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It’s easy to see why “Rain,” a Merv Griffin Entertainment production, went straight to DVD. It’s proof that, even with stars like Oscar winner Faye Dunaway and nominee Robert Loggia, a former panaglide, steadicam, and camera operator named Craig DiBona should never have been admitted to the Directors Guild. How he got bad performances out [...]

POTC: At World’s End is a 21st century movie par excellence. More to the point, it is a 21st century sequel par excellence. It falls into the same trap, and I mean exactly the same trap, into which the Matrix sequels fell. Like the Wachowski brothers, Verbinski is a very capable director and so manages to insert a handful of intriguing elements, but not enough to keep the project from being anything other than ordinary.

Last week we asked you to vote for the Best CGI Movies of All-Time. This week we turn our attention to movie franchises that came not only with second helpings, but thirds as well. In honor of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and many other sequels throughout the summer, we want to know what the Best Third Installment of All-Time is in the eyes of our readers.

This upcoming DVD release from Dragon Dynasty repackages the 1986 film that has many names. The name on the box these days is “Shanghai Express” though it has been called, more aptly I think, “The Millionaire’s Express” back in the day. But I digress.
The movie itself has a fairly loose plot and this [...]

Hollywood’s theme for this summer movie season: Anything you can do, I can do better. This weekend as the country celebrates Memorial Day and the unofficial beginning of Summer, a little indie comedy, a creepy horror flick based on a play and an armada of dirty, wretched Pirates take on the box office with ferocity that has not been seen since, well… Last Summer. For those of us in the biz, we are ready to just sit back and enjoy the ride. You may want to do the same, savvy?

On this week’s shows, your heroes Kevin and Neil travel to World’s End to bring back Captain Jack (and Captain Morgan). Of course we talk about Pirates; and since we can’t give away any of the plot details thanks to our non-binding resolution with Disney, we just decide to make some up. We think ours are better, but that is yet to be seen. Also on the show, we move into our new fancy “Magical Studio in the Sky” so that you can here us in ultra-clear stereo sound… Get ready for fast-paced swashbuckling action and some Fat Guys, too…

Spider-Man 3 was a huge disappointment; Shrek the Third was just okay; and now, finally we have Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End in our grasp and it has to have us wondering that maybe we should have started our summer here in the first place…

With the anticipated release of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,” we all know that everyone around the world is ready to party like a pirate. And what better way to celebrate the movie’s opening than with a hearty “Yo ho ho!” and a bottle of rum?

Ah, this movie marketing machine never ceases to amaze me. They will certainly go to any lengths to promote an upcoming summer blockbuster. In this round of marketing madness, Twentieth Century Fox has joined up with the Franklin Mint to create a bunch of limited edition “Silver Surfer” U.S. quarters that will “challenge movie goers to Search for $ilver.”

Over two previous films, Shrek has had to learn to live with being the King. With the first Shrek film in 2001, the big green ogre became the King of all the animated creatures in Hollywood’s forest as he was thrust into the lives of millions of children across America and the world. Now with Shrek the Third, Shrek is forced to take on the role of being King of Far, Far Away… His toughest challenge yet.

MXC takes video from Takeshi’s Castle, a late ’80s Japanese game show, where individuals competed against each other through a series of silly, yet dangerous-looking stunts for chance at one million yen. Through the magic of post production, most notably the hysterical commentary, ranging from witty to crude, MXC appears as a team competition [...]

Want to look like Captain Jack? Want to see what your radio co-host looks like as the creepy swamp witch lady? It can all be done with the help of the Piratizer, courtesy of the folks at Disney and MySpace. You provide the picture, they will make you look like a creepy Pirate. Or in Kevin Carr’s case, a bit more normal…

When we first discovered that Disney was making a live-action Underdog movie starring Jason Lee as the voice of Underdog, there was a collective groan. Now that we have seen the first trailer, it is clear that things are getting better, but we are not quite sold yet.

Recently we at Film School Rejects had the opportunity to sit with Tom Jane, also known as The Punisher to the fanboys out there. We got a chance to talk about his recent decision to drop out of The Punisher 2, current films with which he is involved, future projects and of course, comic books. Look out world, here comes Tom Jane the actor, writer, director, producer, comic book guru and overall bad-ass…

Despite the fact that I think Dane Cook is yet to prove himself to be much of an actor and the fact that Good Luck Chuck looks like a slightly improved version of Employee of the Month (the improvement being the substitution of Jessica Alba over Jessica Simpson), I am impressed with these three new teaser posters that we just received from Lionsgate…

Not too long ago we reported that Robert Rodriguez was in the midst of making decisions about what he would make next. The two options on the table were a live action adaptation of “The Jetsons” or a movie version of “Land of the Lost”. Both projects seemed very interesting, but there were no definite answers to be found. Now we learn that Rodriguez has a new project, “Barbarella”.

Richard Roeper, who isn’t a movie critic but plays one on TV, recently said on an episode of “Ebert & Roeper” that zombies make the worst movie monsters. It was at that moment that I put aside my personal, stubborn beliefs, got down on my knees and reconnected with God because I prayed real hard for a real zombie outbreak just to prove Mr. Roeper wrong.

Just in case you’re worried that a movie called “Piano Teacher” might be as stuffy and dull as your typical piano lesson, Haneke quickly proves otherwise; within five minutes Erika (Isabelle Huppert—wow), la pianiste of the title, is shouting, name-calling and pulling her elderly mother’s hair. Perhaps that’s not much more arresting than repeating major scales, but two or three reels later she is sitting in a private screening room, watching a pornographic film and inhaling the aromas of the booth’s previous occupants’ used-tissues. How’s that? The Piano Teacher, far from priggish, is one of the nastiest, most prurient movies ever committed to digital video outside of the San Fernando Valley, so much so that its distributors felt it necessary to remove almost fifteen minutes from the U.S. DVD.

Dino Stamatopoulos has an amazing resume as a television comedy writer. He has worked on the late night talk shows of David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, the sketch comedy shows of Ben Stiller, Dana Carvey, and Mr. Show, and the difficult-to-describe TV Funhouse and Tom Goes to the Mayor. He can now list “creator” with Moral Orel, which airs on Adult Swim and has its first 15 episodes, all of season one and half of season two, available on DVD as Volume 1.

While David Lynch is touring the country with his new film Inland Empire, dividing critics and tearing families apart, I thought it was high time to visit another divisive Lynch film, one that was hated at the time of its release with the sort of rabidity that met Gigli.
When Twin Peaks, the popular ’90s television [...]

Thus far, only a few late-year films have been talked about as much as “The Golden Compass”, starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and a host of others. It tells the story of a little girl (Dakota Blue Richards) who gets swept up in an amazing journey that begins as your typical children’s adventure and evolves into a dark, philosophical epic. And we’ve got a first look at the new trailer…

In week three of Spider-mania, Dreamworks decided to drop the atomic bomb of family flicks, Shrek the Third. The mass marketing machine was running at full speed, with a major promotion with McDonalds and every 3rd commercial on Paramount property Nickelodeon featuring the lovable Ogre. There was no way that Shrek could not win big at the box office, yet we are all left to wonder how long he will be able to hold onto his throne…

Sitting through 28 Weeks Later I had an odd sense of d©j  vu. But it was not because this movie was a sequel of 28 Days Later, which came out in 2003. I was thinking instead of a movie I had seen a few weeks ago. It finally hit me: 28 Weeks Later is what Planet Terror would have been if they had played it straight…

“Scrubs” achieves everything that every sitcom should strive to be: poignant, touching, unafraid of being silly, edgy and (most importantly but often forgotten) funny. This raises the obvious question: how the hell did a show like this manage to stay on one of the big four networks for five whole seasons without getting put down [...]

The folks over at Warner Brothers, the lucky SOBs connected with the marketing of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, seem to have launched a viral marketing campaign that is, as the guys in the Guinness commercials would say, BRILLIANT! If enough people play along, we may get our first look at Heath Ledger as The Joker!

Shrek the Third arrives on the big screen as an undercooked lark that isn’t half as witty as it thinks it is, nor is it half as deep as it would like to be. It has its moments of laugh out loud hilarity, but there is no connective tissue to string the gags together…

Unless you’re a real hard-core fan of suspense and horror films, you probably missed “Thr3e” when it was out in the theaters. It had a very limited run, but now it’s on DVD for people who want to catch up on things.
“Thr3e” tells the story of Kevin Parsons (Marc Blucas), a seminary student who finds [...]

On 18 November 1978, according to titles at the very beginning of Jonestown: Life and Death of People’s Temple, 909 members of Jim Jones’ American expatriate Christian cult—let’s call a spade a spade here—committed mass suicide on their compound in Guyana, named after their revered leader, by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Others, though the minority, were shot, strangled and stabbed for refusing to do so, so perhaps more accurately, all things considered, we should say that the people of Jonestown were slaughtered. (If this is all news to you, read up on it.) Those figures also don’t take into account a visiting U.S. Congressman and his retinue of aides and journalists, some of whom were shot on a tarmac that same day while trying to leave. It’s an astounding tragedy, horrifying, sickening, and any other adjective Roget can toss out that still couldn’t describe the actual revolting monstrosity of it: parents poisoning their children, including many infants, spouses killing one another, grown-children administering the toxic concoction to their elderly parents. How to wrap one’s mind around such confounding behavior?

I love working in this business, because every day I wake up lately it seems like Christmas. Earlier this week we got our second major Transformers trailer, packed with some serious robot-on-robot action. Today our good friend Alex at FirstShowing.net has somehow pulled a John Rambo trailer out of nowhere (and by nowhere, I mean AICN.) And trust me, there is plenty of Stallone-on-everyone violent action in this one…

If there is anything we love here at FSR, it is a little bit of reader backlash. We have always tried to listen to our readers, take their feedback to heart and always do what we can to raise the bar when it comes to delivering the best content in the world of film. And of course, we like to have a little fun while we are at it…