Extras! 15 July 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!

• This weekend past there were really only two movies on people’s lips (well, three if you count Darryn still trying to watch the acrid taste of Transformers: Age of Extinction out of his mouth), and they couldn’t be more different. Matt Reeves’ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is big budget blockbuster spectacle brandishing miraculous digital trickery to realize it stunning world. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an intimate yet simultaneously insanely ambitious personal passion project that shows the dramatic ups and downs of one boy’s family, filmed in real time over 12 years, with the actors really aging on screen.

So of course somebody went and made a parody trailer that mashes up the two films.

• The first official synopsis for The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies – the final film in Peter Jackson’s trilogy-that-should-have-been-one-movie – has just popped up online, and true to form it’s way longer than you expected it to be.

From Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson comes The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third in a trilogy of films adapting the enduringly popular masterpiece The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies brings to an epic conclusion the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield and the Company of Dwarves. Having reclaimed their homeland from the Dragon Smaug, the Company has unwittingly unleashed a deadly force into the world. Enraged, Smaug rains his fiery wrath down upon the defenseless men, women and children of Lake-town.

Obsessed above all else with his reclaimed treasure, Thorin sacrifices friendship and honor to hoard it as Bilbo’s frantic attempts to make him see reason drive the Hobbit towards a desperate and dangerous choice. But there are even greater dangers ahead. Unseen by any but the Wizard Gandalf, the great enemy Sauron has sent forth legions of Orcs in a stealth attack upon the Lonely Mountain.

As darkness converges on their escalating conflict, the races of Dwarves, Elves and Men must decide – unite or be destroyed. Bilbo finds himself fighting for his life and the lives of his friends in the epic Battle of the Five Armies, as the future of Middle-earth hangs in the balance.

• Poster of the day: Horns

• After the recent news that SyFy was looking to adapt James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse sci-fi series, I went off and read the first book in the space opera quadrology, Leviathan Wakes. The book was simply fantastic, so I really couldn’t be happier that it’s getting a big budget TV adaptation. Well, that was until I saw the news this morning that Thomas Jane will be playing the lead of Detective Miller, a cop on asteroid belt colony who along with a rogue ship captain, James Holden, uncover a vast, galaxy threatening conspiracy. Now I’m really happy!

• Every day, no matter how dire the situation I may find myself in, there’s always one way for me to be assured that I’m making the right life choices. Simply ask myself: What would Jack Bauer do? (SPOILER warning for season finale of 24: Live Another Day)

• Here are a few more really cool Max Steel pics – to add to the first batch released last week – that prove that the live-action adaptation has some great character design, and yes, Andy Garcia is actually in this movie.

• It’s a well known fact that Batman is a genius who can do anything. ANYTHING! Well, except have a desk job in an office.

• The Amazing Spider-Man 2‘s script was a pile of hot stinking spider-poop. Right now, you’re probably thinking “Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen spider-poop before”, but you did and it was called The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The film suffered from a litany of faults – from the ever popular “too many villains” to the “why the hell are they actually fighting?” – but that was the final film. If you recall, there were lost of things that were cut from/changed on the film while it was in production (like all of Shailene Woodley’s Mary Jane scenes being dropped), but thanks to Badass Digest getting their hands on an earlier draft of the script, we now know that some of those changes were really dumb. That’s not to say that the earlier draft didn’t have it’s own share of problems, because trust me, it does. Or don’t trust me, and just go read for yourself.

• Have you guys seen that new Mark Wahlberg movie? You know, the one with the transforming robots from space where he and Will Ferrell are loser cop partners just trying to prove themselves? Man, I really love The Other Transformers.

• Mortal Kombat Legacy creator Kevin Tancharoen may no longer be getting ready to perform a fatality on the big screen, but he does have a few other projects lined up. And one of them is a Christmas movies. Only this is more the “lotsa guns and badass killers” kind of Christmas (exactly like the ones I used to love, growing up on the Cape Flats). Tancharoen will helm The Guns of Christmas Past, which puts a ballistic spin on the classic Charles Dickens’ tale A Christmas Carol, as it follows “a retired hitman who returns to Chicago on Christmas Eve to avenge the death of his friend. During his mission, he must fight his way past three unlikely adversaries from his past, present, and future. In the process, he finds out who he really is.”

• And Iiiiiiiiiiiiiyiihiiiiiiyiihiiiiiiii want to show you this first pic of Yaya DaCosta and Arlen Escarpeta as late pop star Whitney Houston and her husband Bobby Brown, in the upcoming, still untitled Angela Basset directed biopic about the Grammy Award winner’s tumultuous life. The resemblance between the actors and the real life Houston and Brown is so striking, it may leave some fans waiting to exhale.

• If you didn’t catch Richard Curtis’ About Time last year, then you missed out on a fantastic time travel romantic dramedy. You would think that that would be a very niche genre, but I can think of a few titles that belong there. And now there’s one more in this hilarious and smart time travel short film called – what else? – Time Travel Lover.

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 15, 2014