What is Movie News After Dark? It’s difficult to explain, really. We do know what it isn’t: boring. We begin this evening with one of two images from the scene of the crime where George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road could very well be shooting. We know this because some wicked Mad Max-esque vehicles have been spotted near where the production is said to begin shooting in April. It’s got Tom Hardy, it’s George Miller back in the saddle, and it’s okay by me.

The first glimpse we’re getting of Akiva Schaffer’s star-studded new comedy Neighborhood Watch certainly isn’t giving us much of a look at what the plot is going to be—and I guess that’s why they call it a teaser—but there still seems to be something a little off with the way they’re introducing this one to the world. The slow motion footage of lame suburban guys trying to look hard while driving, the slightly out of date rap song that makes up the soundtrack, somehow it all adds up to make something that feels a little less like a wide-release comedy that’s about to hit theaters and a little more like the funny new show that’s about to debut after Weeds on Showtime.

If you had bet that Sofia Coppola’s next film would deal with disaffected young women in some way, then it turns out you’re a big winner. And if you imagined it would be a look at the bored lives of the rich and depressed, then congratulations, you were pretty spot-on. But what may come as a surprise is that, despite Coppola’s trademark inert style, her next film is going to have something of an action element. Based at least in part on true events, The Bling Ring tells the tale of a group of fashion- and celebrity-obsessed teens in Beverly Hills who form a crime ring and proceed to break into celebrity homes. Coppola says that the film will “reveal a sobering view of our modern culture,” which sounds about right if you replace the word “sobering” with the word “infuriating.” The movie is intended to be an ensemble piece, and Coppola says of pre-production so far, “I’m excited about the young cast we’re assembling and I’m looking forward to shooting on location here in Los Angeles.” While most of the specifics of who make up this exciting young cast aren’t known, we do know that Coppola and her producers have landed a pretty huge name already.

You’d think the words “Gerard Butler” and “diamond heist flick” would spell out something fantastic, but in the case of Robert Luketic‘s Brilliant, they seem to signal something less than shiny. Butler has just replaced a previously in-negotiations Eric Bana to star in the film (and that’s already a black mark against it in my book, I’d much rather watch Bana on screen than Butler), which will be directed by his The Ugly Truth helmer. Yeah, that’s not good. Variety reports that Brilliant centers on “a small-time criminal who partners with a female thief to pull off a daring diamond heist.” While that’s certainly a fun premise, the closest that Luketic has come to a heist flick is 2008′s missed opportunity 21. And the film’s screenwriter will be of little help when it comes to crime expertise, as the film is writer Gillian Gorfil‘s first project.

Directors and writers aren’t the only one with viewpoints on filmmaking, so we’re starting at the beginning and the bottom as two production assistants give us their stories and share their insights into starting out in Hollywood. Plus, Fat Guy Kevin Carr joins us to play Good News/Bad News and deliver his own TED Talk. Download This Episode

There hasn’t been much good news surrounding Piranha 3DD so far. From the very beginning, the fact that Alexander Aja and his writers weren’t coming back for this sequel to their delightfully nihilist 2010 film was a disappointment. Then the studio started monkeying with the release date, a sure sign that signals were crossed and expectations weren’t being met at some level of the production. It got to the point where it was pretty easy to write Piranha 3DD off as a missed opportunity before anyone had ever even seen it. But this new trailer that Shock Till You Drop has dug up throws a monkey wrench in those plans. How could anyone hate a movie with a cast like this? First off, Christopher Lloyd returns as the crazy scientist, which is something that should happen in about every third movie made. Secondly, David Koechner is playing the owner of a water park who has hired strippers for life guards. Thirdly, they’ve included David Hasselhoff, who shows up playing himself, but while dressed in his Baywatch gear. Then you also have to consider the fact that Katrina Bowden seems to have a baby piranha in her vagina, the only thing that can stop these fish may be Gary Busey biting their heads off, and eventually things get so bad that Ving Rhames has to go all Planet Terror and pull out a set of gun legs.

Do we really need to introduce this one? Check out the brand new trailer for The Avengers below.

Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash—or simply “the Stash,” if you’re down—is a comic book shop in Red Bank, New Jersey. The sheer existence of the store when so many others are closing, in and of itself, might be noteworthy but what really gives this place some cachet is its owner: Kevin Smith. A comic book shop is a comic book shop, but when it’s in some way connected to the tour de force that I (and other people, probably) like to call Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, who isn’t going to want to visit? The new show Comic Book Men’s appeal is similarly tied to the Jersey Girl director—the unscripted series is set in the Stash and produced by Smith. I like Clerks, I like Chasing Amy, I like most of Dogma, I’ve gone to (and enjoyed) one of Smith’s live Q&A shows, so I think I fall within AMC’s target audience here. Despite being a part of this demographic, or maybe because I’m a part of this demographic, the network shouldn’t have put all of their eggs in the bespectacled, be-bearded, be-hockey-jerseyed filmmaker basket.

There are very few great directors with a near perfect record of feature films because the more movies you make the greater the odds that you’ll eventually make a stinker. Steven Spielberg has Always and Hook, David Fincher made The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Francis Ford Coppola shat out Jack. [Editor's note: The labeling of these films as "stinkers" is solely my opinion, and definitely not condoned by Webster's Dictionary or Mr. DeFrank.] But there’s at least one fantastic director who has yet to release a disappointment…you just have to look outside Hollywood. South Korea’s Kim Ji-woon has six feature films to his name so far, and all of them are pretty damn stellar across a wide range of genres. The Quiet Family, The Foul King, A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life, The Good the Bad the Weird, and I Saw the Devil. He’s currently filming his English-language debut (The Last Stand) with Arnold Schwarzenegger so this statement may not hold past next year, but for now the man is a golden god. His latest project, Doomsday Book, is an omnibus film that sees him contributing one of the two (or three?) segments alongside Lim Pil-seong (Hansel & Gretel) and possibly Han Jae-rim. The film is apocalypse themed with Kim’s segment featuring a robot gaining sentience and Lim’s focusing on a virus that leads to zombie hijinks. Check out the trailer below for Doomsday Book.

Tonight! We visit in with some of our favorite whacky Brits as they power through the seventeenth season of one of the greatest reality television programs in the history of time, space and everything else. We explore a historic, beautiful look at cinema’s start through the eyes of contemporary film’s biggest nerd. We watch a 9-foot tall man roundhouse kick an entire country. And we watch Rowan Atkinson continue to spit in the face of reason, churning out more laughs. Also, James May talks to a gurrrl. Top Gear: The Complete Season 17 If you are anything like me, then you’ve never really been much of a gear head or a car freak. That’s okay, we’re simply the kind of people who would rather be in the living room watching a movie than in the garage tinkering around with engine parts. That said, there’s nothing more magnetic to me than the musings of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. This triumvirate odd couple of motorist journalism is the most consistently entertaining group of hosts you’ll find anywhere on TV. Forget about Idol or The Voice, it’s all about these three middle-aged British men and their clear overcompensation issues. The fact that the BBC allows them to smash up expensive cars, light segments of Sweden on fire and hold monumental tributes to the Jaguar E-Type is all just a bonus in the end. Did I mention that they let celebrities drive around in reasonably priced cars? If you’re not giving [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Why Watch? From the sweeping soundscape of industrial music to the first-rate CGI effects to the raw and dynamic visuals, everything about this short film is stunning and fantastic. The imagery is conflicting and toys with the mind – a cow meanders down a highway with a decaying billboard in the background, a happy mascot sings the joy of a new solution to radiation-riddled cities while the husks of civilization prove otherwise. All of this delivered along with the gritty narration of a man with cracked lips and a voice worn from swallowing gravel creates a huge rust-covered impact. Watch it, and the District 9 connection should be clear, but this is an animal all its own. Amazing work from Factory Fifteen. What will it cost? Only 6 minutes. Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films. Special thanks to Hector P. for sending this to us.

Before Community riffed on it, My Dinner With Andre was the kind of thing you chatted about over Merlot while chuckling and pretending to know what you were talking about. After Community, that’s still the case, but you can reference Community referencing it and still seem cool. The truth is, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory‘s contemplative dinner conversation about the nature of art is fascinating because it features two men who know way more than they should talking about the broad-reaching subject of the humanities. Even as high a pedestal as they should be on, they manage to come off casually. Why there hasn’t been a podcast featuring the two yet is baffling, but according to The New York Times, they’re both set to work together again, and they’ll be doing it with directing icon Jonathan Demme. After Dinner, they did Vanya on 42nd Street, so naturally for desert they’ll be twisting up Henrik Ibsen‘s play “Master Builder” for a movie called Wally and André Shoot Ibsen. There’s nothing like tackling the depressingly Norwegian father of prose drama to create a stir, and doing it with the genius behind Caged Heat and Silence of the Lambs is even better. No cynicism, no irony, everything about this project sounds ridiculously amazing. Plus, the director claims “it’s like a Hitchcock movie with a vein of humor running through it.” Get. Ready.

Hot on the heels of winning a slew of awards at the Oscars, Harvey Weinstein has decided to go to war with the MPAA over the new documentary Bully, which was “slapped” with an R rating for language and lost an appeal to have it changed to PG-13. I’m not going to spend all my time pointing out the irony that Harvey Weinstein is a big bully himself, leveraging the tragic events in this new film to orchestrate a publicity stunt. Suffice it to say, if he were interested in actually having as many students as possible watch this film instead of making money, he could easily distribute censored screeners to schools with any offending language bleeped out. And why is he doing a little song-and-dance about releasing it “unrated” when he knows full well that the National Association of Theatre Owners will have to treat it like an NC-17 film (under the yoke and obligation of the MPAA)? Make no mistake… Weinstein’s in it for the money and not the cause. But let’s leave his personal bullying out of the argument and consider the possibility that an R rating might, in fact, be the right thing for Bully.

I may not have been completely on the Bridesmaids bandwagon like a lot of other people, but I love Kristen Wiig as a performer and might go as far as to say she’s the most talented female to ever work on Saturday Night Live; so I’m very interested in where her film career is going to go now that she has some clout in Hollywood. And, according to a report from Variety, her next movie is one that is going to be well worth my attention. Wiig has reportedly attached herself to star in a new action comedy written by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, or as they’re otherwise known, Nat Faxon and Dean Pelton from Community, or as they’re otherwise known, the two guys who just won an Effin Oscar for writing The Descendants. Add Wiig’s unparalleled skill as a comedic performer with these guy’s obvious skill in crafting big screen stories, and it sounds like we might be in for something special. Factor in that all three of these talents know each other from back in the day when they performed in The Groundlings together, and we may just be looking at one of those perfect pieces of synergy that becomes an all time great. I mean, this new movie is being described as an action comedy, for the love of Mike. That’s a genre I generally can’t get enough of, and when’s the last time you’ve seen a good action comedy made in Hollywood? If this movie’s [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Welcome back to This Week In DVD and the last day of February! Well, what should be the last day but is instead actually the 2nd to last thanks to the shenanigans of the evil and gilled Leap Dave Williams. Only one big title hits shelves this week, but it’s an Academy Award winner! Other titles that aren’t named Hugo include a few fantastic and exciting foreign films (The Front Line, Rabies, The Yellow Sea), a few less exciting foreign films (The Conformist, Tomorrow When the War Began, Mandrill) and more! As always, if you see something you like, click on the image to buy it. I Melt With You Four old college friends (Thomas Jane, Rob Lowe, Christian McKay, Jeremy Piven) get together annually for a drug-fueled weekend, but their latest reunion finds each of them at the lowest point of their lives. All four leads do a fantastic job in this energetic but terribly depressing movie that examines the ideas of failure, depression and expectations at the mid-point of a man’s life. Things tease the point of over-doing it, but the lasting effect is a powerful one as the men face the lives and mistakes they’ve made. Plus Carla Gugino, Arielle Kebbel, and Sasha Grey! Director Mark Pellington has a couple solid films under his belt (Arlington Road and The Mothman Prophecies), but his main career focus seems to be music videos so it’s fitting that his latest film matches the stylish visuals, heavy emotional toll and powerful [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly collection of things you’ll enjoy. We promise. We begin tonight with the story of the evening. Or more to the point, the casting story of the evening. Elizabeth Olsen has been offered the lead role in Oldboy, the Spike Lee directed remake of the incredibly popular Korean revenge film. Heralded for her performance in Martha Marcy May Marlene, Olsen has burst onto the scene with her ability to act, something she has over her elder sisters, Mary Kate and Ashley. She’s a good choice for just about everything, even a movie that probably shouldn’t be attempted in the first place. Like this one.

This has to be one of the more cooler and inventive pieces of viral marketing in quite sometime. With Prometheus less than four months away from hopefully blowing our feeble minds, we’re still slightly in the dark on Alien prequel. The teaser relied on atmospheric “Holy hell!” visuals, while this viral video actually gives insight into one of the film’s characters, Peter Weyland, of Weyland Industries. Guy Pearce‘s role has been one of the production’s best kept secrets since he joined the project, but now we know he’ll be one of the core links to the Alien franchise. If you recall, Weyland’s company plays a big part in the Alien mythology. Prometheus writer Damon Lindelof wrote this short and Ridley Scott served as a supervisor. Hopefully we’ll be getting more of these from Weyland Industries. Watch it after the break.

Paramount didn’t used to have to make their own animated movies, mostly because they had a deal in place where they handled the distribution of all the movies made by DreamWorks Animation. But that all ended when DreamWorks started looking for a new partner to both buy their company and handle the distribution end of things. Rather than work out a new, riskier deal, Paramount decided they were just going to cut their ties with DreamWorks Animation and form a new wing of their own company called Paramount Animation. You know, with the intention of animating things. This has been in the planning stages for a while now, and it’s looking like Paramount Animation is ready to make their first movie. At a recent investor meeting Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman was quoted as saying, “We will be releasing a SpongeBob movie at the end of 2014, which will serve to start off or be one of our films that starts off our new animation effort.” What better way to start off a new venture than by relying on a proven commodity? SpongeBob’s first movie, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, only had a production budget of $30m and it ended up pulling in $140m worldwide. If you want your team to start things off with a win, it seems to me that SpongeBob is a good first round draft pick to make.

In the interest of tempering my bile after my last post about Ryan Murphy’s Super Group From Hell, here’s some news that sounds good to my ears. Universal Pictures has picked up Cowboy Ninja Viking, the Image Comic by AJ Lieberman and artist Riley Rossmo, for a cinematic adaptation with Marc Forster at the helm. While I’m not a huge fan of Forster (though I do have a weird soft spot for Stranger Than Fiction), the plot of the film sounds so kickass, and the writing talent behind it so fresh, that the whole thing sounds awesome. The story of Cowboy Ninja Viking is considerably smarter and cooler than that mash-up name might hint at, Deadline Davos reports that “the title character comes from a secret government program to turn schizophrenics into assassins. The protagonist comes through the program with the skill sets of a cowboy, ninja and a viking. While most of the patients involved in the program are sent back to insane asylum after the program went awry in Iraq, he escapes and uses his skills to track down the billionaire who masterminded the program.” What are the skills of a Viking? Skull-crushing? A crazy, skull-crushing ninja who rides horses who is bent on revenge? Sold. So sold.

I am fully aware that I after I reveal what I am about to reveal, I may very well have my Official Lady Card revoked – but I’m willing to accept that. Deadline Harriman reveals that Ryan Murphy has signed a “preemptive deal” in the seven-figures with Sony Pictures to make a film titled One Hit Wonders, a musical comedy that will center on three washed-up pop singers from the ’90s who join together to make a super group. The film has yet to be penned, but it will be written specifically for Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, and Cameron Diaz, who will play the singers, along with Beyonce, Andy Samberg, and the rest of the Lonely Island boys in unspecified (but obviously musical) roles. Here comes the part where I throw myself onto the fire – I think this sounds eighteen shades of awful, almost unspeakably terrible. The real kicker for me is this tidbit – “The project came out of a dinner that Murphy had at the Soho House, with Paltrow, Diaz and Witherspoon. They wanted to do something fun together, and kicked around ideas until they settled on One Hit Wonders.” How I wish this had just stayed a funny jag between friends and not something that the rest of us have to be subjected to. While musical comedies are usually delightful, something about a pack of Hollywood A-list friends getting together just for the sake of getting together turns my tummy, and the attachment of Ryan Murphy, [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]