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!
So I’ve been having a bit of crappy work week, which already soured my mood, but then I’m also suffering from some bad sinus headaches and all of Cape Town is going through some truly miserable weather. And it’s all Samuel L Jackson’s fault. Yes, everything. Even your raging alcoholism and teenage daughter’s smoking problem.
Will Smith too expensive for your highly anticipated movie sequel? No problemo! There’ll be a younger version of him around any minute now, and it looks like director Roland Emmerich has found his. Fruitvale Station star Michael B. Jordan has apparently met with the director to discuss a lead role in Independence Day 2. No formal offer has yet been made for the role but according to reports Twentieth Century Fox execs “like Jordan for the part — his name has been thrown around repeatedly in creative meetings — and Jordan is interested.”
A duo of new posters (courtesy of EW) are out for Thor: The Dark World featuring an ex-Doctor and an ex-President, in Christopher Eccleston’s bad guy Malekith and Idris Elba’s badass Heimdall.
As somebody who comes from an IT background, I always cringe at how computer systems are represented in movies, and there are very few serial offenders quite like sci-fi. My favourite – and by that I mean it drives me googly-eyed in fury – is the ubiquitous wall of random flashing lights. Because flashing lights mean COMPOOTAHZ R DOIN STUFFS, YO!
Unfortunately this is only sci-fi faux pas, and you can read all about it and a few more in Cracked’s list of 6 Pieces of Sci-Fi technology That Make No Sense.
Man of Steel scribe David Goyer has sure been chatty lately, and now he’s got to gabbing about videogame movies, specifically: why they tend to mostly suck.
“I think the reason is actually pretty simple: most good video games are about immersive environments. If it’s a first-person shooter you are the character. Most games, and this is changing, tend not to have strong characters. If you think about video games you think about how cool that level was, I did this or I did that.
“You realize that if you’re adapting an environment or a milieu for film, a video game actually does a better job of it. A film will never do as good a job or immersive a job as the video game.”
Here’s a new featurette out for Spike Lee’s Oldboy remake that has the cast trying to get you to watch their film, as they tend to do.
Looks like The Hobbit star Martin Freeman’s travels are about to take him to another strange land of mythical creatures and strange customs: North Dakota. Freeman has landed one of the lead roles in Fargo, the TV series adaptation of the 1996 Oscar winning feature film of the same name. Freeman will play Lester Nygaard, based on the sad sack insurance salesman character played by William H. Macy in the Coen Bros’ original film, whose crime bungling and bumbling set the film’s story into motion.
The 10-part limited series will follow “an all-new ‘true crime’ story with a new case and characters, all seeped in the humor, murder and ‘Minnesota nice’ of the original.” Billy Bob Thornton co-stars as “Lorne Malvo, the rootless, manipulative man who meets the small-town insurance salesman and sets him on a path of destruction.”
Did you know that just about every major bad thing that happens in the Star Wars films is actually Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn’s fault? If only he had not put in the most half-arsed effort since I saw a Vietnam vet with only half his buttocks (he sat on a landmine) when trying to free Anakin’s mom from slavery, we would have had no Darth Vader, no Jedi Purge, hell, maybe even no rise to power for the Emperor. You done f@#$ed up, Qui-Gon.
Sad thing is, he’s not even the biggest loser on i09’s list of The 9 Least Competent Jedi.
Either Johnny Depp is having a really bad hair day, or that’s the first look at Meryl Streep as The Witch in Rob “Chicago” Marshal’s feature film adaptation of Broadway musical, Into the Woods. The film is described as “a twisted fairy tale featuring a number of classic characters including Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack (of beanstalk fame), and Little Red Riding Hood, all connected by The Witch’s powers”, and co-stars Johnny Depp as the Wolf, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, Chris Pine as Cinderella’s Prince, and Emily Blunt as the Baker’s Wife.
Joss Whedon may be up to his ginger hair line in comic book adaptations at the moment, but our esteemed Geek Overlord maybe switching creative gears once he’s done with this whole Avengers: Age of Ultron shebang. In an absolute monster of an interview over at EW (seriously, I think they may just have asked him every question you could think to ask Joss Whedon) he indicated that it’s probably time for him to start doing his own original thing again.
“It’s very important that we start creating new content again. We can only build on nostalgia so much before we have nothing left to build on. Before we’re rebooting Spider-Man—again. It’s dangerous to the culture, and it’s boring to me. I squeezed in between my Avengers movies a 400-year-old play. So I really need to create some new worlds.”
After a bit of a hiatus it looks like David Yates’ Tarzan reboot is getting back into the swing of things. Ya know, because it’s Tarzan. And he swings on thingsAAAAAANYWAY… True Blood‘s Alexander Skarsgard will be donning the loin cloth this time around, and it looks like he may just have found his bad guy in Christoph Waltz. The Academy Award winning actor is apparently in talks with Warner Bros to join the production as “a military figure that crosses paths with the King of the Jungle.”
Yates is apparently also reaching out to actresses to potentially play Tarzan’s main squeeze Jane, with the names of Emma Stone and Focus star Margot Robbie being in the mix.
If you’re anything like us crazy folk over here at The Movies, then you know it’s probably only a matter of time before you get locked in a high-tech, maximum security prison for doing something your granny wouldn’t be proud of. When that day comes you’re going to thank Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest team-up film, Escape Plan, for providing this handy infographic on just what to do when you find yourself incarcerated without a half-brother called Michael Scofield.
Last Updated: September 27, 2013
Justin Hess
September 27, 2013 at 18:29
Aaaaaaaaand you had me at “I think they may just have asked him every question you could think to ask Joss Whedon”