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!
The Sundance Film Festival is currently in full swing, so expect to be hearing some early buzz for a lot of upcoming movies. One such movie, is Oldboy and Vengeance Trilogy Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s English language debut, Stoker. Unfortunately, despite a top cast and the fact that it’s written by Prison Break’s Wentworth Miller, early noise is that it’s rather a bit of a mess, with some already calling it “unintentionally funny”. That hasn’t stopped the film from releasing a pretty great new trailer though.
Despite the fact that he permanently appears to be one puff away from a Cheech and Chong movie, James Franco is a rather busy guy. He’s involved in three separate productions all premiering currently at Sundance this week alone, and he’s already looking to the next thing. And the next thing is hair. And murder. Franco is set to direct and star in Beautiful People, the biopic about Jay Sebring, 1960’s hairstylist to the stars and self appointed playboy. Sebring became well known for his Hollywood romantic liaisons, most famously with Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, and unfortunately for him, eventually ended up as one of the victims of the Manson Family.
Veteran actor Toby Jones has confirmed that he will be reprising his role as Nazi scientist Arnim Zola for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Now for those of you, fleet of brain, you may have realized that the first Cap film takes place in WWII while the new one takes place in modern times, so how can Jones still be around? While the smaller minded among with say “flashback” I will say “SCIENCE!”, that’s how. In the comics, Zola created a robot into which he could transfer his consciousness, and thus effectively became immortal. Yes, I know a box-headed robot villain (stylish design was not Zola’s forte) could be a hard sell, but I’m hoping they pull it off.
It’s been a while since there’s been any new promo material from Jose Padilha’s Robocop reboot for us to laugh at/hate on, but here’s finally something new courtesy of the film’s official Facebook page. It’s the first image of one of the Robocop drones, called EM-208’s, that will be the precursors for Alex Murhpy’s robotic transformation.
In RoboCop, the year is 2028 and multinational conglomerate OmniCorp is at the center of robot technology. Their drones are winning American wars around the globe and now they want to bring this technology to the home front. Alex Murphy (Kinnaman) is a loving husband, father and good cop doing his best to stem the tide of crime and corruption in Detroit. After he is critically injured in the line of duty, OmniCorp utilizes their remarkable science of robotics to save Alex’s life. He returns to the streets of his beloved city with amazing new abilities, but with issues a regular man has never had to face before.
If you’re a Leonardo DiCaprio fan who was upset by the fact that he got snubbed at Oscars for his turn as the villainous Calvin Candie in Django Unchained, well then you’re about to get even surlier. Apparently, it’s really tiring making slaves fight each other for your amusement, as Leo has told German newspaper Bild (translated in English below) that he’s taking a vacation from acting.
“I am a bit drained. I’m now going to take a long, long break. I’ve done three films in two years and I’m just worn out. I would like to improve the world a bit. I will fly around the world doing good for the environment.”
We have no idea how long “a long, long break” really is, but at least we got 2013 covered for Leo-ness as he goes off to play Captain Planet. He’ll be starring in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, and then producing and starring Marting Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street later in 2013. DiCaprio truly puts everything into all his performances, and with his producer’s plate also filling up pretty fast, it’s completely understandable that the man is tired. I say, go and enjoy your money, Leo!
Speaking of Django Unchained, as most movie trivia buffs know, all of Quentin Tarantino’s movies actually take place in the same universe, with characters from various films often being related (the most well publicized being Michael Madsen’s Vic aka Mr White from Reservoir Dogs and John Travolta’s Vincent from Pulp Fiction being brothers). So how does the director’s latest offering, set in the Old West, tie up with his other works? Well, for this one, you need to really be paying attention. Luckily, somebody on Reddit was.
Here’s a new poster for Dreamwork’s upcoming Stone Age animated comedy, The Croods. I love how Grug, the character voiced by Nic Cage, has a serious case of vintage Cage crazy eye. Art imitates life, I guess.
One of the film’s creating quite a buzz at Sundance at the moment is Randy Moore’s Escape from Tomorrow. Now the drama – which deals with a man’s mental breakdown when he finds out he’s lost his job while on a family vacation – has been receiving decent enough reviews, and that’s not what’s causing the ruckus. What’s notable about Escape as that it was filmed in and around Disneyworld, with absolutely zero permission from the House of Mouse. And no, this is no shaky-cam, spy footage movie, this is a properly made production with all the bells and whistles. Movies.com spoke to cinematographer Lucas Lee Graham, who reveals how they accomplished the task, as well as how surprised they are that they haven’t yet got a call from Disney’s legal team.
The original Batmobile used in the 1960’s Adam West Batman series might not go very fast, nor is it’s 19ft length very manouverable, but sure as hell looks cool. And for Arizona businessman and lifelong fan of the Caped Crusader, Alan Champagne, that’s enough. Champagne realized a childhood dream yesterday when he bought the car from it’s original designer George Barris for a whopping $4.6 million! Now that deserves a BAM! BIFF! POW!
Barris bought the original Lincoln Futura that forms the base of the Batmobile for $1, and spent just another $15000 to convert it into the car we know. That means that he got more than 300 times his money back. HOLY GOOD INVESTMENT, BATMAN!
Kevin Williams screamed onto the Hollywood scene in the 1990’s with his script for meta-slasher flick Scream (see what I did there?). He hasn’t really done anything since then with as quite a big impact as that did (Scream kicked off a whole trend of self aware horror flicks that is still happening), but that may all change tonight. Williamson’s latest project, The Following – a Silence of the Lambs-esque TV series featuring Kevin Bacon as an FBI agent hunting down a serial killer on college campus, who develops a Lecter/Starling relationship with James Purfoy’s creepy college professor, who has a group of even creepier student groupies – airs on US networks tonight, with the lucky few who have already seen the pilot episode already proclaiming it as the next big thing. But it looks like The Following may have come from an idea for an old thing, as Williamson explained to Entertainment Tonight.
“Back when I was researching Danny Rolling [known as The Gainesville Ripper; in 1990 he murdered five students in Florida and later served as the inspiration for Scream], I wanted to write about a serial killer on a college campus, and an FBI agent hunting down a college professor. But then I decided to do Scream.” “Interestingly enough, Scream 2 was on a college campus, so it all connected.”
“[Then] in my original story for Scream 3 [Ehren Kruger was brought in to write the threequel after Williamson exited], the killers were basically a fanclub of Woodsboro kids that had formed because of Stab 1 and Stab 2. They were all doing the killings and the big surprise of the movie was when Sidney walked into the house after Ghostface had killed everyone … and they all rose up. None of them were actually dead and they’d planned the whole thing.”
“The motive was their quest for fame, so I just placed that into one character with Scream 4. They were trying to top [Sidney’s] Woodsboro story so they could be the legacy of their hometown. All those ideas metamorphosed into The Following.”
As if I wasn’t excited enough to see The Following!
So last week, we brought you the BRRRRRAAAAAAAAINS hurting news that Zombieland 2 is pretty much deader than its subject matter. But have no fear, zombie lovers (also, apparently have no standards when it comes to romantic interests) as you’ll be seeing more of that world. Just on a smaller screen. Broadcast now has revealed that Amazon will producing a TV series version of the film. While some leaked casting sheets have revealed that the movie’s leads will all be in this incarnation, this will be an original new vision of the world, not a continuation of the film.
Speaking of post apocalyptic worlds, Namibia has been the setting of George Miller’s upcoming Mad Max: Fury Road – which stars Tom Hardy in the titular role made famous by a much younger Mel Gibson – and lucky Youtuber Joosch Heinzer happened to find himself in the right spot during his holiday in our northerly neighbour, as he was able to get this first close-up video recording of the crazy vehicles that will be used in the film.
Last Updated: January 22, 2013
