Home Entertainment Extras! No World's End for SA, Matt Damon is up for an interstellar murder, There's an outbreak on your TV, Incredible first reactions to Gravity, Jessica Alba is a barely lethal villain, James Franco's Child of God gets teased, and Simon Pegg & Nick Frost get lucky! Plus much more!

Extras! No World's End for SA, Matt Damon is up for an interstellar murder, There's an outbreak on your TV, Incredible first reactions to Gravity, Jessica Alba is a barely lethal villain, James Franco's Child of God gets teased, and Simon Pegg & Nick Frost get lucky! Plus much more!

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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!

Hey, it’s a new clip from my favourite new Youtube channel thingy, Movie Phone Mangler, featuring a character from one of my favourite 80’s movies (Ed Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) engaging in a telephone conversation with my favourite cameo character of the last decade (Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder). All that needs to happen is for a tiny Burmese woman to give me a reinvigorating foot massage, and it will be all my favourite things!

Gravity doesn’t suck! Well it does when you’re talking about the electromagnetic force that stops you from being Superman, but when it comes Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity – one of my most highly anticipated movies of the year –  I’m happy to report that it is the very opposite of sucking. The film opened the Venice Film Festival yesterday, and to call the first reviews extremely positive is an understatement. Slashfilm has a great roundup of all the early reactions, but here are a couple of my favourites.

The Playlist:”The film’s technically perfect, of course, from the terrific sound design to the impeccable effects (the exact extent of the CGI is difficult to say, because pretty much everything looks photo-realistic, even when things head indoors). But it’s also cleverly written, and more than anything phenomenally directed, from the way that he uses every available surface to tell his story (someone’s going to write a book one day on the use of reflections in this film) to the way he and Lubezki shift the light to vary the color palette, preventing it from becoming repetitive. Almost every decision is inspired.”

HitFix: “Certainly, the unfeasibly mobile camera of Cuarón’s loyal, invaluable cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki seems drugged – or perhaps purely entranced – by its possibilities, gliding and weaving across seemingly impracticable distances with a deliberate fluidity that no previous screen depiction of weightlessness (whether in outer space or the subconscious hotel suites of Christopher Nolan’s mind) has come close to approximating. (You’d also have to go back to Wim Wenders’ “Pina” to find a film that demands this compellingly to be made and seen in 3D, and even that’s in a different ballpark.) When I stood up as the final credit rolled, I don’t mind admitting that I immediately had to sit down again, a Bambi-like wobble coursing through my limbs, as if I’d just re-encountered gravity myself. For sheer transference of experience upon the audience, I can think of no film quite like it.”

And now for some bad news. I’ve been holding onto this for a few days now as I was waiting on some more info (though some of you may have seen me mentioning it on twitter on Monday), but it looks like we’re not getting a local cinema release for The World’s End, the highly anticipated conclusion to Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frosts’ “Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy”. The film was originally slated for a November 15 local release, but after it suddenly dropped off the latest theatre release schedule we get given, I contacted the distributor, UIP, to find out what’s up.

Turns out they will no longer be bringing the film into the country at all (still no explanation given as to why). I’ve enquired about whether another distributor might pick up the rights and bring it in instead, and it looks like this is definitely possible, but nothing has happened in this regard yet. UIP have promised to keep me informed if the situation changes.

Until then you’re going to have to do your own alien invasion pub crawl. Sigh.

Uhm, excuse me, new poster for How I Live Now, but I do believe you’re doing it wrong. For a film about a girl forced to survive off the land (while finding love), after WWIII breaks out in England, this has to be the exact opposite of what I expected a poster to look like.

howilivenowpostersmall

Still on the fence about Ben Affleck as Batman? Don’t worry, the one voice of reason, that you’ve been waiting on this entire time to weigh in on the subject, has finally spoken! Here’s what Matt Damon had to say, including pre-empting the question you just know was on your mind since you first heard of his best friend landing the Dark Knight gig.

“I think it will be great. It will be terrific. I know there are a lot of people grousing on the internet. I just think it’s kind of funny. You know, he’s not playing King Lear. It’s Batman! Certainly within his skill set. If anybody saw ‘Argo’ or ‘The Town,’ and all the work he’s been doing lately, it’s way more nuanced and interesting and way more difficult than Batman! Batman just sits there with his cowl over his head and whispers in a kinda gruff voice at people. Bruce Wayne is the more challenging part of the role, and Ben will be great at that… But it’s safe to say I won’t be Robin.”

Damon also went on to talk about The Bourne Legacy, the Tony Gilroy directed spinoff from Damon’s Bourne series, starring Jeremy Renner.

“They were just trying to revitalize that franchise and I didn’t mind at all. It didn’t have anything to do with the movie that I made. It makes sense for a studio to keep those franchises as alive as they can, it makes business sense for them. I don’t begrudge anybody for that. I am a huge fan of Jeremy. I don’t equate my Bourne movie with his. He didn’t play the part of Jason Bourne. It’s a totally different thing.”

Speaking of Matt Damon (MATT DAMON!), not only will everybody’s favourite Team America puppet be joining Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar for a small undisclosed role that will only see him shooting on set in Iceland for two weeks of the film’s four month long planned shoot, but he’s also setting up his directorial debut, A Murder ForetoldThe film, written by Oscar winning Argo script writer Chris Terrio off a 2008 New Yorker article, tells the true story about a man who was gunned down in Guatemala, but who left behind a video tape implicating the then president, his wife and their powerful friends in his murder, prompting a special prosecutor to go digging into the sordid mess.

Want to be an actor but can’t afford acting lessons? Well, have no fear, Sir Patrick Stewart is here! He and girlfriend Sunny Ozell took to twitter/Youtube last night to offer a “masterclass” on the legendary quadruple take technique!

When I think of villainous unstable assassins, I think John Malkovich, Benicio Del Toro, Javier Bardem. I do not think of that cute girl whose best friend used to be a crime solving dolphin, but that’s apparently what we’re getting (okay, the grown up version) in Barely Lethal. Jessica Alba has joined the already cast Hailee Steinfeld and Samuel L. Jackson, in the Brett Ratner produced tale about “Megan (Steinfeld), a teenage assassin who is hunted by a former associate after she fakes her own death and enrols in a suburban high school.” Alba will play the villainous former associate, Victoria Knox.

Congratulations, terrifying female predator cosplay, you win the “Creep Kervyn the Hell Out” Award for today.

Marvel have unveiled a couple of new character posters for Thor: The Dark World that feature Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, and what appears to Chris Hemsworth’s cro-magnon cousin.

thor_poster_1

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Yo, 12 Monkeys TV series, looks like you have a friend. It’s being reported that E.R. executive producers Jack Orman and John Wells are looking to turn Wolfgang Petersen’s 1995 viral epidemic thriller Outbreak into a TV series on NBC. Orman and Wells are currently busy penning a pilot hoping for a full season pickup. The original starred Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding Jr., Rene Russo, Kevin Spacey and Donald Sutherland and followed the spread of deadly virus that threatens to wipe out humanity. It also introduced into the pop culture lexicon the term “carrier monkey”, a nickname I still regularly use for Darryn.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler has been serving up a banquet feast of greenbacks at the box office, has earned some solid reviews and even made Barack Obama cry. But not everybody is a fan of the film inspired by the true story of White House butler Eugene Allen. And it’s that “inspired by” bit that has them all worked up. Just ask Michael Reagan, son of ex-US President Ronald Reagan played in the film by Alan Rickman.

“My father was not a racist, but the whole story… is really a bogus story. Eugene Allen — whom I knew, by the way — is a guy who comes from segregated Virginia, gets a job at the White House, works there 34 years, retires in 1986.

“The story in the movie about Cecil Gaines, he was born and raised in Georgia, his mother was raped, his father was shot, he got a job at the White House, then he quit the White House to join a protest against America and what’s going on in Vietnam and race, which is the farthest from the truth about Eugene Allen”

“You could have done a movie just about Eugene Allen and it would have been a great movie about somebody working at the White House. But instead, Hollywood decided they want to make this about Ronald Reagan and disparage Ronald Reagan and others, and did the same thing to Eugene Allen’s wife. To sit there and take his wife, make her an alcoholic, as Oprah Winfrey did, and have her have an affair with the neighbor is outrageous.

“I hope people who go see it don’t believe it’s a true story. Once again, it’s a fictionalized account of a true person at the White House, but it’s written and directed by a person who, in fact, has another agenda, and that’s to disparage the memory of Ronald Reagan.”

My current earworm of choice has to be French electronica duo Daft Punk’s aural cocaine, Get Lucky. A trend has sprung up on the net of celebrities – even a certain US President – performing the unbelievably catchy song, so of course that means that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost will also have to give it a go. And they’re brilliant!

Last Updated: August 29, 2013

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