Home Entertainment Extras! 23 May 2014

Extras! 23 May 2014

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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’s veteran Hollywood studio MGM’s 90-year anniversary, and to celebrate, the studio have released this “High Octane” trailer, reminding us of everything they have done for the action movie genre over the last nine decades.

  • In X-Men: Days of Future Past, just as with pretty much any movie ever made in the history of movies, the moment time travel is thrown into the mix, some continuity issues rear their head, ripe for the nitpicking. And that’s exactly what /Film has done their look at the 5 Big Continuity Issues of X-Men: Days of Future Past.
  • When it comes to the ranking of things that I have no idea what they’re still doing here, in between Powerband bracelets and nipples on a man, you’ll find Adam Sandler. The “comedian” has been churning out painfully unfunny movie after painfully unfunny movie, in which he clearly does not care as long as he gets paid, for years now. And there’s a reason for that: Vacations.

Yes, while chatting with Jimmy Kimmel recently, Sandler has admitted with a straight face, what many of us have been suspecting for ages now: the movies he does are just paid vacations.

vintage-guardians-of-the-galaxy-fan-made

  • Blue Ruin, Green Room. Clearly, Jeremy Saulnier has a thing for colours (please note, easily offended racism police, I said colours). Coming off nothing but rave reviews for his debut revenge thriller, Blue Ruin, Saulnier has landed a financial backing deal from from Broad Green Pictures (again with the colours!) for his next film, Green Room. The thriller is said to follow “a punk rock band find [who] themselves trapped in a secluded venue after stumbling upon an act of violence, fighting for their lives against a gang of white power skinheads”.

White power? Okay, now the racism police can step in.

  • There’s a running joke on the internet about how while WB/DC kept struggling to find a way to make a relatable Wonder Woman movie, Marvel just said “That’s nice” and made a movie starring a talking raccoon and a giant living tree. But even with Marvel’s massive success and creative freedom, we have yet to see a female led superhero movie even from them. So what gives? Do audiences just not want see ladies save the world. Nope! As Film School Rejects so succinctly put it, it’s Badly Written Spinoffs and Not Gender that Killed Female Superhero Movies.

  • Yesterday was the birthday of Peter Mayhew, the lanky actor who has played Chewbacca in all the Star Wars movies. So to celebration, Uproxx took a look back at the creation of the famous Wookiee, and unless you’re some kind of freaky walking rug enthusiast, I bet you’ll be surprised by some of the facts (like how George R.R. Martin helped create his look).

“I have such regard for both Whitney’s and Bobby’s amazing talents and accomplishments, and I feel a responsibility in the telling of their story. Their humanity and bond fascinates us all.”

  • The Transformers have gone viral. And by that I don’t just mean that the movies will make you sick (though, with Michael Bay’s explosive track record, this is a distinct possibility if you’re epileptic). A series of new viral posters have popped up for Transformers: Age of Extinction, all focused on humanity’s ever-growing mistrust of the Autobots.
  • No matter how many times Darryn tries to trick me into watching it, I don’t think I will ever enjoy Tom Green’s gross-out comedy Freddy Got Fingered. And I’m not the only one, as the film was absolutely savaged by the critics, and most cinemagoers who chose to take their money elsewhere, when it was released back in 2001. But Green, whose career pretty much died after the movie, would like you to know that the film was nowhere near as much of a failure as you would think.

“The movie came out and it cost $14 million. It made $14 million. Everyone considered that to be a failure. The critical onslaught was immense. Everyone said it was the most puerile, offensive, grossest, worst movie ever made. It was very extreme. The weekend the movie came out. It’s not the blockbuster people had wanted it to be, but if you do the math, not as big of a failure as it seems. If a movie cost $80 million and make $14 million, that’s a failure. When a movie costs $14 million and it makes $14 million at the box office, then $30 million on DVD, which has not been reported by anyone. I have talked to the studio. The movie has actually profited. It’s not a financial failure. Nobody ever says that.”

Green also revealed that there was a longer cut of the movie, but that he had to excise some of the more out-there stuff to get it past the studio suits – which in the long run may have hurt the movie – even though some of the stuff he fought to keep in may have done his career no favours.

“The cut of the movie was about half an hour longer. It had a very dark soundtrack throughout. Some of the songs were the same, some different. There were scenes that were removed. A lot of it wasn’t just scenes; it was the length of scenes, the amount of time we held on certain shot. The tone was completely different. The movie’s choppy now. It was smooth all the way through. Important scenes were removed. Things were made shorter to make them less gross, less shocking, less strange—to keep it moving,”

“In hindsight, would I have done everything the same? I probably wouldn’t have, because I would have known the effect it would have on me and my ability to make another movie. I certainly wouldn’t have been as cutthroat in my firmness when it came to creative decisions—like walking away from a studio because they wanted to take a couple of scenes out of it.”

  • One of the biggest appeals of Twitter, is to be able to have direct, one-on-one communication with famous celebrities. Did I say “direct, one-on-one communication”? I meant “be an absolute mean dick to”, as Jimmy Kimmel points out in the latest installment of his brilliantly hilarious series of celebrities reading mean tweets about themselves.

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: May 23, 2014

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