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!
- Have you guys seen the new trailer for Fifty Shades of Grey, which finally brought in some sexy times? You know what’s more salivating than that? Fifty shades of chicken. No, that’s not a typo.
Damn, now I want to ravish some chicken!
- Do you think that the way that DC does their movie business by having different actors play different versions of the same character both on TV and movies, is kind of silly? Well, then you’re not alone as that’s how arguably DC’s biggest TV actor feels as well. Stephen Amell, who plays Oliver Queen aka the Arrow on Arrow, was especially miffed when DC revealed their new film slate, including a new Flash, when Grant Gustin’s TV Flash had just debuted a few weeks before that to much acclaim.
“I thought that the way that Warner Bros. announced the slate of DC movies could have been handled better. And I think someone like Grant Gustin, who has just launched an iconic character like the Flash to record-breaking numbers, numbers that far-surpassed Arrow’s numbers, he should have been given a wider berth than two episodes before another actor was announced to play his character. All that being said, that’s because I’m protective of Grant, and that’s because I think producing 23 episodes of superhero television is more difficult than producing a feature film. And it’s 23 episodes again, and again, and again.”
- Poster of the Day: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
- And staying with The Hunger Games… The late great Phillip Seymour-Hoffman passed away before he could finish shooting all of his scenes for the final two installments in the franchise. To get around his absence, director Francis Lawrence explains that they decided to rather rewrite portions of the script than to put Hoffman back into the movie using CG trickery.
“He had two scenes with dialogue that were left and we decided we didn’t want to try any kind of digital trickery with him, so we rewrote his scenes and gave his dialogue to other actors. So there was one scene from ‘Part 1′ and one scene from ‘Part 2,’ so we shot both movies back to back.”
“He was one of the greatest actors, I think, of all time and I just think to try to fake a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance would have been catastrophic and I would never want to do that. I just think this was the best way to be able to get around such a horrible thing.”
Okay, okay. I’ll be the one to say it, even though I know you’re all thinking it: So you can’t CG-fake Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance, but you can easily do it for Paul Walker?
- Did you watch Julie & Julia and wish that it was actually just & Julia? It seems that many fans of real-life iconic foodie Julia Childs were very taken with Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci playing Childs and her husband in the 2009 dramedy, but but didn’t care much for Amy Adams’ Julie Powell, upon whose book about her trying to replicate Child’s recipes the movie was based. So of course the Internet was there to oblige, as writer/director Adam Goldman has edited together all of Streep and Tucci’s scenes (leaving everything else on the cutting floor) into it’s own hour-long movie.
- Bonus poster of the day!: Mondo’s Back To the Future print
- I love science as much as the next man (especially if that next man is Darryn), but do we really need a scientific breakdown of why the Black Arrow would not be able to kill the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit movies?
- Daniel Bruhl has joined the cast of Captain America: Civil War, supposedly in some kind of villainous role. I say supposedly, because Marvel have released absolutely zero info other than to confirm him joining the production, and Variety is merely hearing whispers of his antagonist ways. BadassDigest have some theories as to who he could be playing though, and I kind of like what they have to say.
- If you’re as much of a fan of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Newsroom, West Wing, The Social Network, A Few Good Men) as I am, you would know that as brilliant as he can be, he is known for some Sorkin-isms, i.e. always making use of certain narrative/film devices. And here’s a whole lot of them.
- I know lots of people hate on awards shows, and, well, when it comes to the Hollywood Film Awards, they fully deserve to. The farcical awards – which is picked by 12 anonymous people! – had it’s first televised show over the weekend, and it ended up being the big joke everybody thought it would be. Variety has a wrap of all the highlights, including Johnny Depp accepting an award while drunk, Ben Affleck winning a category where he was the only nominee and Julianne Moore winning an award for a movie that nobody’s even seen yet.
- Gotham may take us back to a world before Batman ever showed up, but what if you wanted to go back even further, to before Gotham? Well, luckily there’s a show for that too. Or at least a parody of one. I give you Before Gotham Begins: Origins – The Beginning!
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: November 17, 2014
