Extras! Noomi Rapace brings some Doom and Gloom, Hulks just want to have fun, The first clip from The Host 2, More actors up for Harry Osborn part in Spider-Man sequel, Ben Affleck finds it hard to take a Stand, and Is this the first look at Pacific Rim's giant robots? Plus much more!

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!

It’s Thanksgiving in Obamaland today, which means that people are too busy stuffing turkey down their esophagus to make proper news. So today you guys are getting treated to way more pictures and videos than normal.

To kick things off, here’s a teaser for a new indie sci-fi film titled 2088 directed by Steven Ilous. And that  is actually all we know, with not even the film’s official site shedding much light on the plot. But who needs plot when things look this good? Can I get an “Amen!”, Michael Bay?

Ben Affleck may have turned into one of the best young directors in Hollywood at the moment, but even he has his limits. An adaptation of Stephen King’s gigantic piece of fiction The Stand has been languishing in developmental hell for a while now, with Affleck being the latest person to take a crack the literary colossus for Warner Bros. But things are not going smoothly.

“Right now we’re having a very hard time. But I like the idea – it’s like The Lord Of The Rings in America. And it’s about how we would reinvent ourselves as a society. If we started all over again, what would we do?”

The LOTR reference may be a bit weird seeing as The Stand is a post-apocalyptic tale, but maybe he’s just referring to the length of the novels, both of which are about the size of a Daihatsu.

If you’ve never seen acclaimed South Korean monster movie The Host, well then boy are you missing out! I can’t tell you exactly what it is that you’re missing out on, because unfortunately this one of those films that just fell through the cracks (think I was busy with my first world domination plan in 2007) and which I subsequently never got around to watching, but I know you’re missing out on something!

And now it looks like I’m going to have to play catch-up real fast, as the first clip from the film’s sequel, the imaginatively named The Host 2, has just popped up online.

And if that piques and your interest, and you’re looking for more info, well I ain’t got any. The IMDB page for the film is still filled with more gaps than a Cape Flats neighbourhood snoek braai.

And the list of actors who want play Harry “My dad Norman has funny hair” Osborn in director Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 just got a little longer. If you recall, Sony originally described the character as athletic and physically imposing, a strong contrast to James Franco’s portrayal of the character in the Sam Raimi trilogy. Then they changed their mind and began looking for actors who could play him more brooding and dark, and that’s where Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich and Brady Corbet came in. But now it looks like Sony might be considering changing their minds once again, as they’ve apparently gone back to the original brief of a more physical Harry and as such have approached Sam Clafin (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Snow White and the Huntsman ), Eddie Redmayne (My Week With Marilyn, Les Miserables), Douglas Booth (LOL, Noah) and Boyd Holbrook (Hatfields & McKoys, The Host).

This is turning into quite the Harry situation.

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was a bit of a weird movie, not narative-wise (though it did have its moments), but rather due to the fact that you could clearly feel the influence of Stanley Kubrick on Stephen Spielberg’s direction of it. Not surprising, since it began life as Kubrick’s project back in the 70’s already, but which the director had continuously put off as he waited for special effects to catch up with his vision. He handed the film over to Spielberg in 1995 though, 4 years before his death.

The film that Spielberg eventually ended up making was decidedly Kubrickian in feel, and met with mostly positive response. Except for the film’s final scene, which fast forwards 2000 years and gives the film’s android antagonist (Haley Joel Osment) a much happier ending. An ending which to some just smacked too much of Spielberg’s normal tendencies for the saccharine. But in this video from the TV documentary Spielberg on Spielberg, the director defends his decision for that scene, saying it’s what Kubrick wanted.

“Yo, Adrian! They love you!” A German Rocky musical (that’s the boxing movie, not the Horror Show) titled Rocky: Das Musical and produced by the Ukranian boxing brothers Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko, has opened in Hamburg this week. And much to probably most of your surprise, it has been receiving rather rapturous critical praise.

Rocky Balboa himself, Sylvester Stallone, was there opening night and spoke to Sky News about it:

“I really truly believe that this thing here is going to be extraordinarily successful. I don’t know how it can fail because it’s about the people.”

The musical was originally written in English but then translated in German for it’s initial run, although it’s planning an English language Broadway run in 2013.

Some new pics for Katheryn Bigelow’s “Hunt for Osama Bin Laden” movie Zero Dark Thirty have popped up online at the film’s Facebook page. They don’t reveal much, but hey it’s a film about a highly classified mission so what did you expect?

Following on from the 3D re-release of Star Wars: Episode I – A Phantom Menace, 20 Century Fox (yes, not Disney) have revealed the 2013 3D re-release dates for Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. The former will debut on September 20, while the latter will be Order 66-ing audiences in three dimensions on October 4.

Seeing as how the 3D Phantom Menace, easily the worst of all 6 Star Wars films,  made more than $100 million at the international box office, I expect the same to happen here again.

Pay careful attention to this next clip as you may just be looking at the first few seconds of footage from Guillermo Del Toro’s giant robots vs giant monsters movie, Pacific Rim. Footage of the film was shown at Comic-Con to much fanfare from those in attendance, and even more jealousy from those who were not. At the time, Del Toro indicated that we wouldn’t be seeing any further video footage until Christmas time. But it looks like Christmas may just have come a bit early.

The video is actually not for Pacific Rim, but rather a promo video for Mirada, the FX company that Del Toro co-founded, but at about the 1:15 mark of the video, a giant robot matching the description of Pacific Rim’s Jaegers can clearly be seen. According to the lucky few who saw the proper footage at Comic-Con, the Jaegers looked way more detailed, meaning this may just be a pre-vis version of it though.

Ang Lee’s Hulk is a very divisive film. Personally, I kind of liked it. Others were not so positive though about the film’s more deliberate pacing and characterization of the not-so-jolly green giant, something which Lee is fully aware of. While speaking to Vulture about how his CGI work on that film helped prepared him for the FX rich landscapes in Life of Pi, the director revealed how he wished he had taken a different approach:

“I learned quite a bit about CG from The Hulk, and I wouldn’t have been able to do Life of Pi without that. But it’s easier to create an animal, because there exists a good reference — so a tiger or a hyena is easier than a 2,000-pound rage monster. The hardest thing to do is the weight, not the skin, because there’s no reference for something that size that is agile. And the technology’s improved, so you can have more details with Mark [Ruffalo in The Avenger]’s Hulk. My problem is that I took the whole thing too seriously. I should have had more fun with it, instead of all the psychodrama! [Laughs.]

No need to apologize about the psychodrama to me, Mr Lee. Now Hulked out poodles on the other hand…

Now I know that Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time of joy and merriment and appreciating what we have, but sometimes we just need a little doom and gloom. Or rather “Doom and Gloom”, the new single from classic rockers and chronic lickers The Rolling Stones. What’s this have to do with movies? Well, the video features none other than the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Noomi Rapace (Prometheus) taking on various roles, even a zombie killer. Give it a listen/watch, but just a warning: Mrs Rapace has never been too worried about showing off her lady lumps, so there’s a bit of a NSFW warning on this one.

Is it wrong that I find Charlie Watts playing the drums to be one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen?

Last Updated: November 22, 2012