Extras! 04 February 2015

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!

• You’ll only get to see my review for Theory of Everything in a few weeks (stupid NDA’s), but I can tell you that Jennifer Garner’s performance in it as Stephen Hawking is just unbelievable and 100% deserving of all its praise. Oops, did I say Jennifer Garner? I meant Eddie Redmayne. Easy mistake to make.

• There are a lot – A LOT – of things that are wrong with Green Lantern, and we’ve already heard from director Martin Campbell himself how he was essentially strongarmed by the studio into putting every dumb idea they had into the movie. That was one of the reasons we ended up with the jade pile of poop we did, and now star Ryan Reynolds has offered up another.

“When we shot Green Lantern, nobody auditioning for the role of Green Lantern was given the opportunity to read the script, because the script didn’t exist. I’m not complaining about it — it was an opportunity of a lifetime, and if I were to go back and retrace my steps, I would probably do everything the exact same way. But script, that’s what’s different on [Deadpool].”

• Poster of the day: The Last Dragon

• Confession time: I still haven’t seen Frozen. While most people are still struggling to let it go, I never even had it in the first place. And it looks like I better get around to watching the record-breaking animated movie soon, or I’m going to be 0 for 2 when it comes to Disney flicks about ice princesses and snowmen, as an animated short film sequel titled Frozen Fever is on the way as well. The film is set on Anna’s birthday follows Elsa and Kristoff who are “determined to give her the best celebration ever, but Elsa’s icy powers may put more than just the party at risk.” And now thanks to USA Today, we have our first images from the flick.

• If you’ve read my review for Selma earlier, you would know that I was mightily impressed with the pairing of director Ava DuVernay and star David Oyelowo. Now there’s been some controversy recently with neither of them being nominated for an Oscar for their efforts in the film (which did get a Best Picture nod). So are DuVernay and Oyelowo busy moping around because of this? Nope, they’ve already lined up their next venture together: a romantic drama with a murder mystery twist set during the events of Hurricane Katrina. That certainly sounds intriguing.

What’s more, Du Vernay is also reteaming with Selma producer and actress Oprah Winfrey on a new TV mini-series apparently inspired by Natalie Baszile’s novel “Queen Sugar”. Not much is known about the series, but Oprah will have a recurring role while producing while DuVernay will write, produce and direct the series.

• The chestburster scene in Ridley Scott’s Alien is one of the most iconic scene in movie history, and thanks to the newest episode in CineFix’s Art of The Scene series, we get to have an in-depth look at just how it was created. Including, how Scott got the actors to look surprised and not knowing what was happening, because, well, they were really surprised and didn’t know what was happening.

Frankly, I prefer my chestburster with a cane and hat, and some sweet dance moves though.

• And speaking of Alien… We’ve featured Jon Spaihts’ original Prometheus script on here before, and honestly I still believe it to be superior to the version of the movie we ended up getting after Damon Lindelof “fixed” the script on instruction from overpowered director Ridley Scott. One of the other reasons for this “fix” was the studio mandate that the movie had to distance itself more from the existing Alien mythology, despite the fact that Spaihts’ work started out as a straight-up Alien prequel. In the end, several of Spaihts’ strongest scenes were slashed entirely, including what sounds like a really awesome “chestburster sex-scene”. I’m not sure I used the word “awesome” correctly there.

• If you’re still trying to pretend that word of a planned Stargate reboot is all just a bad dream, well then I have some bad news for you. It’s being reported that the screenwriting duo of Nicolas Wright and James A. Woods have been tapped to pen the script for this new take on the 1994 sci-fi classic that will once again be helmed by original director Roland Emmerich. Wright and Woods clearly have a good relationship with Emmerich as they also wrote the script for his upcoming Independence Day sequel.

• Bonus poster of the day: Magic Mike XXL (expect the first trailer some time tomorrow).

• As we reported earlier in the week, it looks unlikely that Joss Whedon is going to stick around to direct more Avengers pics after Age of Ultron. While that thought is a bit disheartening for fans, I’m all in favour of it if it means Whedon gets to do his own original work again. Stuff like this crazy concept maybe:

“I will say that when I was thinking about, Well, if I wasn’t going to do Avengers 2, what would I want to do? — of course the first thing I thought of was “turn-of-the-century female Batman.” Not Batman actually. But, you know, something cool. One person. Can’t stress that enough. Movie about one person — not a team, not 10, just one. But [I would] do a nice sort of hard action movie that combined all my favorite things. Something that would be the love child of Sam Fuller and Edward Gorey. You know, I’ve had many thoughts since then. Oh, I could do this! Oh, I could do that! But it is my instinct to want to tell those stories.”

Well, holy hell, if that doesn’t sound awesome! Quick, Hollywood! Throw some money at him!

• And to end off today, we have a bit of NSFW WTF (feel free to add more consonants) as we take a scientifically accurate and very bloody look at classic children’s TV show Barney the Dinosaur. Seriously, this one is definitely not for kids.

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: February 4, 2015