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Extras! 09 July 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!

  • A short while back Buzzfeed ran a fantastic article on What If Doctor Who Was American? and even drew up a long list list of Yank actors that could have portrayed the British sci-staple over it’s half-century lifespan. Gods bless the internet though, because Youtuber Sam Vestey really took to that article and went and produced this clip, titled 50 years of American Doctor Who, that combines video footage of all the names on Buzzfeed’s list, to show us just what an American Doctor Who could have been like.

  • HitFix’s Drew McWeeney got to visit the set of Guardians of the Galaxy and spend some time with writer-director James Gunn, who just seems like one really cool guy. McWeeney has a great interview with Gunn, which I suggest you read in full, but of particular interest (especially to Edgar Wright) is just how Gunn got to add a whole lot of his own flavour on this flick.

“After I wrote the first draft of my screenplay, everybody seemed to be very excited. They seemed to really love the screenplay and [Marvel Studios Co-Presidents] Louis D’Esposito and Kevin Feige and everybody were coming to me and telling how great it was. And then Joss [Whedon] came in and Joss was happy, but he wasn’t as happy as everybody else, and I was like, ‘Whoa, man!’  And he’s, like, “Well, I really loved this, and this is great, and the story’s been cracked, but you know, I just really want there to be more James Gunn in the script.  There are things that are too conventional, and I want more James Gunn in it. And Kevin and Lou were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and I was like, ‘All right… your funeral.’ Then I went home and I swear to God, I wrote a seven-page scene where the guys are in the spaceship arguing about something and it’s all dialogue, and we’re about to shoot it on Friday. I think it’s been a unique situation where this group of characters is ready for somebody who sees things in the way I see things, and I think frankly people are ready to see the movie like that.  So it feels good.”

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  • A live action adaptation of Japanese manga/anime Death Note has been in development for years, with Shane “Iron Man 3” Black having last turned in a script and set to direct. But according to Tracking Board, Black is out and Gus Van Sant is set to replace him in the director’s chair. Which is kind of odd. Death Note is the story of an anonymous master detective trying to track down a brilliant young psychopath who finds a notebook belonging to a Death God, that allows him to instantly kill anybody in the world just by writing their name in it. And that sounds nothing like the type of film normally directed by the guy behind Good Will Hunting and Milk, if you know what I mean.
  • So you may have heard that Harry Potter author JK Rowling sprung a big surprise on fans yesterday as she unveiled a new short story featuring a grown up Harry and co. The demand to read the story was great, that the Potter More site where it was hosted crashed. At which point, Emma “Hermione Granger” Watson replied “Oh, that’s cute”.

Ms Watson was recently appointed as Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women, and when she tweeted about it, including a link to the UN Women website, her followers crashed the damn UN’s website.

  • Game of Thrones is really, really fake. No, I’m not talking about the dragons and ice-demons. Everybody knows that those really exist (that’s what my momma said). I’m referring to the extensive amount of CGI visuals employed by the show to create the world that we keep visiting every week.

  • And this year’s Comic-Con just became a little bit less exciting. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Star Wars: Episode VII are  two of the biggest and most closely guarded films in production right now, and we’ve all been looking forward to getting our official (probably teeny-tiny) glimpses at the convention in a couple weeks. However, Warner Bros have revealed their panel lineup for the vaunted Hall H, and there’s no Batman, Superman or Justicey Dawns to be found anywhere.

So too, StarWars.com shows that Disney has gone to the (Keep It In The) Dark Side and has no plans to unveil anything from the JJ Abrams directed film. WB will have Peter Jackson presenting his The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, George Miller finally letting us see Mad Max: Fury Road and the Wachowski’s showing off the delayed Jupiter Ascending, while on the Star Wars front, the animated Star Wars Rebels will be representing.

  • Speaking of Star Wars… Han Solo shot first. Everybody not named George Lucas knows this. The only problem is that Han always shoots first. Always.

  • Move over, Jason Bourne. No, move over even further. Further. Okay, that should be enough space for this big rock to squeeze in as Dwayne Johnson is in early talks to star in The Janson Directive, an adaptation of Bourne creator Robert Ludlum’s espionage novel of the same name. The action-thriller will see Johnson as “a former consular ops agent who, after leaving covert operations due to the high number of sanctioned serial killings, goes into business as private security consultant. Teamed with a sharpshooter, Janson only takes assignments that he believes will lead to helping those in need.”
  • If you’re one of those people that just hate short, miniscule teaser trailers only a few seconds long, then boy do I have a treat for you. This is the teaser trailer for Swedish artist and filmmaker Anders Weberg’s new film Ambience, and it’s 72-minutes long. Yes, the teaser trailer is 72 minutes long. Now you might be wondering how this can be possible, since that’s about half the running time of an average movie. Simple, this is not an average movie, as Ambience is a whopping 720 hours long! Yes, a movie that runs for a full month!

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: July 9, 2014

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