Welcome to the Film School Rejects Archive

Anyone who reads comics knows the ups and downs of ongoing titles. A great creative team will get on a book and redefine it. Put the characters through changes that alter them permanently. Send the heroes to new worlds that boggle the mind. Pit them against villains that both frighten us [...]

For those of you who are like us and are extremely lazy, reading may feel like a bit of a challenge at times. It is difficult to sit down and browse the web to find reviews, then increasingly more painful to actually read through what someone has to say about a movie… Why can’t they just get to the point, right? Well, as both Film School Rejects and Fat Guys at the Movies, we have decided that we can help you get the advice you need without all of that tedious reading…

On this week’s show the Fat Guys take on a full range of topics, from the Biblically sized comedy Evan Almighty to really bad Stephen King adaptations. Neil prays for a new co-host, Kevin prays for more Jessica Alba and Steve Carrell prays that his film will make back the $175 million dollars that it cost to make… We have our doubts. Also on the show, we run down the Ten Best and Worst Stephen King Adaptations of all-time. Be prepared to flame on…

We all have those DVDs that haunt us. They call out to us, needing to be watched over and over again. Around your house you may call them different things; you may call them classics, favorites, or even essentials within your collection. Around here, we call them “The Twenty Plussers”, DVDs that just don’t get old…

This week the theme for this column can be summed up by the words “Oh my God!” Because the big story is the release this weekend of the big-budget Steve Carell comedy Evan Almighty, and the fate of this movie is a big question mark. If it’s a big hit, executives at Universal will be delightedly saying “Oh my God!” But if it doesn’t do well, they’ll also be going “Oh my God”, because the budget for this movie is rumored to be upwards of two hundred million dollars. So the people who greenlit this flick have a lot on the line.

The cartoon character Mr. Magoo is an old man who gets himself involved in very funny misadventures due to his poor sight, his poor hearing, and his stubbornness. The jokes come fast and furious as he barely comprehends what he’s looking at, which is why he unknowingly finds himself bowling in a bottling company, [...]

In 2006, director Neil Marshall made his debut on the big screen in the U.S. with the supremely scary The Descent. Now, if you have not seen that film, do yourself a favor, go rent it, buy it, whatever, just treat yourself to a horror film that has genuine scares and chills. Neil Marshall’s story [...]

In the mid 1970’s through the early ’80’s a small group of filmmakers emerged from Down Under to create a sort of Australian New Wave. This group consisted of directors like George Miller (Mad Max)and Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career), and actors such as Judy Davis, Mel Gibson, and Nicole Kidman. All would go on [...]

That’s right: crazy hot chicks. And we’re not using “crazy” as an adverb to emphasize the unbelievable degree of hotness that these chicks possess. No, these smokin’ hot babes are crazy like Lindsay Lohan with a knife after an all-night cocaine bender. You know the type; you’d do her, but only if she didn’t know your address.

Speck is a movie that is interesting in how equally good and awful it is. When you watch this film, you know how bad it is, but no matter what you do, you can’t look away. Well, I couldn’t… but I’m probably in the minority in that respect.
Speck is another one of those “based on [...]

After the recent box office “disaster” formally known as Hostel: Part II, director Eli Roth discussed the film’s “failure”–oh god, a film that only grossed $8,203,391 on 2,350 screens across the country its opening weekend! What is the entertainment world coming to?!?–in several interviews and online forums (including his myspace.com blog), alluding to its influence over his recently altered production schedule.

As I left the theater, I could not help but wonder what this film might have been like if the script was more focused or if the story was actually substantive. I felt that The Last Mimzy tries too hard to be some sort of ET-style message movie. The tone is all over the place, [...]

The Painted Veil is one of those movies that I was interested in, but never really felt like making the time to go see it. Even now, with the DVD in hand, I approached the viewing as if it were a chore. You know those types, the movies that seem interesting on paper, or have [...]

Dear parents of the world,

There’s no doubt in my mind you have the most difficult, underpaid and underappreciated job on the planet, and that includes Paul W. S. Anderson’s script doctor and the U.S. Senate’s congressional angry spittle mopper. This isn’t first hand knowledge since there are no kids under my branch on the family tree. (It’s a personal choice, nothing physical mind you. My twig doesn’t need any Miracle-Gro, thank you very much.)

This movie has it all: controversy, powerful acting, nudity, and deaths that will have you wincing in pain. After a viewing of American History X, other than marveling over the powerhouse storyline, all you will be thinking is “What a performance,” by actor Edward Norton. To say this film is “good” is an immense understatement. [...]

Four years ago, God appeared to Bruce Nolan, gave him almighty power and took a vacation. The movie centered on showing how tough it is to run the world and give Bruce a little perspective on his own life. In that film we also met Evan Baxter, played by Steve Carell, a co-worker and rival [...]

Spoiler Alert!
After viewing “1408″ last night, I expected some comic relief with “Evan Almighty;” but man, it’s really not very good at all. Fifteen minutes into the film, it’s not hard to see why critics are pounding this movie. This is a really poor effort from director Tom Shadyac and it’s hard to believe [...]

While I don’t know if He Was a Quiet Man will unleash Christian Slater unto the world and have him taking over the cinematic landscape anytime soon, the film does look very interesting. It is a creepy take on that guy that works in every office across America. What if that dude killed everyone and then dreamed that he didn’t? It would surely make an interesting flick…

“You don’t run the same gag twice,” Don Cheadle says—his irritating Cockney accent thankfully dampened—somewhere in the middle of the third installment in the unnecessary Ocean’s franchise, and it’s tough to say whether Soderbergh means it as some sort of peremptory apologia or as just a moment of glib, ironic self-knowing. As Soderbergh must be aware, even though the plot is “different” and the details aren’t exactly the same, Ocean’s 13 is essentially a mere replaying of Ocean’s 11; so it’s lucky for everyone involved—filmmakers and audience—that that was a pretty good flick.

First of all, let me get this out of the way, Silver Surfer is definitely an upgrade over the original Fantastic Four movie. The first FF, while attempting to show the origin of the group, failed in just about every arena it ventured. While Silver Surfer does flesh out the story and the characters a little more, it’s still never going to be confused with Citizen Kane. Hell, it’s probably closer to Batman & Robin than Batman Begins. Where is does succeed, is that it has some pretty good comic dialogue and timing. Now, a comic book movie really shouldn’t try to be funny, it should use comedy to drive the action; but Silver Surfer really does use the quips in it’s script to move from dry spot to dry spot. The other real problem, is that the story is super condensed, it could have easily ballooned to, I don’t know, 2 hrs, I mean come on 1 hr and 40 minutes, we’re talking Disney animated feature here, geesh!

Forged from the remains of the Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter franchises DOA was born. It is a series of fighting games, the is known as much for its fighting as it is for the over-enhanced, gravity defying female characters than for any story that is in desperate need of being told. The girls of DOA were so popular that it spawned another game, one centering on the bikini clad fighters leaving the fighting arenas and heading to the beach for a round or two of bouncy volleyball.

The drinking games presented on this site have a single purpose: to enhance your moviegoing experience (and possibly improve a film) by getting you drunk. We use simple rules that are easy to remember. After all, it isn’t a calculus test. It’s a drinking game. Feel free to adjust as you see fit.

I can’t remember when I last last one-–maybe that Sidney Lumet disaster with Vin Diesel–but courtroom dramas have a big advantage: nobody in the audience really knows anything about the law. So, as far as plot twists are concerned, anything goes. That’s pretty much the story with Fracture, although we don’t see much of the [...]

It’s bad enough when something comes to Earth to kill people. It’s worse when something comes to earth to wipe out humanity. But when something comes to Earth to destroy the entire planet, that’s a real problem. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes (more often, actually), they fail. The new film “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer” features Galactus, a planet-eating cloud, and the Silver Surfer, an intergalactic beach bum ready to serve Earth up as an appetizer. This has inspired the Fat Guys at the Movies to list the top ten things that have tried to destroy planet Earth (in a movie… and one TV mini-series).

On this week’s Exclusive Online Show (aka the one where the guys swear like sailors. Parental Discretion is Advised), the Fat Guys bring their shredding skills to the US Air Guitar tour, meet Air Guitar Icon Bjorn Turoque and get drunk. They also solidify the fact that they will never, ever have a shot at an interview with Angelina Jolie by talking trash about her affection for African orphans. They also take on the box office results, new DVD releases for the week and Ryan Reynolds’ outlandish remarks about the world of competitive eating. Hide the women and children…

For avid David Lynch fans the five-year-long wait for another product of the filmmaker’s seemingly tireless genius is finally over. Lynch, known for his work on the popular ’90s television series “Twin Peaks” as well as his films Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997) among others, released his latest film, Inland Empire (2006), in [...]

If there’s one thing I can infer from 2007 it’s that small, beautiful, limited release films are going unnoticed while mediocre blockbusters hog the theaters and reap the glory. Why go see Delta Farce when you can see Away From Her? I can’t be any less than thankful than I am that there’s a theater [...]

Billy Bob Thornton’s latest film, Astronaut Farmer, opens with the quintessential silhouette shot used in contemporary movies to try to draw a visual parallel for the audience between the image on the screen and classic, old Western films.
Unfortunately, this is the type of film opening that tends to signal to the viewer that the upcoming [...]

Two years ago, movie audiences were introduced to the adventures of the Fantastic Four. That film was moderately entertaining, though it had serious flaws which prevented it from coming anywhere near the quality of the X-Men or Spider-Man franchises. However, while it made story, character, and casting missteps, it was not nearly as bad as [...]

Steven Soderbergh makes it a trilogy with his latest Ocean’s installment, Ocean’s Thirteen. It’s not a bad movie, but like its immediate predecessor it falls far short of the first movie, and for the typical reasons that sequels generally fall short. Not based on action and fighting sequences, the Ocean’s saga relies on [...]