Here’s Geek God Review’s top news picks on TV series, books and movies as we wrap-up this week from Tom Hopper’s interview on how to be a pirate in Black Sails to Manu Bennett’s comment on not being picked up to play as Deathstroke in the upcoming solo Batman movie.
Movies: Three Months From Release, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Gets a New Composer
No matter what, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will be the first Star Wars film not scored by John Williams. It just won’t be scored by who we thought. The Hollywood Reporter says Michael Giacchino just replaced Alexandre Desplat as the film’s composer.
The reason behind the change? Those damned reshoots. Apparently, because the reshoots pushed the schedule back so much, Desplat was no longer available to score the film. They asked Giacchino to step in, and he has.
For Star Wars fans, a Giacchino/Star Wars collaboration is something we long expected. The instant J.J. Abrams was brought on to direct The Force Awakens, we speculated that he’d replace Williams with his long-time collaborator. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but now we’ll hear a Giacchino Star Wars score only one year later, on the second film released under the new Disney umbrella. *1
Movies: Here’s what Deathstroke’s TV version has to say on Joe Manganiello
While there has been more cohesion as of late in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe with their television offerings, DC Comics seems to be a bit more all over the place. The latest is that Joe Manganiello will be playing Deathstroke in Ben Affleck’s standalone Batman movie, but the thing is, Deathstroke already exists on the show Arrow and he’s played by Manu Bennett. This isn’t the first time that this has happened, either, with Ezra Miller taking on the role of The Flash while Grant Guston plays The Flash on television.
Bennett decided to poke some fun at the whole situation by taking to Twitter to show that there are no hard feelings, although if Manganiello can take his role, he should probably take one of Joe’s. The one that he picked, well… *2
Books: “The Catcher in the Rye” is being distributed with an “anti-white” notice in Washington, DC
Holden Caulfield is known for a lot of things—his whininess, his condemnation of phonies, his disillusionment with society at large. Now, he’ll be labeled in Washington, DC, as “anti-white”—but for a cause.
This month, the city’s public library system is hiding once controversial books around DC in a literary “scavenger hunt.” Each book has a black cover, printed with quotes from people who have tried to have them banned or removed from US libraries and schools. John Knowles’ A Separate Peace will be labeled “filthy, trashy sex novel,” and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is labeled “anti-white.”
Black covers refer to a tradition of passing around controversial books with their titles and original covers hidden. The titles for this campaign were chosen to show the “amazing sense of disconnect” of the people who took issue with each book, says Linnea Hegarty, executive director of the DC Public Library Foundation. Several hundred copies will be distributed.*3
TV Series: “I’d have never survived life as a pirate!,” says Black Sails’ Tom Hopper
Johnny Depp might have made them popular again with his Pirates Of The Caribbean films. But British actor Tom Hopper is making pirates super sexy in his swashbuckling TV drama Black Sails. And Tom is no stranger to a costume drama as, for 27 episodes, he played Sir Percival in hit BBC show Merlin. Tom, 30, is married to fellow actress Laura Hopper and they have baby son Freddie together. Here, he tells TV Extra how he became best mates with chart-toppers McFly and why he’d make a useless pirate in real like.
How much effort is required to stay fit playing a pirate?
Well, I like to eat well all year round and the training I do doesn’t take that long. I can be in the gym for 45 minutes and work up a sweat and then I’m done. My wife is very understanding, she gets it that I’ve got to go train because of my career. The hardest part of staying fit is when we are working and on set. When you’re waking up for early mornings, it’s hard to find the time to go training after a 12-hour day working on a ship and climbing ropes. But because my character has to look a certain way, it’s just what I have to do.
Are you a sporty guy anyway?
I’ve always enjoyed sports. I used to play a lot of rugby and I was a goalkeeper when I played football. But these days I play more golf. When I turned 30, I got married and had my first child. It was like I thought, “Right, it’s time to settle down and play golf instead.”
You’ve just filmed the third series of Black Sails but this is the first time we have seen it in the UK….
When we come home and tell people about it, it sounds like we are just going to work and having a laugh on a pirate ship because no one has seen it here. So it’s really exciting that it’s being shown now. *4
*1: (http://io9.gizmodo.com/three-months-from-release-rogue-one-a-star-wars-story-1786691696)
*2: (http://uproxx.com/tv/tv-deathstroke-joe-manganiello-response/)
*4: (http://www.dailystar.co.uk/showbiz/460643/Tom-Hopper-Black-Sails-interview-actor-BBC-Merlin)
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