the camera to move in. As soon as the camera moved on, the seat would be retracted, the side panel closed up, and the actor just continue acting as if he/she had been there the entire time.

  • With that X-Men: Days of Future Past clip showing up after the credits of Amazing Spider-Man 2, lots of fans got to buzzing (AGAIN!) about how cool it would be if the three studios currently owning the various Marvel character licenses – Marvel Studios, Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures – could get over their legal differences and do a crossover with each other. This is something that Simon Kinberg, who writes/produces the X-Men movies for Fox, is dreaming to see it happen.

“Listen, I would love it. The dream to me – I almost feel like Martin Luther King or somebody. I see a world where everyone is joined together. The dream is, obviously, one day to do a Marvel movie that is with all the Marvel characters or at least a universe where they can dive in and out of one another’s films. Because that’s the way the comics were created, I think that’s the way the movies should actually be. The dream is that we could cross-pollenate and everyone would be building off the momentum of each other, which is what actually happens. For a series of business reasons, they aren’t.”

Unfortunately, Avi Arad, producer of Sony’s Spider-Man pics, doesn’t share that dream at all.

“I think I’m probably a little bit of the militant here. I think it will take a moment in which we’ve run out of ideas. There’s so much to tell about Spider-Man. There’s so much to tell about the Sinister Six. The relationship between Spider-Man and Venom will bring a whole other world in.”

  • As you may recall, Universal and director James Wan’s plan to get around Fast & Furious 7 star Paul Walker’s untimely death, is to make use of his brothers, Cody and Caleb, as well as CGI trickery to fill in the scene that Walker never got to shoot. Well, co-star Vin Diesel has just released the first pic of the Walker brothers on set, and I have to admit, this plan may just work. While the taller of the two definitely has Paul’s body type, the shorter brother is a dead ringer in the looks department and could easily fool many a viewer.

Cody+Caleb_Walker_VinDiesel_Fast7_n__span

  • What do you do when a highly acclaimed director like David Fincher walks off your movie project over failed salary negotiations and takes his big name star – Christian Bale – with him? Simple: you get an arguably even more highly acclaimed director, who can bring along another, possibly even bigger star. That appears to be what’s happening on the Sony Pictures lot, as they have begun talks with Oscar winning director Danny Boyle to helm their Aaron Sorkin penned Steve Jobs biopic. And who does Boyle want to replace an actor of Bale’s stature as the (in)famous Apple head? None other than his The Beach star, Leonardo DiCaprio.
  • Apparently, if it were up to Nick, the first Amazing Spider-Man film would have ended with a title card simply saying “The End. Forever and ever. There will never be a sequel no matter how much you cry”. Fortunately, Nick is a ginger, which means that not only does he not have a soul, he also has no say in anything anywhere.

The folks over at CineFix’s How It Should Have Ended may not possess much more Hollywood clout, but they do know how to make hilarious clips, which is where this latest edition – with special bonus scene! – comes in.

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: April 22, 2014

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