Extras! 14 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!

• The MTV Movie awards happened last night, and during the ceremony a very poignant and touching tribute video was shown for Paul Walker, the late star of the Fast & Furious franchise. Of all the awards shows, this is one probably the most fitting platform for all the “in memoriam” vid of Walker, as Fast & Furious was a firm favourite here.

• If you want to know what else you may have missed at the MTV Awards (like Seth Rogen French kissing his mother), then EW has you covered with all the highs and lows from the ceremony.

• Much like Keanu Reeves in 1999, Baz Lurhmann knows kung fu. Or at least he might. Proving that he just will not be shoehorned, the genre hopping director is apparently contemplating helming a feature film adaptation of Kung Fu, the 1970’s TV series about a Shaolin monk who travels the American Old West in search of his brother. In typical Hollywood fashion, this kung fu fighting Shaolin monk was not played by Bruce Lee, who some believe actually came up with the idea, but David Carradine, a white guy from California.

If he should take it on, Lurhmann would also rewrite John “Black Swan” McLaughlin’s script. This new version would also the monk, Caine (or “young grasshopper” as his master  famously called him) in search of his father in China, not the Old West.

• Poster of the day: Carry On X-Men (which is not a real thing, but totally should be!)

• The Force is not strong with Benedict Cumberbatch. The Sherlock star has long been rumoured to be up for a part in director JJ Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII, but according to Cumberbatch, although he really would want the gig, it’s just not happening. And neither will he be popping up Doctor Who (Oh, fiddlesticks!)

“I would’ve liked a part in JJ’s new Star Wars but it won’t happen sadly.”

“I’m never gonna play The Doctor, & nothing to do with the Whoniverse.”

Now, not that I want to build your hopes up unfairly, but you might do well to remember that this is the same guy – with the same director – who told anybody that would listen that he was not playing Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness and then totally was. Make of that what you will.

• There aren’t that many nice things that can be said about Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, but one of them – for me at least – is that I kinda dug the way Venom was translated onto the screen. I am of course referring specifically to Spidey’s black symbiote costume here, and not that guy from That 70’s Show playing a character that is supposed to be a walking mountain of muscle. But apparently (shocker!), not everybody agrees with me on this, as some people would have preferred to see a black costume that more closely resembles the comics. But had these people got their wish, we may have seen Spider-Man running around in what was essentially just one mouth-zipper shy of a gimp suit.

• Writer-director James Gunn has been dropping some details about his upcoming offbeat Marvel space adventure Guardians of the Galaxy, confirming that not only will we get to see Thanos again (he was that purple guy in the post-credit scene of Avengers that caused all your comic geek friends to void their bowels in excitement with just one grin), but that the mad Titan will be portrayed on-screen using motion capture. Gunn also refers to him as “the head of the snake”, probably referring to Thanos being the suspected puppet master behind many of the calamities in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Just don’t expect that head to completely reveal itself any time soon. Guardians may very well be the last film before Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron signals the end of Marvel’s Phase Two, but according to Gunn, his film is actually “directly connected to Avengers 3.”

• Inseparable best friends Sirs Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are the very antitheses of grumpy old men. Well, besides for the “old” and “men” part, of course. The point is, they are just all around awesome guys who are always doing something entertaining together, even when that something is playing the Newlywed Game and proving that just because they hang out all the time, doesn’t mean they actually know that much about one another.

• It always feels kind of weird to me when people answer the question “Who’s the best James Bond?” with anything other than “Sean Connery”. It feels even weirder when they say “Pierce Brosnan”. Not that I have anything serious against Brosnan’s Bond (his adventures boast some of my favourite Bond moments), and also realize that for a whole generation of filmgoers he was James Bond for the longest time. It’s just that he was given some of the worst Bond scripts to work with (invisible cars, anyone?), on top of which, I always felt that the producers never allowed him to be as ruthless as Connery, or even as suave as Moore. And apparently Brosnan agrees with me.

“I felt I was caught in a time warp between Roger [Moore] and Sean [Connery]. It was a very hard one to grasp the meaning of, for me. The violence was never real, the brute force of the man was never palpable. It was quite tame, and the characterisation didn’t have a follow-through of reality, it was surface. But then that might have had to do with my own insecurities in playing him as well.”

“I have no desire to watch myself as James Bond. ‘Cause it’s just never good enough. It’s a horrible feeling.”

• Emma Stone, besides for just being effortlessly charming and cute as a button, is also a gigantic Spice Girls fan. Like, GIGANTIC. Stone and her co-stars Andrew Garfield and Jamie Foxx are currently busy promoting the upcoming release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in England aka Spice Girl Homeland, which has given talk show host Graham Norton the opportunity to arrange something very special for her.

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 14, 2014