Home Entertainment Extras! 19 June 2014

Extras! 19 June 2014

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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!

  • If you’re following Game of Thrones on DSTV, then tomorrow night will see you hunkering down in front of your TV to watch the show’s fourth season finale (spoiler alert: It’s awesome!). Just make sure that you don’t watch it with somebody who’s never actually seen Game of Thrones before.

  • As you know, I am a gigantic Star Wars nerd. As such, you may have noticed that despite this, there’s been a bit of a downturn in reporting Star Wars: Episode VII rumours around here. There’s a simple reason for that: Most of them are bantha poodoo. So instead of posting stuff that inevitably turn out to be some fanboy dream ravings, I’ve decided to only post stuff that look really legit. Which is why I didn’t post a story that had the Star Wars corner of the internet abuzz over the weekend, as MakingStarWars claimed to have some info detailing the film’s villains, apparently called “Jedi Hunters”. A few days after the story had already gained lots of traction, TheForce.net debunked those rumours, claiming to have some insider info of their own that completely refuted everything. Then Latino Review came along and said that only some of MakingStarWars’ story was bull, but they had just misinterpreted some other info on were on the right track, and so on and so forth.

I expect this cycle of news becoming not-news to continue ad nauseum until JJ Abrams eventually lets in to the Mystery Box, so until then, if you see some Star Wars rumour pop up here, it’s probably a good ‘un.

  • And now for a Star Wars rumour… Wait, wait, I’m not being hypocritical. This is actually a very cool investigation done by the folks at Movie Legends Revealed that gets to the bottom of a long running rumour that even has hardcore Star Wars fans as myself confused and doubting their own memory: Just when did the first Star Wars become Episode IV.

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  • Joss Whedon has done a very interesting interview with Huffington Post on the state of the superhero movie genre. He has some intriguing thoughts, (some of which, like his soon to be unpopular opinion of The Dark Knight, which I totally agree with) and even pokes a bit at his own contribution in The Avengers.

“People have made it very clear that they are fed up with movies where entire cities are destroyed, and then we celebrate.”

“Now, I watched ‘The Dark Knight’ and I thought of that as riffing on the genre. That was a superhero movie as ‘The Godfather.’ And I was like, ‘But I just still want to see a superhero movie!’ We had just gotten the technology to make it awesome, and I wasn’t ready to be post-modern about it yet.”

“You’re in a constant state of being pulled both ways at all times. You’re trying to make a populist film with fascist iconography that is just bigger, and better, and longer, and trying to break that down and find a weakness and humanity. People come in with a certain amount of emotional baggage. So, whether we’re in our larvae stage or our decadent stage, I can’t really say, but I try to make my superhero movies as if there’s either never been one or there’s only ever been them. I work with the idea that it’s just a natural way for people to be, so that you still make a movie about people.”

  • And speaking of Avengers, I received this pic in my inbox from our local Disney contact last night, with nothing more than a mysterious “Teaser” as the subject line. I don’t know about you guys, but that looks kind of Ultron-ish to me.

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  • And staying with all things Marvel, just a few weeks after Scott “Sinister” Derrickson was confirmed as director, the studio has hired Jon Spaihts to pen a new script for their upcoming Doctor Strange feature film adaptation. Spaihts has several other big name projects in the works (like Universal’s The Mummy reboot), but he is probably most (in)famous for having produced the first screenplay for Ridley Scott’s divisive Prometheus. While his script for that film had its issues, I actually preferred it way more than the one that Scott and Damon Lindelof ended up putting out, so I am really intrigued to see what he can do with Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme.

Along with the news of Spaiht’s producing the script, also comes reports that the previously rumoured Jared Leto, has now also been added to the shortlist of actors to play Strange, next to the previously reported Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy. Personally, as cool as it may be, I just don’t see Marvel going with either of those three though.

  • Here’s a pic of a well-groomed white guy not paying attention to the road as he’s driving a car. Or as the press release calls it, “the first look at Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey in the upcoming adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey”.

Fifty_Shades_of_Grey_3

  • Despite the popular gangster rap anthem, I’m happy to report that there are no police sexual relations happening in this first cast pic for Straight Outta Compton, the biopic detailing NWA, the iconic 1980’s rap group formed by Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and others. In the pic you’ll find producer Ice Cube, director F. Gary Gray and producer Dr. Dre, standing behind the young actors cast thus far, from left to right: O’Shea Jackson Jr. as young Ice Cube, Jason Mitchell as young Eazy-E and Corey Hawkins as young Dr. Dre.

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Along with the pic, the film’s official synopsis was also released.

In the mid-1980s, the streets of Compton, California, were some of the most dangerous in the country. When five young men translated their experiences growing up into brutally honest music that rebelled against abusive authority, they gave an explosive voice to a silenced generation. Following the meteoric rise and fall of N.W.A., STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON tells the astonishing story of how these youngsters revolutionized music and pop culture forever the moment they told the world the truth about life in the hood and ignited a cultural war.
  • The guys over at Screenrant have tried to make sense of Edge of Tomorrow‘s really silly ending. Spoiler alert: it still really doesn’t, but good on them for thumb sucking their way to some kind of logical conclusion. The fact that these types of articles have now begun popping up, just leads to wonder even more how director Doug Liman could have signed off on that ending, as it makes no logical or thematic sense, and is an unnecessary blight on an otherwise incredible film.
  • The folks at CinemaSins have take some heat in the past for nitpicking their way through decent, sometimes even great movies in their “Everything Wrong With ________ in 10 Minutes or Less” series. This week, they don’t have a great movie. In fact, it’s so bad that I’m not sure why they didn’t just play the entire movie, stamp “EVERYTHING IS WRONG” on it and call it a day. So ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you Everything Wrong With Dragonball Evolution in Many, Many Minutes!

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: June 19, 2014

One Comment

  1. Straight Outta Compton, can’t see that soon enough.

    The Dark Knight was fucking amazing imo but I never got into Christian Bale as Batman throughout the series. I still prefer the detective comics when Batman was chasing down a sick serial killer. I always felt Batman’s character and motivation was portrayed better in comic form.

    Reply

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