Home Entertainment Extras! Racist Hunger Games fans are disappointed, Gandalf saves a pub, James Bond set gets blown up, Summer movie viewing guide and What will the new Turtles movie be called? Plus much more!

Extras! Racist Hunger Games fans are disappointed, Gandalf saves a pub, James Bond set gets blown up, Summer movie viewing guide and What will the new Turtles movie be called? 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!

Remember that dour English mansion glimpsed in the last Skyfall set pics? Well I hope you didn’t get too attached to it, not only because that is a completely creepy thing to do and you should probably seek professional help, but also because it just got destroyed in a raging inferno!

Not too worry though, it was all part of the plan, as the Daily Mail reports:

The film’s crew and designers spent months building the replica building in the middle of the English countryside to create the perfect mansion worthy of a secret agent.

But in true action film style, nothing ever stays standing or intact for too long.

And last night, James Bond’s countryside lodge was destroyed in a huge explosion as more scenes were filmed for the upcoming 007 film.

Director Jonathan Liebesman’s latest, Wrath of the Titans (see our review over here), is not even out yet, but he is already talking up his next project. In this case, a sequel to last year’s alien invasion actioner, Battle: LA.

“We’ve just started the script now, so that’s where we are. We have just begun the script. Just because I don’t want the studio to get pissed at me, I’m not sure what I can and can’t say about it. But what’s exciting is it sounds like the budget will be as big. They’re really going to make it an event.”

Based on both Wrath and Battle: LA it’s clear that Liebesman has master the art of Blow-crap-up-nojitsu, so I’m hoping that he takes some time to learn how to tell an actual story. After the live-action Turtles movie of course. With Michael Bay overseeing everything, there is no way in hell he is picking up any storytelling pointers on that set, except maybe how to relay the complex narrative of an explosion.

Speaking of Turtles, Bleeding Cool has scored a scoop confirming that Paramount’s working title for the live action reboot is just “Ninja Turtles”. Now the lack of “mutant” is certainly not surprising, but the fact that “Teenage” has now also been dropped faster than Megan Fox on a Michael Bay movie, is. Does this mean that the Turtles are no longer adolescents? Or is it only a matter of time before Bay and co realize that extraterrestrial ninjas is an even more absurd idea and the title just becomes “Turtles”?

Over the pond in the Indian motherland, England, there exists a little pub in the city of Southampton famously called The Hobbit. The pub has been happily trading under that name for the last 20 years, but now that a certain big budget movie is on its way, the Hollywood firm in possession of the Lord of the Rings rights, the Saul Zaentz Company, has legally threatened them with closure unless they either change their name or fork out for an annual licence fee.

After fans took to social media to express their outrage at SZC for this action, none other than Gandalf himself, Ian McKellen, got involved. The award winning actor described SZC’s actions as “unnecessary pettiness”. Fellow Hobbit actor, Stephen Fry, also took to twitter to describe affair as “self-defeating bullying” and he and McKellan have agreed to now pay the demanded licence fee so as to keep the pub’s doors open.

Thanks to Stark Industries (the real-world website, not the techno-industrial company from Iron Man), we have our first glimpse at the character posters for director Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man. These new posters for the Spidey reboot were spotted in Japan, I’m assuming by a fan on the street, but officially released images will probably be made available soon.

And yes, I know. Viva lo resolution!

One of the best things Sony ever did with the marketing for the original Men in Black was have Will Smith record a catchy as hell theme song. Even if you hated that sort of poppy rap music, you would still find yourself humming it under your breath, and its a well documented fact that every adult between the ages of 20 and 35 knows at least one line of the song. Unfortunately, Will Smith’s follow up title song for MIB2 was just like the film: far less memorable.

So now for MIB3, Sony has decided to eschew their Big Willy Style and instead offer the musical reins to Pitbull aka Mr Worldwide aka Mr 305 and the resulting song is… well, lets not beat around the bush here, its bloody atrocious. And when the dubstep bits kick in? Oh my sweet petunia, now I know why Pitbull is so sad. Even Paris Hilton’s musical career is pointing and laughing at this one.

But that’s of course just my opinion (the right one, I might add) so here, have a listen for yourself:

And because I know that you’re now desperately looking for something to cleanse out your ear canals, and that letter opener on your desk is starting to look mighty tempting, I think you need to be reminded of the fun catchiness of Smith’s original song. Also, good luck getting this out of your head for the rest of the day.

It’s almost time for the Hollywood equivalent of Happy Hour at your local drinking establishment. Yep, the Summer (or in our southern hemispherean case, Winter) movie season is almost upon us. This is the time of year where movie goers get bombarded with blockbuster after blockbuster, and it’s easy to not know exactly which movie you need to see next. Luckily for you, the guys over at HollyWonk have created this handy Summer Movie Guide:

We end today on some good ol’ fashion prejudice. Gawker has a sometimes hilarious, mostly infuriating article up about the reactions some so-called fans of the Hunger Games have had to viewing the film adaptation of their beloved books. It seems that these “fans” have taken to Twitter and Facebook, armed with an arsenal of upper-case letters, bad spelling and exclamation marks, to rage about how in the film version of Suzanne Collins’ story, “all the the good characters are black.”

Sigh…

None of these witless oxygen thieves take into consideration the fact that most of these “good characters” – Rue, Cinna and Thresh – are actually described in the book as being “dark skinned”. Yep, racism and reading skills; not good bed fellows.

Here’s a sample of some of the idiocy:

Ah, Internet, stay classy.

If you want to read the entire article, you can do so over here, just be warned that there is a massive spoiler if you’re not familiar with the books.

And on that note, I’m out of here. I’m off to go write a profanity laden tweet to Marvel about how the hell they could allow Robert Downey Jr to act as Tony Stark in Iron Man. I mean he was an aborigine, right? What’s with all this white boy crap?!

Last Updated: March 27, 2012

8 Comments

  1. Justin Hess

    March 27, 2012 at 17:14

    What the fuck was that shit? A collection of sounds clumsily slung together to vaguely approximate the notion of music. 

    I got as far as 50 secs and then I stopped. And by ‘stopped’ I mean flung the computer out the window of my office in a mad frenzy. In conclusion, that song by Pitbull is shit. Tremendous, tremendous shit

    Reply

    • Kervyn Cloete

      March 27, 2012 at 17:48

      I feel your pain, dude. To make yourself feel better, go watch that “Pitbull is sad” video that I linked above. That should brighten up you day.

      Reply

  2. Tracy Benson

    March 27, 2012 at 17:27

    Oh my word, those tweets. “lolol not to be racist buuuut” – that’s when you know the comment is going to be ridiculously racist. That’s like saying “no offense but…”, it actually means “I am going to offend you but you can’t say anything about it”. 
    Also, I didn’t throw a hissy fit when Denzel Washington played Lincoln Rhyme in The Bone Collector, even though the book character is described as pale with dark hair (the complete opposite of very-much-African-American Denzel freakin’ Washington). Why are people angry that dark skinned characters are being portrayed by dark skinned actors?

    Reply

    • Kervyn Cloete

      March 28, 2012 at 08:41

      Because they’re dumb. It’s that simple.

      Reply

      • Tracy Benson

        March 28, 2012 at 10:32

        Sigh. I know you’re right, it’s just… easy to lose faith in humanity when you see things like that. You wish that there was a better reason, but people really are just that dumb. 

        Reply

    • Gavin Mannion

      March 28, 2012 at 11:08

      I was taken by surprise that Rue was black as well, I didn’t notice it in the book and I’m actually midway through the trilogy right now.

      I don’t know if that makes me racist or a good person for not even noticing.. I couldn’t give a crap what colour the actors are as long as the movies are as good as the books

      Reply

      • Tracy Benson

        March 28, 2012 at 11:19

        I think it makes you a good person for not noticing, you care more about how the character is and what they do than what they look like. Most often authors don’t go out of the way to say “Oh by the way guys this person is totally black/hispanic/asian/ginger, it’s not even remotely related to their story arc or development, we just thought you’d like to know” because that’s pointless, it doesn’t matter in the long run. 

        Personally, I think it’s fine if you are surprised that a character doesn’t match how you thought they looked, but as long as they act like the character is supposed to it doesn’t matter. 

        Reply

        • Gavin Mannion

          March 28, 2012 at 12:00

          I think I’m a bit guilty of ignoring a lot of what the author says when they describe characters. I generally just picture them how I want them and then get horribly surprised at the movies 🙂

          Reply

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