Extras! 01 April 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!

Hugh Jackman is the best he is at what he does, and what he does is play superhero/hair model Wolverine as well as win Tony Awards for singing on stage. So what better way to improve on what he does, than by combining the two. So by the powers of Les Miserables and X-Men combined, I give you Wolverine: The Musical

With The Incredibles 2 FINALLY being put into development recently, the talk has turned to which characters from writer/director Brad Bird’s brilliant original will be returning. Samuel L. Jackson seems to think that his Frozone has a shot, and being Nick Fury and all he probably knows these things.

“Every time I run into Brad (Bird) he always tells me Frozone is going to be part of whatever’s going on, so I have to believe that. I guess they would be the Incredibles without Frozone, but I think Frozone would be a wonderful, wonderful addition to what’s already there. I’m just looking forward to seeing what Jack-Jack turned into.”

Have you been staying up nights, racking your brain trying to imaging what Muppets look like as humans? Well, then today’s your lucky day, as you’re being admitted for psychiatric evaluation, but not before having your pressing question answered.

Poster of the Day: Godzilla. Sharing this image on Facebook, with the tag #demandtoknow, will apparently unlock something new. I’m holding thumbs for a Godzilla sextape.

Dear makers of the My Girl video game, why do you hate my heart so much that you stomp all over it again, just like the movie did all those years ago? Sniff.

Congratulations, OBGYN Kenobi T-shirt. You win the internet for today!

There were many things that Man of Steel floundered on, but if there was one thing it got very right was the fantastical opening on the planet Krypton. Those 15 minutes alone were arguably the best sci-fi movie of 2013. The man who wrote that scene, David S. Goyer (who also penned Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy) was asked by Collider if there’s any other alien world like that that he’d like to tackle, and the question apparently made him turn green.

“I would love to do ‘Green Lantern. I really wanted to showcase Krypton as a truly alien world. That was one of the things I wanted to do from the beginning when I got involved in the project. At his heart, Superman’s always been a science fiction story. I wanted to lean into that, and so did Chris [Nolan], and so did [director Zack Snyder], so I was just glad we were able to.”

Goyer writing Green Lantern is really an idea I can get behind. I mean, as many faults as the man has, he certainly can’t turn in anything worse than the verdant effluent that was the 2011 Ryan Reynolds movie.

Keeping things green, here’s a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles banner, giving us another look at Jacob Zuma on roids Michelangelo and the boys.

Hey, guys! They’re making a Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers movie and Ben Stiller has already signed on to – Oh, no. Sorry. They’re making a movie about the origin of the Chippendales, the beefcake male erotic dance group, and Ben Stiller is going to star in it… Wait, what?!

There’s been quite a lot of controversy around Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, specifically around some of the more fantastical beasts and creatures that normally aren’t to be found in your average Sunday School lesson. But the thing is, despite how some of the film’s detractors are upset about him changing a very important biblical story, Aronofsky actually pulled a lot of those bits of fantasy straight from Hebrew texts, including the Nephilim, a race of giants created when fallen angels mated with humans to create. In the movies, these “Watchers” are represented as weird looking, stoney colossi and speaking to BadassDigest, the director explained just how this look came about, and how it scared the folks at Industrial Light and Magic.

“We were very interested in everything we could read about the Nephilim, and we were inspired by all of it. But we needed to find a way to do something original. When we wrote this seven, eight years ago there weren’t that many giants on the screen and since then there have been all different sorts of things.

We struggled for a long time figuring out how to do them. We knew there was some angelic energy to them, and we knew there was some type of earthly form to them, but we want to try and capture the themes of the movie in these creatures. We didn’t want them to just be cool creatures. There’s this really big theme about justice and mercy going on in the film where Noah and God move from justice towards mercy, and we flipped that for the Watchers. We made these incredibly merciful characters move towards justice. Then we tried to figure out how to express their story in a physical form. The idea of these angelic creatures mating with earthly forms and making something else became, through metaphor, the idea of these angelic forms captured by and forming with the earth and becoming imprisoned by the earth.

The big image we had stuck to the wall was a seagull trapped in oil. The way the earth can destroy that type of lifeform we wanted to apply to these winged creatures. We went with six-winged creatures because the Seraphim are described as a six-winged creature. When they got encased they were able to use the wings as arms and legs.

When we started to come up with these designs we scared the hell out of ILM. They were saying, “How are we going to do this? They’re so bizarre.” When we did motion capture everything ILM gave me was this very realistic, human-moving giant. And I said, “No, I don’t want that. I want to move away from that as much as we can.” So we started working on walk cycles, and I brought in all these ballet dancers I know and we attached yoga blocks to their feet and gave them crutches and created this painful, crippled, dragging feet type of feeling to visualize the pain of the characters, that they were malformed and captured.”

And now for your daily dose of Vitamins W, T and F, courtesy of this trailer for Drop Bears: Attack of the Killer Koalas, a new project from writer/director Stephen Banham and producer Peta Astbury (The Marriage of Figaro) who are hoping to turn this into a full feature length film using Kickstarter. So if a horror comedy where a fuzzy little bear devours a lady’s really cheap looking entrails are your thing, then go and give them your money!

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 1, 2014