You’re about to be eaten by a pterodactyl. Do you climb down the cliffside using a vine or try to hide out in a small cave? Your answer is important because it’ll determine whether you end up in a Jurassic beast’s bowels or not. But you can always hold the page with your finger while you check to see if your choice gets you digested to death. In the 80s and 90s, “Choose Your Own Adventure” books were insanely popular. They were the mainstream, socially acceptable version of D&D where you could be a spaceman, a knight, or a spaceknight who went on highly descriptive adventures of your own design. The draw was the power it gave the reader to make decisions that directly influenced the experience of the book, to convert a passive activity into an active one. More than a few have tried to translate the model into movies (including the “Choose Your Own Adventure” brand with the help of William H. Macy and a yeti), but there are inherent difficulties in doing so — specifically the group-based nature of movie-going. YouTube solves many of those issues, but now a program called JumpView seeks to create a truly immersive movie-watching experience complete with the digital ability to hold your finger on the page. They’ve even made their own movie for users to experiment with. Here are the basics.

J.J. Abrams is a no-brainer for Star Wars: Episode VII. He’s proven himself as a popular storyteller of science fiction by working with, among others, a giant international franchise that takes place in space. He’s also a self-diagnosed fan of George Lucas‘ grand creation — a factor that went into his feigned earlier denial of the directing gig when speculation was at its peak. From a business angle, from a fan angle, from every angle, he’s the ideal filmmaker to take over for the franchise. Which is why his hiring is potentially terrible. It all boils down to two key problems. One, the consolidation of creative visions under too few roofs, and two, the potential for a generic future of a revolutionary franchise.

Vulture has a super vague rumor that Warners is attempting to coax Steven Spielberg into giving his blessing for a remake of Gremlins. It’s not the first time, it probably won’t be the last, and so far there’s no reason to believe that this trial balloon will soar where others have failed before it. But if the studio really wants to recapture a bit of Amblin magic, they’re going to need drop the eternal sticking point that kept Joe Dante from making Gremlins 3: the insistence of switching to CGI (a point succinctly argued by Quint in his open letter to Spielberg). Quints main parallel is perfect — how would audiences react if the new Muppets movie was going to feature a CGI Kermit? Regardless of whether technology has made fantastical leaps and bounds, Gizmo and the gang are rooted in that practical puppet look. On the fan side, making them CGI will be heresy. From a business standpoint, if you’re going to trade off the name-recognition of the characters, you have to respect the iconography, or you’re ultimately just launching a new unknown anyway.

After I saw Django Unchained for the first time, I jokingly tweeted that it was going to be funny when a bunch of white people get nominated for Academy Awards for this movie about slavery. Then the Academy Award nominations came out, and it became less of a joke and more an eerily accurate prediction. I’m not telling you that to give you the impression that my twitter feed is magical or that following me will make your life immeasurably better (even though it is, and it will), just to remind you that the Oscars aren’t really about the best or most important movies, performances, or artistic accomplishments, which is why when you look at a history of the winners you’ll see a curious absence of classics like Die Hard or Star Wars, and an overabundance of moviesthatsuck. Because instead of telling us what movies were the best, the Oscars tell us what movies made the Academy feel the most warm and safe.  Nowhere is this more apparent than when looking at how the Academy treats movies about slavery. They don’t want a smart, artistic analysis that properly explores the darker aspects of the fact that the United States contributed to a centuries-long genocide. They want movies that gloss over the pain and suffering. At best, they want movies that cut right to the part where white people get forgiven. Which is why we see the following trend in this brief list of every movie to deal directly with slavery

Let’s be real for a second. Even if screenwriter Kelly Marcel claims that Fifty Shades of Grey is going to be NC-17, there’s no chance that it will be. For that to happen, Universal — one of the biggest studios in Hollywood — would have to convert the best-selling, phenomenon level property they spent $3m to acquire into an aggressive message aimed directly at the MPAA (which is partially funded by Universal) and risk money on the film not screening in a lot of theaters. Had The Weinstein Company gotten the rights, this might be believable, but it’s beyond the realm of possibility as it is, and there are two situations playing out that I can see here: This is a screenwriter — who from what I can tell has some serious game — pointing to the bleachers or having a laugh by going over the top. This is part of a cultivated marketing plan to make the property even more titillating and dangerous which will culminate in them either achieving an NC-17 (maybe they’ll have Ryan Gosling go down on Michelle Williams in it) before pulling it back for an R or aiming for an R regardless of the NC-17 publicity. Obviously there’s going to be sex in it, but if The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is still an R, it’ll be truly surprising to see Grey manage to go harder. But truly, the reason this doesn’t pass the smell test is that a lot of major theater chains won’t

“Movie Houses of Worship” is a regular feature spotlighting our favorite movie theaters around the world, those that are like temples of cinema catering to the most religious-like film geeks. This week, we don’t have a theater to share so I’m writing about comfort at the movies instead. If you’d like to suggest or submit a place you regularly worship at the altar of cinema, please email our weekend editor. It used to be that movie theaters tried to compete with home viewing options by offering amenities you couldn’t find in your living room. But bigger screens, gimmicks and special menus are no longer enough. Or maybe even a draw at all. Now it seems the theater industry is out to accomodate us in ways that mimic our experience at home. They want us to feel as comfortable as we would had we never even gone out. That has to be the reason that AMC Theatres has introduced to five of its locations across the country new “comfy seats,” plush power recliners with footrests that are just like (or for some us better than) our favorite movie-watching chairs at home. Do we need such comfort at the movies? Can we take our shoes and pants off, too? Hold a cat on our lap? Can we all have remote controls so we can pause the screen if we have to go to the bathroom? Presumably theaters will keep the line drawn at decency and personal conveniences that don’t infringe on others’ comfort and enjoyment.

As if answering our well-established hypothesis about Hollywood shutting down the production of genuine movie stars, the industry offered a positively scientific blitz of testing this year to challenge that assertion and ultimately prove it correct. The home version of the game is to try and name the last movie star minted by the studios, the last big name to emerge and become wildly popular because of their appearances in motion pictures, the last figure to be crafted by the system in order to help secure a bigger box office for it. However, filmmakers gave us something much more concrete this year in order to prove once and for all that — while a face or two still rises from the periphery to the forefront in movies – we should be mourning the concept of “The Movie Star.” They gave us Channing Tatum and Taylor Kitsch. Let’s start with some magic.

If there’s one word I think of that’s best tied to the story of film in 2012, it’s “disappointing.” That’s not to say that 2012 was a disappointing year for movies. I don’t know if it was the best in a while, as some of my fellow critics claim, but then I still haven’t seen a lot of the “best” titles of the year. What I do know is that there were enough movies that really, really, really disappointed a lot of people, and so I feel like I heard — or read — the word “disappointing” more than any other. Whether it was a long-awaited prequel to a classic helmed by the original’s director or the expected return to form for a filmmaker or a final installment of a much-worshipped superhero trilogy or a reboot of a beloved comic-based franchise or a new animated feature from a usually dependable studio, there were plenty of major releases that turned out to be less than satisfying. At least for some.

This is not an article that makes wild predictions about the future. It probably won’t solve all of you movie-watching problems, either. It’s also not entirely about a movie in which Liam Neeson has a set of skills. It is, however, a cautiously optimistic piece about where the world of digital distribution is heading. We talk about it far too much as part of the debate over piracy. The notion that for producers of content to truly reach the plugged in generation, they’re going to have to fix the mechanism that sells us the content. It’s perhaps the worst conditions under which we talk about digital distribution. So many sides, so many emotions, so much grey area exists in the piracy discussion. And so often, it escalates out of control. But what about the optimistic side of digital distribution. What is it that people want most, if they aren’t simply after something free. It’s simple: they want it now. And more and more, we’re seeing distributors who are closing the gap between when things are in theaters and when you can have it in our home. In these instances, there’s cause for hope.

The National Rifle Association is breaking its silence after the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, promising a full news conference on Friday and “meaningful contributions to help make sure [something like Sandy Hook] never happens again.’’  The group has received a lot of public criticism for their staunch position on 2nd Amendment rights, but a former NRA political director is claiming that we might hear the same old speeches from the group. “When the emotions come down, I’m sure you’ll hear the NRA address this issue. It’ll be in January when legislation is introduced. They’ll testify at hearings. You’ll hear the same kind of arguments that I’d come up with,” said Richard Feldman, who worked on behalf of the group in the 1980s and remains an advocate for their cause. We’ve already gotten a hint of what one of those arguments will be: that it’s violent movies, not access to firearms that are doing the real damage. “If we’re going to have a conversation, then let’s have a comprehensive conversation,” an industry insider told Fox News.  ”If we’re going to talk about the Second Amendment, then let’s also talk about the First Amendment, and Hollywood, and the video games that teach young kids how to shoot heads. If you really want to stop incidents like this, passing one more law is not going to do a damn thing.”

In a country of 62 million, 35 people are about to alter the way the public sees movies. Not even 35 people either — more like interpretations of their open-ended responses to a faulty screening process disguised as research. You see, earlier in the year, the British Board of Film Classification commissioned a study on sexual and sadistic violence in films [PDF], but instead of consulting experts or surveying thousands of people to get a meaningful understanding of what the public is thinking, they asked 35 people leading questions to decide that everyone’s against what the censor board wants them to be against. It wouldn’t be such a big deal, but now the BBFC has announced they’ll be reviewing their attitudes regarding films with sexual and sadistic violence based on this bogus study. Talk about a self-fulfilling policy.

“When Danny asked me to make the film, I knew right away I had the opportunity to pay tribute to a skateboarder I admired and tell a human story that fed my filmmaking soul. When Danny calls and asks, you don’t say no.” – Jacob Rosenberg, director of Waiting for Lightning There is no real way of knowing, just by watching it, that the new documentary Waiting for Lightning is a work commissioned by its own subject. The above quote comes from an interview in the press notes, and after reading it, I decided that the film is even worse than I already thought. Something just rubs me the wrong way about a prominent person having a movie made about himself. It reminds me of Triumph of the Will, especially the opening. This isn’t to say that I think legendary pro skateboarder Danny Way is comparable to Hitler in the worst of aspects, just in the narcissism sense.

It would be easy to think that the recent announcement that Netflix beat out pay television for the rights to Disney/Marvel/Pixar/LucasFilm releases is a positive step forward, but the good news is more of a bandaid than a cure-all. Even forgetting that they won’t see new releases from Disney until 2016, the core problem for Netflix is spelled out brilliantly over at Tech Crunch by Armando Kirwin: they’re now a small fish swimming in a giant pond that they built themselves. On the business side of things, a ton of major players in other industries have jumped into the deep end of streaming, stealing a lot of potential revenue. On the fan side of things, Netflix remains a repository of mostly middling independent work, direct-to options, a handful of older films and a golden kernel of flicks that are only a year or so old. That’s the half-empty way to look at it. Of course the reality is a lot more complex, especially considering that the above graph, while accurate, is more a representation of what larger companies are able to do with a safety netted streaming service while Netflix swims alone. However, it’s not easy to imagine that Netflix’s saving grace will be in its ability to make deals like the one with Disney that make sense to its core users.

It’s a sad day indeed, for another media pundit has discovered the ugly ease of piracy and is calling for the complete destruction of the release schedule structure because he just cannot wait two days to see more episodes of Homeland. This time it’s Frederic Filloux writing for The Guardian, and his quandary is not to be taken lightly: the poor man paid $32 for the first season of the twisty CIA show only to find himself hooked, but when the next season arrived on September 30th, he had “no alternative but to download free but illegal torrent files.” Oh, no! Like a neck-scratching addict, he had to turn to crime in order to get his fix because his only other option, a hellish last resort, was to wait a few days to see it on TV. So let’s burn this mother down. Filloux argues that the antique nature of the current stratified release schedule should be replaced by universal availability because he wants everything right now, and, okay, maybe all of his frustration is warranted even if his response isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing the reality of how we consume media now, and we can take it without any kind of value judgment, but this is yet another situation where someone is calling ignorantly for the castle to be destroyed because the gate he goes in through all the time was closed for the day.

We’re entering Awards Season, folks. For most of you, that usually means seeing your favorite films of the year lose to what you’d consider the “lesser” Weinstein picture. It’s always very frustrating, but one of those movies you may be cheering on — and has Oscar nominations written all over it — is Ben Affleck‘s Argo. The movie is a shoe-in for both the heavy hitter nods and countless spots on year-end top 10 lists. To GQ, this makes Affleck the director of the year, considering how he went from “loathed, frat boy Ben Affleck” to “esteemed filmmaker Ben Affleck.” It’s a transformation, for sure, and one to be proud of, but does continuing an epic comeback we all knew about really make him filmmaker of the year for 2012? Affleck proved himself as the director of the year in 2010 with The Town. That doesn’t mean he made the best movie of that year — and he certainly didn’t — but it was a big statement for Affleck the filmmaker. He proved Gone Baby Gone was no fluke — that he was the real deal. Although Argo is the best of these three films, it doesn’t say as much about his directorial career as his first two features do.

Whether you loved it or hated it, there’s no denying the fact that Prometheus was pretty polarizing — most obviously because everyone reading this probably either loved it or hated it. Among those who hated it, the criticisms are generally focused on the script. Character motivations were unclear or nonexistent. People reached out to lovingly pet blatantly malicious monsters. DAVID, the most interesting character by far (largely due to Michael Fassbender’s amazing performance) is never explained, even though he incites the core conflict of the film. So naturally those who hated it (like me) are pretty upset with Damon Lindelof (Lost) for messing up what could easily have been a really great movie. Because as much as Prometheus sucked (for some people), it’s also pretty clear that the ghost of greatness is lingering just beneath the surface. So when we learned that Lindelof had done major revisions to the original script written by Jon Spaihts (The Darkest Hour, the unproduced Passengers), many assumed that the original script had been brilliant before Lindelof came along and Lost’d it all up. Because that’s a far more palatable reality. Turns out, we were right. The original script for Prometheus (then called Alien: Engineers) has been leaked, and it solves virtually all the problems with the original. Is it perfect? By no means — but at least it achieves a lot that the finished version doesn’t. Here are 8 terrible examples:

Tim Burton is not a fan of the horizontally-challenged. That’s the conclusion I reached from watching Frankenweenie, an otherwise very pleasant return to form for for the director. What isn’t so pleasant is how every paunchy character — the mayor, the gym coach, and the chubby kid whose name doesn’t matter — is cackled at by Burton and turned into a visual punch-line. Burton portrays these characters in a way that seems antithetical to how most people perceive him and his films… with a casual dash of mean-spiritedness. The one constant in Burton’s films, aside from Johnny Depp obviously, is that he’s always championed the outcasts and made them the eventual heroes of their worlds. Think of the Goth cutter Edward Scissorhands defeating the jock bully, the goofy Amish kid saving the day in Mars Attacks, the friendless Charlie Bucket outlasting the truly bad kids to win the chocolate factory, etc. Looking back at his work, though, it seems clear that Burton himself has been acting the bully when it comes to even the mildly obese. They’re made to be clumsy, goofy, obnoxious and irritating, and if they don’t exist strictly as a visual gag they’re almost sure to be a villain. Can you think of one overweight hero or true good guy in his films? I can’t. Why would a man so feverishly in favor of defending and uplifting outsiders himself single out a specific group of people to consistently bully throughout his career? Hell if I know, but

As far as I can tell, regular folk don’t care for movies about movies or films about filmmaking. They used to, back when Hollywood was a more glamourous and idolized place for Americans. Classics like Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, The Bad and the Beautiful and the 1954 version of A Star is Born were among the top-grossing releases of their time. But 60 years later, it seems the only people really interested in stories of Hollywood, actors, directors, screenwriters, et al. are people involved with the film industry — the self-indulgence being one step below all the awards nonsense — and movie geeks, including film critics and fans. If you’re reading Film School Rejects, you’re not one of the aforementioned “regular folk,” and you probably get more of a kick out of stuff like Living in Oblivion, Ed Wood, Get Shorty, State and Main, The Hard Way, The Last Tycoon, The Stunt Man, The Big Picture, The Player, Bowfinger, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Argo than those people do. While it is true that The Artist faced the challenge of being a silent film, another major obstacle in the way of box office success must have been its Hollywood setting. Argo isn’t really literally about filmmaking, though, and that might be working in its favor. Ben Affleck‘s period thriller, which is expected to finally take the top spot at the box office this weekend, is about not making a film, so it should have the opposite result of most movies in which

God help whatever poor soul is given the task to follow up Sam Mendes‘s work on Skyfall. Mendes has brought the James Bond franchise to a level beyond what we would hope and expect from a fifty-year-old series. Most characters couldn’t endure that lengthy amount of time, but Mendes and the brass behind the franchise have made a bold reason to believe that Bond is far from dead. Even looking past Roger Deakins‘ rich cinematography, Thomas Newman‘s intense but subtle score (which I’m listening to/fawning over as I write these words), and the magnificent locations milked for all their beauty, there’s still plenty more to love about Skyfall. Mendes has brought his voice to the franchise while also preserving Bond’s greatest traits, making the film one hell of a character-driven action movie. But just how did he do it?

Beware of Massive Spoilers for Looper after the jump. Should we enjoy time travel movies for their entertainment value despite any plot holes that might arise, or are those pesky nitpicks enough to sink the sci-fi ship? That’s the question at the heart of a metric ton of gold-bricking discussions about Looper – a film that playfully and smartly waves away the specifics in search of a larger metaphor. But is that really okay? To step away from the heat of the conversation, I’d like to give an example from the past that falls in the sweet middle spot of that main question: the liquid metal absurdity of Terminator 2. My central problem with the time travel in that fun-as-hell film is that it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Granted, from the “present” that we’re watching, it all seems fine. The original plan failed, so they call in Robert Patrick to take over. But put yourself in the room when the machines sent back Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first one. They would have known instantly whether the plan worked or not, and that causes a lot of problems for the internal logic of what goes on in the sequel.