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!
- That crazy cast for DC’s Suicide Squad is not the only superhero related reveal on the internet today, as EW has landed a batch of new pics from the Sony produced Powers TV series which sees local prawn star Sharlto Copley as an ex-superhero turned cop working the beat in a world where several people have powers. One of these supers is Michelle Forbes’ Retro Girl, who we finally get a look at in full costume here (along with the rest of the cast). And no, this pic is definitely not helping with the crush I’ve had on her since her Battlestar Galactica days.
- If you’re a James Bond fanboy like me, then you may want to keep http://www.007.com bookmarked, as the title and full cast of the next Bond movie will be revealed during a live-stream on Thursday at 11am GMT (that’s 1pm local time in case you’re wondering). We’ll obviously be doing a write-up on it as well. Obviously.
- Despite hearing very little about it, it looks Joseph Gordon Levitt and David Goyer are not sleeping on their Sandman adaptation. Get it? Sleeping on…? Because of Sandman being about Morph-Oh forget it. Just read Goyer’s latest update in which he reveals that they’ve already turned in the first draft of the script with a little help from creator Neil Gaiman.
“I hesitate to definitively say when it might go before the cameras, but the one thing different between other iterations and ours is that Neil Gaiman has been in the room with us and is a vital part of the team. We have a draft Warners is very happy with and we’re moving forward, knock on wood.”
- Poster of the day: The Deer Hunter
- Vampire Diaries star Claire Holt has done her fair share of sucking on TV, but let’s hope the trend doesn’t continue as she is reportedly one of the actress testing to play the lead in the planned Supergirl series from Arrow and The Flash producer Greg Berlanti. I don’t watch the very popular Vampire Diaries, so I’m not too familiar with Holt’s work, but she certainly looks the part.
While the superhero drama, which follows Superman’s cousin Kara Zor-El dealing with her powers on Earth, has got a series commitment from CBS and not CW like Berlanti’s other DC Comics shows, he has recently indicated that they could all still crossover.
- So you may have heard that The Wire, often touted on the net as the greatest TV series of all time, is getting re-released in HD. While that should be news to celebrate, the problem comes from the revelation that the show would be remastered in 16:9 aspect ratio when it was only shot in 4:3. When The Simpsons was recently re-released in widescreen format, it was an unmitigated disaster as severe cropping and awkward resizing ruined several episodes. So will the same happen to The Wire? HBO claim no, that it will in fact make for a better, “tighter” experience, but I’m not getting the same confidence from the show’s creator David Simon.
“…Over the past several months, looking at some of what the widescreen format offered, three things became entirely clear: First, there were many scenes in which the shot composition is not impaired by the transfer to 16:9, and there are a notable number of scenes that acquire real benefit from playing wide. … But there are other scenes, composed for 4:3, that lose some of their purpose and power, to be sure. … More fundamentally, there were still, upon our review, a good hundred or so scenes in which the widening revealed sync problems with actors who would otherwise have remained offscreen, or even the presence of crew or film equipment.”
- There’s been a lot of grumblings online about the new cross-guard lightsaber seen being used by a hooded figure in that first Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer. But now Stephen Colbert has done the research and is here to put this argument to rest once and for all.
- And speaking of the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it has now officially become the most watched trailer in history. I think my 8 viewings may have contributed to that.
- If there was one thing that I wished the writers in Hollywood had never heard of, it’s “hacking”. It’s become the biggest, most ridiculous deus ex machina in movies where anything even remotely computer related can be hacked in seconds by somebody just quickly bashing keys on a keyboard without there even being a prompt on-screen to type. As somebody whose actual career is in IT, it never fails to get me shaking my head at how easy they make it look. But hey, at least they’re trying a bit now, unlike the 90’s where hacking was basically just a video game with really poor graphics, as you can see from this 90’s movie hacking supercut.
- Looks like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves is moving on from damn dirty apes to some damn dirty criminals. While Reeves will be tackling the third Apes sequel next (scheduled for July 29, 2016), he’s already lined up his follow-up project, an untitled bank heist “in the vein of Heat and Dog Day Afternoon”. The flick comes from a pitch from Matt Charman – who just penned Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ untitled Cold War drama – and is being produced by Toby Maguire. Now word yet on whether Maguire will also star.
- And while on the subject of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, it is undoubtedly one of the best films of 2014. That rare blockbuster that packs incredible visuals and action into a story steeped in emotion and thought-provoking layers of social commentary. So of course we’re going to poke fun at with an Honest Trailer!
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: December 3, 2014
