Extras! 04 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!

• Samuel L. Jackson is a badass motherf@#$er, and as a badass motherf@#$er he can do whatever the hell he wants. Whether that be playing the top spy in the Marvel universe, or maybe doing a slam poetry reading about 1990’s sitcom Boy Meets World.

• We already know that Tobey Kebbell will soon be enrolling in evil medical school and getting his Doctor Doom in Fox’s Fantastic Four reboot, but according to a rumour over at The Nerdist, he won’t getting doom-y all alone. According to the sites’ sources, Doom will be telekinetically controlling an army of Doombots, the very deadly robots he makes in his image. As megalomaniacal villains tend to do.
• Big, major, gigantic Batman vs Superman casting news time! Maybe. We hope. We’re really not sure. Warner Bros have announced that Holly Hunter (The Piano, The Firm), Callan Mulvey (300:Rise of an Empire, Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and Tao Okamoto (The Wolverine) have all joined the upcoming superhero sequel, but in case you were imagining what Holly Hunter would look like as grey rage monster with spikes growing out its face, just know that the three will be playing character especially created for the movie. And there’s no word on just who/what these character will be.
• There’s a new Lord of the Rings game coming out soon. Alas, it is not done in 8-bits. Stupid game developers, with all their hundred of bits. I mean, just look at this video for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and tell me you need more than 8.

• Welcome everybody, we now live in a world where Johnny Knoxville is a Ninja Turtle. And not in a Jackass strap a shell to my back and jump in a poopy sewer kind of way. Paramount have announced that Knoxville and Monk star Tony Shalhoub has joined the voice cast for Jonathan Liebesman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot, with Knoxville voicing leader Leonardo, while Shalhoub will be getting all ratty as Master Splinter.
• Poster of the day: The Bourne Legacy

• Martyrs is grueling, hard hitting horror film, that is almost universally revered by fans of the genre. It’s also French, which if course meant Hollywood would want to remake it English, because damn, reading in a movie is, like, so annoying.  The man that was tasked with making this remake happen was The Last Exorcism director Daniel Stamm. That was quite some time ago, and still no remake. And there probably won’t ever be one, as Stamm explained just what happened to the production.

“What happened was the French had done these 30 pages of just mind-numbing, repetitive violence, which is genius because it makes you feel the actual horror of that stuff, but there is no entertainment value. And so the Americans come in and go, ‘We have to spice this up and make it more entertaining,’ so suddenly it’s 30 pages of Saw that just didn’t work.

“The American remake keeps both girls alive, whereas the French version kills one of the girls very early. If you keep both of them alive this gives you a really great chance to have this psychological play between them and the torturers. Everything was going great creatively, and then the call comes in. ‘The option ran out a week ago and the French producers now want so much money that we can’t make the movie.’

“I think they’re now back to making the movie for like $1 million, really low budget, which I think you could almost do, it’s just there’s this philosophy in Hollywood that you can never go back budget-wise. As a filmmaker you are judged by that. And then there’s also this concept I was unaware of called plateauing, where if you’re a filmmaker who makes two movies in the same budget bracket, that becomes your thing. You are the guy for the $3 million movie, and then that’s all you do. And so my agents wouldn’t let me do the $1 million movie, because then that’s it for you, you’ll supposedly never get that bigger budget.”

• There are many fictional character we either love or love to hate. But did you know that some of the biggest are actually based on real people? And no, this does not give you leave to start sitting in the bushes outside these people’s houses in the hopes of playing out your twisted fan fantasies.

• He’s one of the most talented actors of our generation, has a brace of Oscars to his name, and yet Kevin Spacey hasn’t starred in a movie since 2011’s Horrible Bosses. Besides for starring in Netflix’s brilliant political series House of Cards, Spacey has actually spent his time running, and appearing on stage at the Old Vic Theatre in London. And besides for a short stint in the upcoming Horrible Bosses 2 (in which he reportedly got paid $1 million for just a couple days work), Spacey has no plans to return to Hollywood. So what gives? Well, among many other things, what this incredibly in-depth interview with THR reveals, is that he just has high standards.

“Unless it’s Martin Scorsese, and it’s a really significant role, f— off. I’m not playing someone’s brother. I’m not playing the station manager. I’m not playing the FCC chairman.”

“People thought I was crazy 11 years ago when I moved to London and started a theater company. What is he doing? He’s out of his mind. People thought we were crazy when we made the Netflix deal for ‘House of Cards.’ ‘They’re out of their minds, it’ll never work.’ I’m used to people thinking I’m nuts. And you know what? I kind of love it.”

• Look, when Arhnuld tells you to “GET TO DA CHOPPAH!” you better “GET TO DA CHOPPAH”, because based on this graph of 25 Deadliest Actors Ranked by On-Screen Kills, there’s a pretty good chance he may just shoot you in the brain.

• Since I’m a fan of symmetry, and we kicked off today with a clip in the “Because it’s the Internet, that’s why!” category, I think we should end Extras the same way. So, without further ado, is what classic 1990’s action movie Speed would look like if Keanu Reeves was replaced with a pug. Yes, a pug.

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 4, 2014