Extras! 29 August 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!

• I’m not even going to try and deny that I think this Star Wars-ified version of Kill Bill is far superior to the original.

• So, remember that whole “Warner Bros wants ‘no jokes'” thing? Seems its total bovine doo doo. Well, that’s at least according to Seth Rogen, who responded to SlashFilm’s reporting of the story on Twitter. Now it has to be mentioned that Rogen is – as far as we know – not involved in any DC Comics projects in WB’s stable, so how he would know this for certain is a mystery.

@slashfilm @russfischer this is bullshit.

— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) August 27, 2014

 

@slashfilm @russfischer by that I mean it’s not true. — Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) August 27, 2014

• Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye may be the greatest archer in the world, but as you can see from this new behind-the-scenes pic from The Avengers: Age of Ultron, he is still yet to master the Joss Whedon Invisible Bow technique.

• And staying with Age of Ultron, there is a serious rumour brewing over on Badass Digest about how the Avengers team roster could change in the upcoming movie, as well as how one long rumoured new member may just have been cut. It’s all very, very SPOILERY if true, and could potentially ruin what would be one of the biggest surprises of the movie, so I suggest you don’t just click that link willy nilly.

• Poster of the day: Dredd by Bruce Yan

• Praise be to the Force and the recuperative abilities of 70-year old ankles! According to THR, Harrison Ford has now fully recovered from the crippling injury he sustained on set, which means that Star Wars: Episode VII can now officially resume production.

• My love of Star Wars is well documented (see above), so when I saw this video of a pair of attractive twins, playing some of my favourite movie music on a cool instrument, I instantly clicked play. I was not prepared for the weirdness that followed. Adult Ewok costumes, is all I’m going to say.

• Did you know that Eddie Murphy only bagged the role of Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop because Sylvester Stallone and Mickey Rourke – who had been offered the gig first – turned it down? Yes, Sylvester Stallone and Mickey Rourke. You would have course already have known this ridiculous bit of trivia and more if you had read this list of 60 Facts You May Not Know About Classic 80’s Films.

• The very long in production Ridley Scott produced TV adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s 1962 novel “The Man In the High Castle” is finally seeing some foward momentum. Bones and Pretty Little Liar star Luke Kleintank has been tapped for a leading role in the four-hour miniseries which tells of an alternative history in which the Axis won WWII after Franklin D. Rooseveldt is assassinated 1933 by Giuseppe Zangara, who in real life actually murdered Chicago’s then-Mayor Anton Cermak instead.

Kleintank is said to be playing the role of Joe Blake , a character that actually doesn’t exist in the novel, and who is described as “a New York City-based member of a resistance cell”.

• So this ALS Ice Bucket Challenge thing is still going strong, with even supermen and definitely-not-so-supermen getting in on the act. While there’s a fair debate around just how effective this whole charade this, there’s no denying that it’s quite often very entertaining to watch these celebs get drenched.

• Elijah Wood is making a zombie movie, only because it’s the offbeat, post-Lord of the Rings Elijah Wood, this is not your normal zombie movie. Curse of the Darkness is being produced by Wood and his SpectreVision production company, and is described as an “”anthropological zombie film, [which] will take its cues from purported real-life roots of zombie, which involved chemically-induced slavery widely practiced by plantation owners around the Haitian Revolution of 1803.” The movie will also be “set against the modern day backdrop of undocumented workers laboring in the Louisiana sugarcane fields, the story is a terrifying look at the systematic exploitation of the labor force by large corporate entities, as well as a portrait of the plight of undocumented workers in the United States.”

Righto. Apparently “Braaaaaaaains” just doesn’t cut it anymore.

• Speaking of weird movies involving zombies, I recently came across this NSFW trailer for the 1982 gem classic something Raw Force that combines kung fu movies with gorefest cannibal movies and which these words just simply aren’t doing any justice. Just look at this!

A group of martial arts students are en route to an island that supposedly is home to the ghosts of martial artists who have lost their honor. A Hitler lookalike and his gang are running a female slavery operation on the island as well. Soon, the two groups meet and all sorts of crazy things happen which include cannibal monks, piranhas, zombies, and more!

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: August 29, 2014