Extras – 04 March 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!

It seems that the whole movie world is still Oscars crazy (well, except for James) so I guess we better follow suit. On Sunday night, the Oscar for Best Animated Short was handed out to Laurent Writz’s Mr Hublot, and now this rather charming little film is available for you to watch online.

Captain America may have superhuman stamina, but even he needs to a break sometime. Well, a break from acting to maybe direct more, that is, as Captain America star Chris Evans explained recently.

“I think when I’m done with this Marvel contract, I’ll take a little break from acting. With acting, you’re one piece in a very big puzzle. It’s like you helped buy a gift but you don’t know what the gift is, so you come back and see the movie. Sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s tragic. This process [directing], you’re involved in every single decision. If I hadn’t done it, I’d be really kicking myself. At the time, it was a daunting task for a number of reasons, but in hindsight it was the right move.”

Until that break though, Evans still has to don the star spangled costume a few more times, something that he’s happy he chose to do, as Captain America is unlike many other superheroes out there.

“He doesn’t have demons. He’s not Batman, he doesn’t struggle with inner turmoil. The nature of this character is that he puts himself last and helps the common good. So he could easily slip into a world of boredom. The blessing and curse of Captain America is that he doesn’t have that fancy an ability. He doesn’t live in another world, or turn green. He doesn’t have bells and whistles, he doesn’t shoot missiles. He punches and kicks.”

Speaking of superpowered people that also punch and kick – and spin webs – here are two new motion posters for The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Now for some rather sad Oscar related news. Barkhad Abdi, the first time actor who was recently nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as a Somali pirate leader in Captain Phillips, is flat out broke. In a recent New Yorker article (via The Wrap) it was revealed that Abdi was paid just $60, 000 for his role in the $210 million grossing movie. And with Captain Phillips actually having wrapped more than a year ago, that money is already gone. Now that paycheck is actually not that surprising for a first time actor, but you would think that Sony Pictures could at least throw Abdi a bit of a bone here, especially now that he’s generated so much award buzz for the film.

They’ve provided him with a hotel allowance, clothes on loan and a town car to use when in Los Angeles to promote the film, but other than that Abdi has spent the last few months working in a friend’s mobile phone shop in Minneapolis, struggling to make ends meet.

Besides for being a great actress, Anna Kendrick is also quite the songstress. She’s shown off her pipes (not like that, you perverts!) in Pitch Perfect, will be doing it again in that film’s sequel and has the upcoming Broadway musical adaptations for Into the Woods and The Last Five Years, but now she’s done with musicals. Why? Because they’re f–king hard and she just wants to drink a cold one, that’s why!

“I never want to sing again, honestly. It’s hard as f-ck. The ‘Pitch Perfect’ [sequel] is going to be fine, ten girls have to be able to sing the songs so it’s going to be fine, but doing ‘The Last Five Years’ and then ‘Into the Woods’ straight away, I was like, I don’t want to have to think about my voice so much. I want to be able to drink beer whenever I want.”

And you can file this one under “Because they can, that’s why!”. A new XXX parody of The Big Lebowski is being released, and apparently instead of just the normal bow-chikka-bow wow, wham bam thank you ma’am style of normal pornos, this one is claiming to stay pretty true to its source, using the original dialogue, proper costumes and make-up and even boasts character development (and I don’t just mean developing one part of a character’s anatomy!). Here’s the completely Safe For Work trailer to the parody, because I know you want to.

Sony Pictures are going to make a Viking Santa Claus origin film, and honestly, if I had just read that sentence fragment, I would have been happy enough. The studio has paid $1 million to acquire the rights to the spec script titled Winter’s Knight, which will be directed by Kon-Tiki‘s Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg, and penned by newcomers Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton. The story is thought to be based on Wizard of Oz writer L. Frank Baum’s 1902 book, “The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus”, and will be a Viking mythology based origin story of ol’ St. Nick.

It’s unknown how much Lustig and Thornton will borrow from the book (which is now in the public domain, and therefore rife for pilfering), but here’s a short description of book which should give you an idea of some of the story concepts.

Santa Claus, as a baby is found in the Forest of Burzee by Ak, the Master Woodsman of the World, and placed in the care of the lioness Shiegra. The Wood Nymph, Necile, breaks the law of the forest and takes the baby because she desires to raise a child of her own as mortals do, convincing Ak that since he made the law, he can allow an exception, and agrees to have both Necile and Shiegra care for the baby. Necile calls him Claus, meaning “little one” in the old Burzee language, but Queen Zurline gives him the more formal name Neclaus, “Necile’s Little One” (According to a footnote “Nicholas” is an erroneous name based on common convention). He is educated by the immortals of the Forest, including: The Fairies who watch over humans, The Wood Nymphs who watch over trees, The Gnomes who watch over rocks, The Knooks who watch over animals, The Ryls who watch over flowers, The Sleep Fays who bring sleep to the world, The Light Elves, The Sound Imps, The Wind Demons and The Water Spirits.

Upon reaching young adulthood, Ak decides it is time for Claus to see how other mortals live. He sees war, brutality, poverty, child neglect and child abuse and is frustrated by mortals’ very existence. Ak encourages him not to shy away from the mortals, because he is one, and must learn to live among them, as he cannot reside in Burzee as an adult. He settles in the nearby Laughing Valley of Hohaho, where the immortals regularly visit and assist him, and Necile gives him a little cat named Blinky.

Easily one of the highlights of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was the fantastic barrel chase scene. There were so many moving parts to that scene, that I always knew that director Peter Jackson clearly had his work cut out for him, but little did I know just how much work that was. Like for example, the fact that the 7-minute long action sequence actually had to be edited down from 98 minutes worth of footage! You can check out more amazing facts about the scene in the vid below.

Hey, did you guys hear that the rules have changed? I don’t know which rules and what they’ve changed into, but when a dirty Mark Wahlberg brandishing what appears to be a giant space sword-gun tells you something, you listen. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Then check out these first two (surprisingly robot-free) posters for Transformers: Age of Extinction, which features the aforementioned Wahlberg and Jack Reynor.

While Gravity may have resulted in an acute drop in people dreaming of becoming astronauts (I don’t know about you guys, but playing dodgeball with a meteorite death shower doesn’t sound like my idea of a fun time), it’s actually been a hit with real astronauts. So much so that after the film cleaned up at the Oscars, walking away with 7 golden statues, NASA themselves issued some messages of congratulations straight from space!

Let nobody ever again say that the guys at Neflix don’t have a sense of humour (not that I’m actually sure that anybody has ever said that before, but let’s just roll with it). Now you may recall Amazon’s Drone delivery service idea that they showed off not too long ago. Well the guys at Netflix have decided to crack it, with some funny results.

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: March 4, 2014