Extras! Christmas gets Greasy, Del Toro talks Frankenstein, Tom Jenkins and Simon Sharp will be Giants, Olivia Wilde butters Ashley Greene, Paramount boards the Vessel and Natalie Portman wants to be the Last Witness code named Sasha! Plus much more!

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!

Here’s a new NSFW clip from Butter, which starts off with a scantily clad Olivia Wilde pole dancing and then gets even more raunchy from there. Spoiler: She gets very friendly with Ashley Greene. Why are you still even reading this sentence?

According to E! Online, the Iron Man 3 trailer will be appearing online at 12:01 am on October 23. Synchronize your watches! (I always wanted to say that)

Remember that earlier post about how Lynne Ramsay is going to make a “Moby Dick in deep space” movie? Well, fan favourite director turned hack M. Night Shyamalan has sort of the same idea. It’ll just take place closer to home. A lot closer. Called “Lost Horizon” it will be a TV series that transplants the classic tale to the American East Coast. Way to be ambitious, Shyama-lame.

If you ever needed proof that the Mayans were right, this is it: John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John will be releasing a Christmas album. And if that thought alone was not horrifying enough, just have a look at the album cover.

I ain’t sleeping tonight. It’ll just be creepy smiles and LEGO hair!

Guillermo Del Toro loves himself some monsters. And while he’s still busy with his monsters vs mech movie, Pacific Rim, and his next project is already set to be Beauty and the Beast, he’s looking past that to even more monstrous projects. He spoke to ShockTillYouDrop about his proposed adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and whether or not his version would remain faithful to the novel:

“I think the moment that the only quality you can claim is faithfulness… It’s a very difficult, tricky slope. Because then anytime that you deviate from that, you’re betraying the very goal you submitted. I’m being very faithful to trying to encompass the whole narrative of the novel. I’m being very faithful in that I’m trying to capture the spirit of the novel, when I read it as a kid, and how it impacted me. I recognize that it’s both biography and prophecy about my life. It’s a very personal film. In many ways it’s the most personal film I’ll ever make, because my connection with the creature is very profound and deep and I don’t think there’s any other monster that has affected me as much.

Del Toro also gave an update of sorts on the Hulk TV series that he’s supposed to be producing:

“Right now all I know is the official word I was given is that there’s a writer they want. They are very interested in me meeting with him. He’s very, very busy. The official word is we are holding, but I don’t know… After AVENGERS having the success it had, perhaps the fate of the project may change. Right now officially what I know – and I’m not hiding anything off the record or anything – is that we were told we were waiting for this writer, and we were going to do it with him.”

When asked if he would direct the pilot for the series, he responded with the following:

“Of course. The reason is that the superheroes I like and that I would like to get involved with are all monsters. Be it Swamp Thing, Etrigan [the Demon], Doctor Strange – which is not a monster, but… [A dark fantasy saga].  Certainly supernatural. I would love to do Morbius [the Living Vampire], Blade – they have to be monsters for me to be involved.”

Here’s a new poster for indie drama The Sessions. While it may appear to be just whimsical at first, the poster takes on rather different subtext the moment you realize what the movie is about.

Based on the poignantly optimistic autobiographical writings of California-based journalist and poet Mark O’Brien, “The Sessions” tells the story of a man confined to an iron lung who is determined at age 38 to lose his virginity. With the help of his therapists and the guidance of his priest, he sets out to make his dream a reality.

“Wow. I never thought The Avengers would sell well on DVD and Blu-Ray” said nobody. Ever. According to the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert charts, the home version of the blockbuster not only came in at no.1, but sold 34 times more copies than no.2, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

Natalie Portman has certainly been keeping busy since she returned from maternity leave. She’s going to be shooting up some outlaws soon in Jane’s Got a Gun, but she’s already eyeing two more future projects. One is Last Witness, where she would be a psychologist helping out the amnesiac lone survivor of a cafe bombing.

The other, and more exciting sounding project, is Code Name Sasha, which would see her as a single mom who also happens to be a lifelong petty criminal, who is asked by the FBI to go undercover and take down the world’s biggest gun running operation, in exchange for being given a clean slate.

If you didn’t get enough Vitamin Beatdown in your diet today, then you may need to head on over to i09 where they’ve done a roundup on 27 of the Most Insane Martial Arts Battles Ever Filmed. Just wait until you get to the part where guys use acne as a Kung Fu technique

Just in case you forgot what Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe looks like, here’s a very lazy poster for Broken City to remind you.

If you fancy yourself clever, then head on over to WB’s official site for The Hobbit, where they’ve launched a new interactive game that allows you to play Riddles in the Dark. No, you don’t get an all powerful ring if you win.

Short film makers Tom Jenkins and Simon Sharp are set to write and direct Giants, a movie about “an alien race known as Giants on planet Gigantus [who] are attacked by a foreign spacecraft, which prompts a team of soldiers to embark on a mission to Earth in order to wage war. The aggressors are taken aback when they realize while they were giants on their home planet, they are 1/4 inch tall compared to earthlings, and the foreign spacecraft that attacked them was actually a loose screw from the Hubble telescope. The giants land in a nerdy kid’s yard, and through a series of events bond to save the world.”

I’ve seen this movie before. It starred Eddie Murphy and was so unfunny I contemplated defenestrating myself. Lets hope that doesn’t happen again.

Speaking of short films… Clark Baker’s rather impressive short film Vessel (we featured it over here) is being turned into a feature film by Paramount Pictures. The Grudge and Texas Chainsaw 3D scribe Stephen Susco will be developing the script.

Agnes Bruckner has landed the lead role of in an Anna Nicole Smith biopic for Lifetime, titled The Anna Nicole Story. IMDB tells me she’s had a string of supporting roles in various TV series and movies over the last few years, but I think I’ll still need to hit Google image search to see if she’s…. qualified enough. For research.

And we end today on a rather impressive and thought provoking short film titled Lost Memories. Written, directed and produced by French filmmaker Francois Ferracci, it’s set in Paris in 2020 and looks at how far our civilization’s integration into the digital realm could progress in the future.

Paris, 2020. A beautiful couple, a city over-saturated by holograms and digital stream. A polaroid camera. Tomorrow will never be the same.

Last Updated: October 4, 2012