Home Entertainment Extras! Rupert Wyatt maybe ditching the Apes, Max Landis is Vigilant, Sam Neil and Rosamund Pike have A Long Way Down, Night (Court) Moves, Fuji no film, and Blake Lively has clearly never seen Good Will Hunting! Plus much more!

Extras! Rupert Wyatt maybe ditching the Apes, Max Landis is Vigilant, Sam Neil and Rosamund Pike have A Long Way Down, Night (Court) Moves, Fuji no film, and Blake Lively has clearly never seen Good Will Hunting! 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!

We kick off today with a bit of a “What if…” Besides for the absolutely horrible casting of Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane, if there was one thing that always bugged me about Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man it was the look of the Green Goblin. The “helmet with a face” look just made no sense to me, especially when the guy under it, Willem Dafoe, was naturally already halfway there to translating the character’s look from the comic to the screen (Oh, you know it’s true). Now we get a glimpse as to what could have been with this previously unseen test reel, where through a combination of prosthetics and animatronics, the Green Goblin is truly brought to life.

Well here’s some news to make you fling your poo. While most people expected last year’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes to be, well, crap, it actually ended being one of the best blockbusters of the year, and a lot of that was due to relative newcomer Rupert Wyatt’s great directing. But now it looks like Wyatt might not be returning for the sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. According to Deadline’s sources, Wyatt is not happy with the tight filming schedule that FOX has mandated for the film. At this point his non-involvement is not confirmed yet, but I certainly hope that something can be worked out to allow him to stay on.

Chronicle screenwriter and consumer of far too much caffeine, Max Landis, is apparently going to do more than just make fun of Superman’s death, as he and Homeland writer/producer Howard Gordon will be producing a new superhero theme TV series for FOX titled Vigilant. The show is billed as “a ‘superhero’ origin story told through the unlikely point of view of a smart 20-year-old woman who happens to be a social outcast. After an honorable veteran detective is brutally coerced into working for the corrupt head of Internal Affairs, the detective’s daughter plans her revenge by creating a fictional vigilante persona to take on the criminal elements within the police department and the city.”

All of which sounds very much like a run of the mill superhero story, something which Landis was very quick to dismiss on Twitter:

@Uptomyknees: “No spoilers, but calling  a “super hero show” is a lot like calling Taxi Driver a pre-cursor to Spider-Man 3.”

@Uptomyknees: “Calling  a superhero show is like saying Luther was inspired by Judge Dredd”

Make of that what you will.

Here’s the first poster for new horror movie Smiley, which sounds like the Mxit version of Candyman. Only not scary.

After learning of an urban legend in which a demented serial killer named “Smiley” can be summoned through the Internet, mentally fragile Ashley (Caitlin Gerard from “Magic Mike” and “The Social Network”) must decide whether she is losing her mind or becoming Smiley’s next victim.

Am I the only one that immediately gets reminded of Arseface from Preacher when I see that?

And here’s on rather large nail to pound into the digital vs film coffin. As of March 2013, Japanese film giant Fujifilm will start to halt production of cinema film at all its facilities, as they effectively cannot compete with digital anymore.

Night Moves, the Kelly Reichardt directed thriller starring Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard, about eco-terrorists who try to blow up a dam, may just be blowing up itself.  And not in a good way. The production has been sued by Edward R. Pressman Film, who claim that Night Moves “is a blatant rip-off of the popular Edward Abbey novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, which is about to be turned into an authorized film from the Catfish team of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman.”

And I got to admit, it sounds kind of fishy:

“By way of example only, both works feature the targeting of a dam for destruction by means of ammonium fertilizer-laden boats. In the Novel, the principal bomb-maker is a beer-guzzling veteran who served overseas as a Green Beret, where he acquired his knowledge of explosives. The bomb-maker in ‘Night Moves’ is a beer-guzzling veteran who served overseas as a U.S. Marine, where he acquired his knowledge of explosives. Both the Novel and ‘Night Moves’ also feature a 20-something woman who starts out as a companion of another member of the group but develops a sexual relationship with the bomb-making veteran, despite his initial objections to her participation in the group’s illegal activities.”

Rosamund Pike and Sam Neil will be joining Pierce Brosnan, Toni Collette and Aaron Paul for A Long Way Down. The film is an adaptation of the Nick Hornsby’s novel which sees four strangers meeting on a rooftop on New Year’s Eve, all with the intention of committing suicide.

Isn’t that always the case? Just when you build up the nerve to fling yourself off a building to your death, there ends up being a queue!

I think it’s safe to say that most of us weren’t very taken with the new Robocop suit unveiled over the weekend. Well thanks to some new set pics, at least we know that he’ll be driving a pretty cool looking car.

That certainly goes a long way to remove the bad taste lef- Oh, wait. No. There it is again.

Producers Vincent Sieber and Clark Peterson have bought up the film rights to James “LA Confidential” Elroy’s latest novel, Blood’s A Rover. Here’s the synopsis for the book:

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover’s pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover’s racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow—ex-cop and heroin runner—is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan—and each of them will pay “a dear and savage price to live History.”

Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it—our recent past razed and fully reconstructed—Blood’s A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.

If you’re hoping for some more of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, then you might be interested in this (rather small) update, courtesy of Jude Law who plays John Watson to Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes in the films:

There’s certainly talk of it, and I know there’s a script being played around with, but Downey’s a busy boy and I’m a busy boy so we’ll see. But we want to [do another one]. We’re a very happy team and we have a lot of fun and we also think there’s still a lot of legs in the duo.”

Here’s the final poster for Ben Affleck’s latest film, Argo, which has been receiving some stellar reviews on its current festival circuit run.

Speaking of Ben Affleck, the actor turned director gave a pretty good interview over on Details where he spoke about a number of things such as being labelled a “70’s styled filmmaker” and his early collaborations with Matt Damon. He also spoke about how he went from Razzie nominee to award winning, critical darling director:

“I made a bunch of movies that didn’t work. I was ending up in the tabloids. I don’t know what the lesson is, except that you just have to find your compass.  I liked SUM OF ALL FEARS.  DAREDEVIL I didn’t at all. Some movies should have worked and didn’t. At a certain point, it’s just up to the movie gods. Anyway, this image becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I just said, “I don’t want to do it anymore. This is horrible. I don’t want to be in this spotlight, this glare, in this way. It’s tawdry, it’s ugly, it’s oppressive, and it’s inane. So I’m going to try to get away,” said Affleck.

He continued, “And most of the way I did that was by not acting. I said, ‘I’m going to steer myself toward directing. I’m going to do something that takes me toward a place where the work that I do is reflective of what I think is interesting dramatically.'”

“You know, putting on the uncomfortable, cheesy suit—I understood that. And I understood what it was like to feel limited by perceptions and having ambitions to do things that were more interesting.  And also, I got married, and I got older. And had kids. You know, the current of the river of life moves you downstream anyway. But I definitely reject the narrative that says, you know, Bad Guy Turned It Around. My life isn’t Behind the Music. I wasn’t a criminal!”
He then also told this rather embarrassing story about Blake Lively:
“When I was doing THE TOWN, I’d tour the actors around Boston. I was with Blake [Lively], and I saw Matt’s childhood home. And I said, “Oh yeah, that’s where Matt grew up.” And she said, “Who?” And I said, “Matt Damon.” And she said, “Oh my God! You know Jason Bourne?!” She really didn’t know. And I thought, “There it is. The first age of people who are adults who missed the whole Matt-and-Ben propaganda campaign!” Mostly, it just made me feel old.”

And we end today on this rather amazing anime inspired Star Wars animation created by Youtube user Otaking77077. He uploaded the film yesterday, but then promptly removed it again, as it was not done yet and completely lacking in sound. But the internet is a wonderful place and in the short time it was up, a couple of people managed to copy it, and one such person then re-uploaded it again, complete with Star Wars sound effects now added in.

It’s still pretty rough, and as Otaking77077 mentioned in the video’s comments, he meant to just upload it for a few people to see as it’s still very much a work in progress, it’s nonetheless already pretty impressive looking and makes me very excited for the finished product.

Last Updated: September 18, 2012

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