Writer-director Oren Moverman’s terrific feature debut, The Messenger, was about trying not to deal with grief, while his character-driven “cop” drama, Rampart, is about attempting to not deal with everything. The lead of the film, Dave Brown, rejects change in a major time of change. Despite Moverman using his latest film to track a far more morally corrupted character than he previously dealt with in Messenger, he still shows the same measure of empathy, making Rampart a fascinating character study. The film follows Woody Harrelson‘s Dave Brown, as he confronts both a new time and a new way of life. Brown, a former soldier who sees himself as something of a man’s man, is unwilling to get with the times. With the true-life Rampart scandals serving as motivation, the LAPD is making major changes – ones that Brown won’t (or can’t) go along with. The cop is a sickly, paranoia-driven enigma who (forgive the cheesy as all hell expression) plays by his own nonexistent rules. Dave is stubborn, racist, fearful, and believes that he’s someone important enough to be spied on. He’s a real bastard.

The premise of That’s What She Said sounded like it could be funny enough, with a trio of seemingly oddball women coming together for a day of slightly mad-cap adventures throughout the streets of New York to get Bebe (Marcia DeBonis) ready for her big date that night. Things start out amusing enough with clearly neurotic Bebe constantly calling her probably still drunk from the night before best friend Dede (Anne Heche) to plan their day. Bebe is already primping at 7:30am while Dede (yes – these are their names) barely notices when she falls off her own bed making it clear that the two are polar opposites, but you get the sense that they have been friends long enough to know (and put up with) each other’s less than favorable traits. The day gets off to a bad start with Dede already in a bad mood (although it seems she is always this way) and Bebe having taken a very upset (and constantly crying) Clementine (Alia Shawkat) under her wing. Clementine has just gone through a breakup and is not shy about sharing every (every) intimate detail of her now defunct relationship. Dede is the picture of constant support and symphony while Bebe could care less, until a sudden near run-in with an ex of her own causes the idea of Clementine joining their group the least of Dede’s concerns.

It’s about time more lady-centric comedies popped up in theaters, and the success of Bridesmaids (and what appears to be an insatiable demand for a sequel) should usher in a bit of a golden age for the mini-genre. If that’s so, it’s no shock that such a female-driven sex comedy would show its goods at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Carrie Preston‘s That’s What She Said will surely be the butt of many jokes around Park City come next week, so it’s fitting that we’re getting the film’s first trailer to warm up the Michael Scott in all of us. The film stars Anne Heche as DeeDee (Heche was at last year’s Sundance with Cedar Rapids) and Marcia DeBonis as her best friend Bebe (you might recognize DeBonis as Jennifer Garner’s put-upon assistant from 13 Going On 30). Both unlucky in love, DeeDee is trying to heal herself up with bad habits (lots of smoking), while hopeless romantic Bebe thinks she might have finally met her match. A pretty standard plot, right? Well, that’s probably why Maeby Fünke herself, Alia Shawkat, gets tossed in with her own messed up notions about love. Shawkat’s Clementine is a sex addict, and it looks as if her boundary-pushing just might force DeeDee and Bebe to rethink their own choices. Plus, you know, sex and cigarettes. That’s What She Said will have its World Premiere at Sundance on Friday, January 20, with three additional screenings throughout the festival. Check out the film’s official trailer [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]

Only mere hours ago, I watched Oren Moverman‘s Rampart. It’s much, much different from his fantastic 2008 directorial debut, The Messenger. Since I’ve only seen the film so recently, I’m not 100% comfortable discussing it at length. It’s a film that needs time…but I can say that this trailer is not the best representation of Moverman’s meditative drama. There is no hard rock music in the movie, it’s not fast paced, and the film is not as clichéd as the trailer suggests. If this trailer gets anything across right, it’s all the hints at how great Woody Harrelson is as Dave Brown. Harrelson fills a through-and-through bastard with a surprising amount of humanity, and even a little bit of uncomfortable empathy. It’s a powerful performance. But does Harrelson really look like the most corrupt cop you’ve ever seen on screen? You be the judge:

There’s dirty cops and there’s bad cops, and there’s a difference between the two. In Oren Moverman’s Rampart, a large-scale scandal threatens to ruin an entire police division, but the possibly-orchestrated (and conveniently televised) fall from grace of a single, uninvolved officer forms the plot of the filmmaker’s sluggish and sloppy second feature. Writer and director Moverman again teams with his The Messenger star, Woody Harrelson, as maybe-fall guy Dave Brown, a renegade cop unhinged by the possibility that he’s been bad all along, he just didn’t know it. Though Rampart makes copious mention of the complicated real-life scandal that shook up Los Angeles and the LAPD in the 90s, the film itself instead focuses on the fictional tale of Harrelson’s Dave Brown. An old school cop, a former solider who spends a touch too much time harkening back to his Vietnam years, Harrelson fills out Dave with enough of that classic Woody charm to keep him endlessly watchable, but frequently hard to care about (Harrelson will likely get some Oscar buzz, and if anything in this film is awards-worthy, it’s Harrelson’s work). A cigarette-chomping, skirt-chasing alcoholic, Dave doesn’t have much to recommend him besides swagger and a smirk, but even that can’t save him when he’s caught on tape positively kicking the crap out of a citizen who (at least on the video) appears to be doing nothing wrong. Sent to the media and popping up on newscasts across the city, Dave’s bad behavior may be ruining his life, [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]

Bear with us while we explain to you why you need to purchase a new insurance plan. Trust us, it’s important, and if you want to be taken care of, you should buy your insurance exclusively from Tim Lippe. He’s definitely a guy you can trust… until he makes it to an insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Columbus, Ohio may not be Cedar Rapids, but it’s in the Midwest where the film is expanding on March 4. However, fans of Ed Helms, Miguel Arteta and John C. Reilly have a chance to catch Cedar Rapids for free before it opens locally. FSR is here to help by hosting an early screening in Columbus, Ohio. If you live in the Columbus area, you can use this super-secret code that allows you to print out two tickets to the Columbus screening of Cedar Rapids on Thursday, March 3 at the AMC Lennox at 7:30 PM.

Kevin Carr has a chat with Ashton Kutcher about his new indie film Spread, in which Kevin obsesses about sex scenes with Anne Heche, suspenders and whether a fat guy from Ohio can find an L.A. sugar mama.

So there I was, watching Isla Fisher’s new film Confessions of a Shopaholic and being a little surprised as how likeable she is on screen in a leading role when it occurred to me… I’m probably never going to see her boobs again