Home Entertainment Extras! 31 July 2014

Extras! 31 July 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!

  • True story: When Samuel L. Jackson was younger, he had a really bad stutter. One of the ways he overcame it was to use certain replacement words the moment he found himself starting to stammer. One of those words, was of course “motherf@$ker”. Jackson has since turned this bit of maternal profanity into his mantra and calling card, as he has said it A LOT in his movies. How many times exactly? 171 Times according to Huffington Post who not only broke down his “motherf@$ker” usage throughout all his movies, but also produced this chronological supercut of every single time he’s said it onscreen.

  • It seems as if the guys behind The Revenant are making this movie just for me, as they seem to be stocking it with all of my favourite people. A western which follows “a 1820s frontiersman on a path of vengeance against those who left him for dead after a bear mauling”, The Revenant is directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu (21 Grams, Babel) and already stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. And now they’ve gone and tweaked my interest even more (which I didn’t think was possible) by casting Domhnall Gleeson. The young Irish thesp rapidly became one of my favourite actors after Richard Curtis’ brilliant About Time, and is also set to have a starring role in Star Wars: Episode VII.
  • Oh no he di’int! Comedian T.J. Miller has seemingly gone an pulled a Megan Fox. And no, I don’t mean he’s had his thumbs surgically altered to look like toes. Miller has a short role in director Michael Bay current box office juggernaut Transformers: Age of Extinction, but while chatting to fellow comedian Doug Benson on his Doug Loves Movies (via JoBlo) podcast, Miller revealed that he’s not looking forward to working the Master of Bayhem again.

“Ya know, he has a specific way of communicating with people. Once he said to me, “Nothing that you’ve said is funny T.J.! Not one thing all day! We hired you to be funny! There’s 300 people here! None of them are laughing at you! Say something funny! I can still cut you out of the movie!” And I said, “Michael, I would love that because then I would be able to leave right this instant!” And he said, “Say something funny! You haven’t even made the Make-a-Wish kids laugh!” To be fair to him, I hadn’t, and they were standing there like, “This . . . was not our wish.” Then the second the cameras stopped rolling he would say, “Hey, do you wanna get sushi and grab drinks?” It was a very bi-polar experience.”

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  • Looks like Alex Kurtzmann has found his mummy. No, this isn’t some family reunion on the Oprah show though. After the recent announcement that Kurtzaman and Chris Morgan would be shepherding Universal’s planned shared-universe reboot of all their classic movie monsters, THR are reporting that Kurtzman has now taken the director’s chair on the upcoming reboot of The Mummy. That chair should still be pretty warm too, as the Jon Spaihts’ scripted project has already gained and lost Len Wiseman and Andres Muschietti before this.
  • There are many, many things about Guardians of the Galaxy that I love, but the one that was the most surprising, and which I probably hold the most affinity for, was Dave Bautista’s turn as Drax. He simply owns every scene he’s in with impeccable comic timing, which is quite surprising based on his professional wrestling roots. And according to this interview he did with GeekTyrant, it’s actually thanks to the WWE (but not in the way you think) that we can now get to experience the birth of new movie star.

“[I switched from wrestling to movies] because I fell in love with acting and the WWE told me that I couldn’t make films. [Laughs.] Well, because they have their own film division, they still do, at the time they were really starting to really dive into it, but none of their films included me. And I’d done a small part in a film called Wrong Side of Town as a favor to a friend, and I really kind of fell in love with it, and I wanted to pursue it. So I understood that they didn’t want to include me in any of their films, but I asked for permission to go and do stuff outside of the company and they wouldn’t let me, which I thought really sucked. Because it was one of those things where they decide who their superstars are going to be and they kind of push them accordingly, and their plans didn’t include me, and I thought it was kind of unfair. You know, why can’t I have these opportunities, it doesn’t seem right. So I said, well, if you’re not going to let me do it then I’m just going to leave the company, and so I gave them about 9 months notice and I left. Kind of went out on a limb and took a gamble.”

  • Chris Pratt now stars in my two favourite movies of 2014, and some Internet genius has just gone and made me stupidly happy by combining those two loves into this Guardians of the Galaxy trailer made in LEGO.

  • Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson did an AMA on Reddit and it was freaking awesome. The Hercules star covered a variety of topics like how he prepared for his role as the demi-god, and also about the importance of wearing turtle neck sweaters and fanny packs. His AMA was so awesome, it even resulted in an impromptu visit from Arnold Schwarzenegger who then expressed his desires for a team-up movie featuring The Rock and The Oak, while the Rock offered to be the villain in the next Expendables movie so that he could “hunt every single one of them down and tell them to ‘send your soul to heaven cause your ass is mine.'”
  • Thanks to Zooey Deschanel’s tweeting, we just got our first pic of the cast for Rock the Kasbah

And in case you don’t recognize them, that’s Bill Murray, Danny McBride, Zooey Deschanel, Bruce Willis and Scott Caan. The Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam) directed comedy follows “Richie Vance, a has-been rock manager who takes his last remaining client on a USO tour of Afghanistan. When Richie finds himself in Kabul, abandoned, penniless and without his passport, he discovers a young girl with an extraordinary voice and manages her through Afghanistan’s version of ‘American Idol,’ the wildly popular ‘Afghan Star.'”

  • Vin Diesel may have thought he scored the easiest gig in the world he landed the role of Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. I mean his script literally consists of more than the words “I Am Groot”. But apparently there was a lot more to it than that, especially when it came to being multilingual.

  • As if we needed any more reasons to love Tom Hiddleston, the Business Insider has posted this letter, found in Joss Whedon’s autobiography (imaginatively titled “Joss Whedon: The Biography”) which releases tomorrow. Hiddleston wrote the letter to Whedon after first having read his script for The Avengers, and his geeking out is just a joy to behold.

“Joss,

I am so excited I can hardly speak.

The first time I read it I grabbed at it like Charlie Bucket snatching for a golden ticket somewhere behind the chocolate in the wrapper of a Wonka Bar. I didn’t know where to start. Like a classic actor I jumped in looking for LOKI on every page, jumping back and forth, reading words in no particular order, utterances imprinting themselves like flash-cuts of newspaper headlines in my mind: “real menace”; “field of obeisance”; “discontented, nothing is enough”; “his smile is nothing but a glimpse of his skull“; “Puny god” …

… Thank you for writing me my Hans Gruber. But a Hans Gruber with super-magic powers. As played by James Mason … It’s high operatic villainy alongside detached throwaway tongue-in-cheek; plus the “real menace” and his closely guarded suitcase of pain. It’s grand and epic and majestic and poetic and lyrical and wicked and rich and badass and might possibly be the most gloriously fun part I’ve ever stared down the barrel of playing. It is just so juicy.

I love how throughout you continue to put Loki on some kind of pedestal of regal magnificence and then consistently tear him down. He gets battered, punched, blasted, side-swiped, roared at, sent tumbling on his back, and every time he gets back up smiling, wickedly, never for a second losing his eloquence, style, wit, self-aggrandisement or grandeur, and you never send him up or deny him his real intelligence…. That he loves to make an entrance; that he has a taste for the grand gesture, the big speech, the spectacle. I might be biased, but I do feel as though you have written me the coolest part.

… But really I’m just sending you a transatlantic shout-out and fist-bump, things that traditionally British actors probably don’t do. It’s epic.”

And here’s Whedon’s just as cool reply:

“Tom, this is one of those emails you keep forever. Thanks so much. It’s more articulate (and possibly longer) than the script. I couldn’t be more pleased at your reaction, but I’ll also tell you I’m still working on it … Thank you again. I’m so glad you’re pleased. Absurd fun to ensue.

Best, (including uncharacteristic fist bump), joss.”

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 31, 2014

3 Comments

  1. LOL!! You said “brilliant In Time.” WTF! Horrible movie but I think you meant About Time which was much better.

    Reply

    • Kervyn Cloete

      July 31, 2014 at 20:31

      Crap. You’re right. In Time was utter balls. Can’t believe that’s the same guy who made Gattaca.

      Reply

  2. Skyblue

    July 31, 2014 at 20:16

    I like how T.J. Miller says that the Make-A-Wish kids weren’t laughing.
    Most of these wrestlers become okay actors coz it’s all they do at WWE anyway. Not everyone has The Rock’s charisma though. Can’t wait to see Guardians this weekend.
    That Tom Hiddleston letter is pure awesome.

    Reply

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