What is Casting Couch? It’s where you go to make sure Elijah Wood is adding another new job to his calendar every day. Turns out, today he kept the streak alive, read on… Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender are two of the best actors on the planet Earth; objectively, inarguably. What a coup, then, that director Michael Grandage has landed both of them for his upcoming project, Genius. Based on a book by A. Scott Berg, Genius is a biopic that explores the relationship between Thomas Wolfe (Fassbender) and his editor Max Perkins (Firth). Turns out Wolfe and Perkins were great friends, but the kind who butted heads over everything. Sure, listening to two guys argue over word choice wouldn’t normally sound like a very exciting idea for a movie, but with these two actors on board it absolutely does. Add this one to your to-do list. [Variety]

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news round-up that comes from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow. A-ah-ahh-ah! When it first hit the web, the consensus was that this red-band trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was nothing more than an illegal leak of someone video taping in a European theater. But since then, after some inspection, speculation and hearsay, it’s now believed to be a strategic leak in accordance with the styles of Lisbeth Salander. That could be the case. Lending credence to that theory is the fact that the audio is pretty clean, there’s an MPAA warning on the trailer (which was supposedly recorded in Europe) and days later, Sony has not taken it down. Either way, it’s a wicked trailer. If it’s a plant by Sony, it’s a brilliant maneuver.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr found himself awake on a distant planet being hunted by macho Rastafarian aliens. Then he realized he was still dreaming. Sucked back into reality, he dove into the 3D experience of Despicable Me and reached for a dunce cap for Predators.

One of the most vivid memories I have of the original Predator film is the no-fluff approach to storytelling. The audience, like the film’s team of mercenaries, is dropped right into the action with little exposition and plenty of machismo. It’s fitting then that Predators, a sequel that disregards everything that has happened since 1987, would do the same — in a more literal sense. When we meet Royce, played by Adrian Brody, he is falling. When he lands, the action begins and the audience is instantaneously transported back to a familiar place. A place deep in the jungle, where a team of killers is hunted by something otherworldly. A place that feels exactly as it should, as it has in the past.

Kevin Carr sits his chubbiness down weighs in on The Bounty Hunter, Repo Men and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Jude Law and Forest Whitaker star as Remy and Jake the repo men, who have been both buddies and rivals since the fourth grade. Their corporate hack boss (Liev Schreiber) sends them on missions to retrieve the unpaid for organs of everyone from wealthy businessmen to hotshot musical artists to your everyday overweight schlubs. The men might believe they’re engaged in a respectable pursuit, but they are in fact angels of death forced to reclaim company property by any means necessary.

At first, the new red band teaser for Repo Men, a futuristic action film starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, seems like a tired old girl. That is, until she busts loose with bloody intensity.

Both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety are unleashing a serious amount of news about the upcoming Robert Rodriguez-produced Predators film, which is set to start shooting here in Austin and in Hawaii in the very near future.

In exploring the newly updated 2008 Summer preview from the Weinstein Company (which makes no mention of Fanboys, by the way), I stumbled upon the late-summer release Crossing Over, which stars Harrison Ford, Sean Penn, Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd.

What’s so fresh about Anne Hathaway or Jessica Biel? C’mon Variety!