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!
- Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s not exactly a cool name, sounding like the moniker given to the new, very posh member of the Cabbage Patch Kids. But would the Oscar-nominated actor actually be as famous if he had a boring old normal name?
- The Oscar-nominated American Sniper has been very divisive due to its politics, but where everybody seems to agree is that a fake baby used by Bradley Cooper in one scene is just terrible. This “Plastic Sniper Baby”, as it’s been dubbed, has been getting a lot of press and this has prompted Pajiba to draw up its own (hilarious) list of inanimate objects from other Oscar-nominated movies that should have received just as much attention.
- So, apparently Michael Mann’s latest film, the cyber-thriller Blackhat, is kind of crap. But what you’ll see on-screen in that movie is apparently only one of its problems as composer Harry Gregson Williams, who is credited to scoring the film, discovered when he attended the film’s premiere.
- Poster of the day: Children of Men
- I don’t know about Winter, but Game of Thrones fifth season is coming. And to mark the show’s return HBO will be presenting a new 30-minute featurette titled “Day In the Life”, which will follow the production crew shooting in three different locations in Northern Ireland, Croatia and Spain. Here’s a very brief sneak-peek of the vid.
- So in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” novel there’s an infamous sex scene involving a bloody tampon that would fit perfectly into the “unusual behaviour” description given by the MPAA when they recently gave the movie an R rating. But that scene – which you can read about HERE if want – is apparently not going to be in the movie. Phew. According to director Sam Taylor-Johnson, the inclusion of the polarizing scene was never even up for debate, but there are still plenty of other sex scenes that have made it in.
“It didn’t make it into the movie. It was never even discussed… [When it came to the amount of sex vs non-sex scenes in the movie], “I’d say it’s pretty 50/50. I think the sex scenes are integral to the story. They are not gratuitous. It tracks the story.”
Producer Michael De Luca does add though that the book’s hectic final scene will definitely be there though.
“The scene that we talked about a lot is the final scene, where Ana asks him to do the worst he can do to show her how bad it’s going to get .It’s the closest Christian comes in the first book to being his full dominant self. Jamie’s performance in that scene is a miracle. He really gets carried away in the moment.”
- Today sees the release of “Star Wars #1”, the brand new, officially in-canon comic book from Marvel. This is kind of big deal for the comic publisher, and this great breakdown on Star Wars’ comic book history tells you all about it.
- Once upon a time, Joss Whedon was going to make a Wonder Woman movie. But then – I assume – the execs at Warner Bros took truckloads of cheap narcotics and decided that they didn’t want money or fans and stuck the film in never-ending holding pattern until Whedon got tired of it, walked away and went to make Avengers for the competition. Very little of that stalled movie has ever been revealed, but now two pieces of promo art owned by legendary artist Adam Hughes have popped up as part of an auction to raise funds for a worthy cause.
- Are you boycotting The Interview in the name of your Glorious Leader? Well, then you’ll be happy to know that although it was Sony’s biggest online movie ever, it actually still didn’t make a profit. In fact, despite it being labelled as some kind of triumph for digital distribution, some basic accounting shows that the movie would have made more money had it actually received a traditional release! This hasn’t deterred Sony though, who have just announced that the Seth Rogen and James Franco comedy will be hitting Netflix this coming weekend.
- I don’t really anything about Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, other than the fact that his name is a mouthful, but I feel kind of sorry for him. The reason for my sympathy: Nicolas-Troyan has been tapped by Universal to replace the recently departed director Frank Darabont on upcoming sequel The Huntsman. Those are some scary big shoes to fill. Nicolas-Troyan does have one thing in his favour though, as he actually served as second-unit director and visual effects artist on the previous film Snow White and the Huntsman, so he’s already familiar with this world and cast.
- The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise may have started off really strong – giving Johnny Depp his best role in years – but four films in, it looks better suited to Davy Jones’ locker, you savvy? But with Disney working on a sort of soft-reboot of the series with the in-development fifth film, subtitled Dead Men Tell No Tales, it’s time to take an honest look back at just how the franchise went from swashbuckler to scurvy sea dog.
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: January 21, 2015
