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!
- To paraphrase a certain sci-fi hit, nobody can be told what Bayhem is, you simply have to experience it for yourself. Or watch this latest vid from the the Every Frame a Painting series where they look at technical side of director Michael Bay’s signature shots, and why his work should still be studied, even if his movies should be pointed and laughed at.
- Oh look, a news story about an Oscar that isn’t cluttering up your twitter timeline or has anything to do with a man screaming like a girl. The Academy – yes, that Academy – is suing the heirs of 1942 Oscar winner Joseph Wright, who auctioned off his golden statue for $79 200. According to Academy regulations, Oscar winners are not allowed to sell their statues without offering the Academy the right of first refusal to purchase them for $10. Look, rules are rules but c’mon: $10 or $79 200?!
- The scripts for the first five episodes of Doctor Who‘s upcoming 8th season have leaked online. I can’t say much more than that, because I sure as hell ain’t clicking that link.
- Posters of the Day: Gone Girl. There’s a new trailer for David Fincher’s latest thriller due later today, so to announce it these four “posters” have been unveiled that all feature pieces of evidence related to the mystery being solved in the film itself.
- One of the best parts about Season 1 of Agents of SHIELD’s massive back-half upswing in quality, was seeing Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson go from cool but bland quip machine to a far more layered – and angry – man, handed a huge responsibility even as all he knew was torn down around them (gee thanks, Captain America: The Winter Soldier!). And according to Gregg, that metamorphosis is far from over, as we’ll find out in Season 2.
“…The Agent Coulson who’s running this team post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, post-Hydra, post-being killed and brought back to life with something in him he doesn’t understand… He’s a very different Coulson than the guy who everyone knew. A lot of people who knew him in the old days say, “He’s different.” I think you would have to be different having gone through that stuff. So I think he’s reinventing himself and re-understanding himself as a person anyway, which is probably really necessary to taking in the new environment and figuring out what SHIELD ought to be in a way that it doesn’t get rotten again.”
“…Coulson got to watch himself pre-memory wipe describing why he thought the whole Tahiti Project was a bad idea. He was talking about all the things that were happening to the people they were using on it and why he suggested they can the whole thing – and looked pretty shaken while he was saying it. So I’ve got to suspect that some of the stuff he saw and some of those patients have some version of the stuff that’s going to happen to him. So we go from having no SHIELD at all, with a director on the run, to a tiny Guerrilla SHIELD with Agent Coulson at its head, and maybe not in his own right head. That sounds fun. That sounds like an interesting Season 2
- If you’re anything like me, you probably also avoided that previous Doctor Who link up yonder like an email from Darryn marked “Tasteful selfies”, but there’s no reason why you can’t check out this very brief little teaser for the upcoming season that doesn’t just hint the return of everybody’s favourite homicidal pepper pots in the Daleks (and maybe even the leader Davros), but also gives a nice look at Gallifreyan Time Lord anatomy. And not like that, you perverts!
- If you recall, once upon a time Guillermo Del Toro was all set for his adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness when he suddenly got cinematically cock-blocked by Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which was apparently telling a very similar tale. Originally Del Toro said he wouldn’t do the movie anymore, but then Prometheus came out and it was more Amateur-metheus (amirite?), and suddenly Del Toro was thinking about it again. And he’s still thinking about it. More specifically, he’s thinking about whether he can do it as a (more financially feasible) PG-13 movie, like he did with Pacific Rim for Legendary Films.
“I said to [Legendary], that’s the movie that I would really love to do one day, and it’s still expensive. I think that now, with the way I’ve seen PG-13 become more and more flexible, I think I could do it PG-13 now, so I’m going to explore it with [Legendary], to be as horrifying as I can, but to not be quite as graphic.”
“There’s basically one or two scenes in the book that people don’t remember that are pretty graphic. Namely, for example, the human autopsy that the aliens do, which is a very shocking moment. But I think I can find ways of doing it. We’ll see. It’s certainly a possibility in the future. Legendary was very close to doing it at one point, so I know they love the screenplay. So, we’ll see. Hopefully it’ll happen. It’s certainly one of the movies I would love to do.”
- Speaking of how to pull off horror stories, Screenrant’s Jeremy has a brontosaurus bone to pick with Hollywood and the way they’ve dragged the horror genre into the woods and massacred it. He thinks he knows how how to fix it though, and it will just take 10 easy steps.
- Damn that Bane. I mean, those kids practiced for weeks, and got all their families and friends to come support them and then just when it’s the biggest moment in the football game, he goes and collapses the entire stadium. What a douche move. Luckily, we don’t need an intact stadium, or even players buried under tonnes of rubble, to do a proper post-match analysis, because SPORTS!
- So after years of being stuck in development hell, fruitlessly chasing Bill Murray’s tail, it looks like Ghostbusters 3 is finally going to happen real soon. Maybe. Kinda. I mean, how do they expect us fans to be confident that this thing is actually more reality than pipe dream, if original star Ernie Hudson isn’t even sure exactly what’s going on.
“I think we’re going to start shooting in the fall, or maybe the spring…once again, it kind of changes a bit…and I’m always reluctant to say anything because they tell me one thing and then it doesn’t happen. It’s unfortunate, you know, [late actor-writer Harold Ramis] is not here. Harold was the glue…he was amazing. He was an icon. So you’re going to get a Ghostbusters, but obviously it’s going to be a Ghostbusters without Harold. It’s going to be different. So it has to be original and it has to be something that is worth all the 30 years of waiting.”
- Star Wars: Episode VII may have lost their Han Solo for a few weeks but at least they got two new… Well, we don’t know who they are yet, but at least one of them is a black female! (For those of you keeping count at home that now makes 4 ladies (2 of them black), 1 black guy, 1 latino guy, a whole bunch of white dudes and a partridge in a pear tree). Acting newcomer Crystal Clarke and Pip Andersen have now officially joined the cast (which had previously been heavily criticized for it’s lack of diversity), though their respective roles have not been revealed. Clarke, who will soon be making her debut opposite Pierce Brosnan the upcoming The Moon and the Sun, could possibly be up for the role of the mixed-race young girl that was rumoured to be Obi-Wan Kenobi’s granddaughter once upon a time. Andersen, on the other hand, is more well known for his parkour skills than his acting talents, having mainly shown off his freerunning in ads like this one for Sony, so chances are he’s probably got some kind of action-man role.
- The reason there are so many probably’s and maybe’s and rumoured’s in that previous news bite is because unless you’re cast and crew, you still know very little about the new Star Wars. Unless you’re also Kevin Smith, that is. The filmmaker and massive Star Wars nerd was given a tour of the Star Wars: Episode VII set recently, getting to mingle with the cast and see all the behind-the-scenes goings-on. And what he saw brought him to tears of joy. While Smith cannot give specifics and details, his descriptions of the design philosophies being employed and the way they’ve gone about recreating this world that has entranced millions of fans for decades, really gives a fanboy like me hope for this film.
Skip to the 35:00 minute mark to hear Smith’s account of his set visit.
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: July 7, 2014
