Extras! 24 March 2014

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!

– Unfortunately, we have to start things off today with some somber news: Veteran character actor James Rebhorn has passed away. Rebhorn, who most recently was seen on TV as Carrie Mathison’s dad on Homeland and as Agent Reese Hughes on White Collar, had been diagnosed with melanoma back in 1992 already, but this Friday past finally succumbed to the condition. He passed away peacefully in his New Jersey home surrounded by family. Rebhorn was 65.

– And to shake off the sadness, here are some pics of Dwayne Johnson shouting and flexing at stuff. The actor showed off these first official pics from Brett Ratner’s upcoming Hercules, in which the People’s Champ plays the titular demi-god.

“It’s when Hercules breaks through the chains and becomes the demi-god he was born to be. I was actually yelling with all the power I could muster, ‘I am Hercules!’ I gave it my all and made myself pass out every time we did it. But I honestly felt in that moment that I was born to play this role.”

– Actor and Lord of the Mo-Cap Andy Serkis knows a thing or two about aping/monkeying/golluming around in the wild, and now he has to get some other guys to do it. Serkis has been tapped by Warner Bros. to direct their new live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book. Not to be confused with Disney’s upcoming live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book being directed by Jon Favreau. Sigh, Hollywood.

– Speaking of live-action adaptations of classic animated stories, Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, The Virgin Suicides) has been picked to direct a live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid. With Coppola’s far more adult-centric directing style, maybe Gabe from Penny Arcade can now finally get some clarity on Ariel’s lady parts.

– There’s been talk of a Mean Girls sequel for a while now already, but you know what I want to see? Mean Girls… with Muppets! And luckily so does Tina Fey, and as we all know, she’s always right about this kind of stuff.

– Nobody can ever accuse 90’s Sylvester Stallone sci-fi action flick Demolition Man of not living up to its name. Shit gets demolished, yo! But just how much demolition are we talking about here? Well, I’ll let this this rather informative video break down all the breaking down.

– Looks like ol’ En Sabbah Nur is going to get his purple behind Cajun fried and then… teleported? Okay, so I didn’t quite think through that analogy, but the point I’m trying to make is that director Bryan Singer has indicated that we may be seeing two of the most popular X-Men popping up in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse.

“I’m considering Gambit and potentially a young Nightcrawler for ‘Apocalypse. I was going to have Nightcrawler [in ‘Days of Future Past’] and even wrote a scene, but I felt that we were forcing too many mutants into the story.”

Because clearly, adding one more mutant to a cast that at last count was probably somewhere in the mid-70’s would just be overkill. I just want this to happen so that I can finally see a proper Gambit (no offence Taylor Kitsch in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) on screen. And yes, that means trench coat, red eyes and funny three-fingered gloves.

– Poster of the day: Animated gif version of Martin Ansin’s Robocop poster.

– Despite the fact that I didn’t feel that After Earth was as toxic as some critics made it out to be, the fact remains that the movie was a failure. But this latest setback (preceded by the setback of The Last Airbender, which was preceded by the setback of The Happening, etc etc.) is not enough to deter director M. Night Shuma-Gorath, who will be getting right behind the camera again, but this time going back to his thriller roots. And no, that wasn’t a plot twist.

Shyamalan (the running gag about his name only applies when we write it out in full) will be getting behind the camera again for Sundowning, which will star Kathryn Hahn and newcomer child star Ed Oxenbould as a mother/son pair who go to visit Hahn’s parents when things go very wrong. There are no further plot details, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the trees.

– He’s already introduced the world to one superspy in Jason Bourne, and now it looks like Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr & Mrs Smith) is going back into the shadowy world of espionage. And I literally mean a world full of shadows. Shadows so deep that people can’t even see a man with three bright green lights on his head. Yes, that’s right, Liman has been tapped to direct espionage videogame adaption Splinter Cell, which features the already cast Tom Hardy as the franchise’s protagonist Sam Fisher.

Liman is a damn good choice to bring Fisher’s adventures to the big screen, and the combination of him and Hardy should make for one hell of an action movie.

– Seeing as we started today off a very dark note, how about we go against expectation and end it the same way. ScreenJunkies sat down with the director and leads of upcoming messed up movie Cheap Thrills and asked them to talk about the most f—ed movie scenes of all time. First warning: This will contain spoilers to some old movies. Second warning: THIS IS A CLIP ABOUT THE MOST F—ED UP MOVIE SCENES OF ALL TIME!

If you have anything you would like to contribute to Extras, whether it be interesting stories, funny videos, or artistic photos of yourself in morally questionable poses, feel free to drop a mail to kervyn@themovies.co.za.

 

Last Updated: March 24, 2014