You knew it was inevitable. We here at Film School Rejects love Michael Bay’s Armageddon. Hell, we even gave the film a full day of coverage last April, sadly a day before Commentary Commentary was in existence. So here we are. The Criterion Collection of Armageddon and everything Michael Bay has to thrown down on the commentary track. Say what you will. Even outside the walls of FSR, this film has its fair share of fandom, and they aren’t backing down from their sturdy position. But be honest. It’s going to be fun to hear all the intricacies and insight Bay has to dish out even if you aren’t a fan of the film. He’s not alone, either. On this particular track, Bay is joined by Jerry Bruckheimer, Bruce Willis, and Ben Affleck. That sounds to me like all the knowledge you’d want about Armageddon wrapped into a tight, little group of Hollywood players. It’s the commentary track – and the Commentary Commentary – the size of Texas, and the less preamble we give it the better. So here’s everything we learned from listening to these fine gentlemen speak about their film, and don’t worry. I’ll acknowledge the moment when Affleck tells Willis he loves him. I’m getting misty eyed just thinking about it now.

There is one thing that becomes quite clear, quite quickly when Lay The Favorite begins: not everyone should do voice over work. Rebecca Hall (who plays Beth Raymer) sadly falls into that category and her baby voice stays with her throughout the entire film. Lay The Favorite tells Beth’s story as she tries to figure out her purpose in life at a job that will be stimulating and make her good money (don’t we all, Beth). The best place to pursue such a dream? Las Vegas, of course! Beth packs up her life (and dog Otis) and heads West with stars in her eyes. Ready and willing to do anything, Beth quickly makes friends with Holly (Laura Prepon) who turns her on to a job with Dink Heimowtiz (Bruce Willis) who runs a legal (at least in Vegas) gambling company (Dink Inc.) that bets on anything and everything, but mainly sporting events. Dink’s world is exactly the type of excitement and stimulation Beth was hoping for and despite her baby talk, daddy issues (no matter what she says) and constant hair chewing, Dink takes a shine to her and agrees to bring her on.

Rian Johnson first won the hearts of film fans by mixing the noir and teen movie genres in 2005’s Brick, and coming up in 2012 he’s set to wow us all again by mixing the time travel movie up with the assassin thriller in Looper. This one sees Johnson once again working with Brick star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who will be playing an assassin that kills people who have been sent back in time; one of those targets being Bruce Willis. You can basically think of Gordon-Levitt as a T-800 and Willis as Michael Biehn. Except, Looper has a twist. While I’m sure this will all be revealed in the film’s advertising, be warned, thar be spoilers ahead.

I don’t know where you stand on the issue, but the release of a new Wes Anderson movie is pretty much cause for a gigantic celebration around my house. I know that he’s kind of a love him or hate him director, but personally, his dry humor, fairy tale tone, and satirical yet sentimental look at neurotic intellectuals hits my funny bone in a way few other things do. And his meticulous attention to production design detail make his movies a joy to pick through and study over the course of multiple re-watches. These are films that grow in my esteem over time, and his newest work, Moonrise Kingdom, looks like it’s going to fit, perhaps quite predictably, right in that oeuvre. Anderson’s movies always feel like they’re taking place in a world slightly more magical than our own, but his last film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, went a step further by being an animated film starring talking animals. Though Moonrise Kingdom sees the director stepping back into the world of live action, it looks like he’s bringing more of that animated absurdity back with him. This trailer has impossible tree forts, Ed Norton in a Cub Scout uniform saying things like “Jiminy Cricket, he flew the coop,” lightning strikes, and little kids brandishing homemade weapons. Make no mistake, Wes Anderon’s latest movie looks absolutely bat-poop crazy, and I’m super stoked to see how far he’s willing to take things. The final scene, where Bill Murray interacts with some children [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]

The powers that be at Film School Rejects were wise enough to include Rian Johnson‘s sci-fi pic Looper as one of our Most Anticipated Films of 2012, and it’s certainly in my top 3 for the year as well. Sadly, the film is still far off and we’ve only gotten a few behind-the-scenes pics (via Looper‘s Twitter feed) and an official shot showcasing Bruce Willis doing what he does best. Now we have gotten another behind-the-scenes picture which may give you a better idea of what to expect. Johnson released this pretty damn cool shot of the film’s time travel machine, and it looks like a down and dirty time machine, a.k.a. it’s not shiny and all that stuff.

My anticipation for the original The Expendables was massive, only to be matched in size and scope by my disappointment after I actually saw the film. Stallone’s new version of Rambo was awesome, it was packed full of R-rated action movie sleaze and it wasn’t at all ashamed of being exploitation. The Expendables looked like it was going to be a continuation of that, and also a massive team-up of bitchin’ 80s action stars the likes of which we’ve never seen. It didn’t really turn out to be all that though. It was kind of lame and boring, and really it was just a Stallone and Statham team-up movie with a handful of other cameos thrown in. So I’m approaching The Expendables 2 much more cautiously. But even with lowered expectations, I can’t help but feel a little bit of a tingle watching the first teaser. I don’t know if it’s going to be the classless, take no prisoners, R-rated schlock that I’m hoping for, but at least it looks like this one is finally going to be the huge team-up of old guys that I wanted from the first. The team-up aspect is all that can be discerned from this teaser though. It’s a teaser in the truest sense, basically we get the names and head shots of the principal cast and not much else.

What is Movie News After Dark? It has been happening (just about) every weeknight since the beginning of the year. One would hope that you have an idea about what it is by now. For those who still haven’t caught on, it’s about movie news… and it happens after dark. We begin tonight with the story of the wee hours of yesterday, in which Empire’s latest issue began shipping with two covers from The Dark Knight Rises, including the limited edition Bane cover seen above. Some of the folks around the web with camera have sent pictures in to Coming Soon, but more importantly, they’ve included details from the set visit piece within Empire. Especially notable is the part about The Dark Knight Rises being set 8 years in the future.

Today in trailers that make little to no sense – Aaron Harvey‘s Catch .44! Big bossman Neil told us a smidgen about this film back in July of last year, when cast additions Nikki Reed and Deborah Ann Woll were announced – and while that piece of news sold the film as a lady assassin flick, there’s not much of that to be seen in this first trailer for the film. Leading lady Malin Akerman is indeed front and center, but she looks like less an accomplished assassin (with an equally as talented and attractive crew backing her) and more like a pretty gal trying to make a quick buck with a big gun. But, hey, Bruce Willis is there doing an older Dov Charney impersonation, along with Forest Whitaker having a whole bunch of fun experimenting with some truly bad accents. Guns! Drugs! A secluded diner! Confusion and hijinks! After the break, try to make heads or tails of the first trailer for Catch .44.

I haven’t seen a nice, dumb prison movie in a while. It seems like it used to be a staple of the action genre. Some super tough guy is framed for something or other, gets thrown in prison, and by the end he has beaten up both the other prisoners and the evil warden. Really, it’s a great plot for a movie, so they need to come back. Summit has been trying to put one called The Tomb together for a while, but it’s been slow going. First Bruce Willis was set to star, but then that didn’t work out. Then it seemed like Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to take the project, but he decided to do Last Stand instead. Also, there has been some shuffling of the director. Antoine Fuqua was going to direct at one point, but then he left to do Southpaw. What is a dumb prison movie to do?

Details have been flying around about the fifth installment of the Die Hard franchise all year. First some plot details leaked, letting us all know that this time around Officer John McClane would be heading to Russia and encountering some terrorism related problems alongside his now adultish aged son John McClane Jr. After that, it became clear that Behind Enemy Lines director John Moore was officially on as the director of the film. Things were coming together, we were starting to get an idea of what this movie was going to look like. And today, the next step toward a potential fifth Die Hard film becoming a reality was taken. Fox has announced that Die Hard 5 is on their schedule for wide theatrical release on February 14, 2013, and that the official title of the film will be A Good Day to Die Hard. If you ask me, that sounds more like a title for a James Bond movie than a movie about rough and tumble NYPD officer John McClane, but hey, when I was watching that tank top clad jerk blowing up Nakatomi Plaza all the way back in 1988 I guess I never imagined that I’d be seeing him traveling to Russia either. In order to continue getting Die Hard movies, it seems like we’ve had to sacrifice some of their Die Hardiness in order to find new stuff for McClane to do. That’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world though. Watching Bruce Willis doing [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]

Next year’s The Expendables 2 is set up to be a team-up movie of the biggest action stars Hollywood has ever known. The only problem is that it looks a bit more like a senior’s circuit than it does an all-star game. Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Chuck Norris are all huge stars, sure, but if you add up their combined ages you get… okay, I don’t know, I’m not going to take the time to add up their combined ages. But they’re old. Jason Statham is going to need somebody who he can fight in this thing without worrying about knocking out their dentures with an uppercut or ripping their colostomy bag with a roundhouse. Luckily for him, Variety’s Showblitz is reporting that he may have found a sparring partner. Earlier this summer Chris Hemsworth made a pretty big name for himself by very charismatically filling the shoes of the mighty Thor. He’s probably got a big Hollywood career ahead of him from this point forward. But it’s starting to look like little brother Liam is playing a quick game of catch up. Not only does he have one of the big roles in next year’s much hyped The Hunger Games, but also it looks like he’s going to be joining Stallone and company in becoming Expendable. His role in the film is currently undisclosed, but adding another high profile project to the resume has got to be big news for the young [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 movie news column that refuses to wear a fat suit. Unless it’s Halloween, because then it will be dressing up as Patton Oswalt. Because no one else is doing it, even though they should be. For those who have not heard yet, Eddie Murphy will host the upcoming 84th edition of the Academy Awards. According to show producer and Murphy fanclub vice president Brett Ratner, Eddie Murphy was meant to be Oscar host. Because the golden guy’s special night needs nothing more than a little fatsuit comedy — that’s why!

When Sylvester Stallone started casting for the original The Expendables it was said to be an all-star action icon meet up. Anybody who had ever been in an action movie before, and even a lot of dudes who just slept on those guys’ couches for a couple months, were all rumored to be in the film. When all was said and done, however, it mostly just ended up being a Stallone and Jason Statham team-up movie, with a dash of Jet Li, a sprinkle of Mickey Rourke, and a very brief cameo from the other big action icons Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. Not quite the all-star lineup people hoped for. Now that production is underway for a sequel, the rumor mill has once again been churning out hopes and dreams of an all-star action cast. Not only are Willis and Schwarzenegger supposed to have bigger roles this time around, but sources loosely associated with the project have intimated that huge names in the action genre like John Travolta, Chuck Norris, and Jean Claude Van Damme are all going to be in the cast as well.

After a tumultuous summer of back and forth negotiating, the people behind Die Hard 5 have made it official that John Moore will be the man directing the further adventures of Officer John McClane. It was reported back at the end of July that Moore was a near-lock for the spot, and that the fifth Die Hard film would take place in Russia and see McClane sharing the action with his son, who was just a tyke in the first film, but who is now all grown up. Then, just a few days later, reports came out that while the story synopsis was accurate, Moore was just one name on a short list that also included Joe Cornish, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Justin Lin. That made me happy because those other three have all made movies that I’ve liked better than anything I’ve seen from Moore. But alas, it wasn’t to be. It seems that the holdup in hiring Moore was that Bruce Willis wasn’t sold on him as the director. The studio, they love Moore, but Willis, not so much. That all changed when, after a series of meetings, Moore sold Willis on both his love for the McClane character and his practical effects over CG approach to shooting action. I have to admit, while I also love John McClane and practical effects, I’m still not sold that Moore is the guy for this franchise. If a franchise as long in the tooth as Die Hard is going to [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]

Typecasting is death in Hollywood. If you keep doing the same kinds of roles over and over A) you’ll go insane and B) people will get sick of your shit. But the sad paradox of Hollywood is that once you’ve established yourself as one kind of actor, you’re basically stuck that way because that’s all people will send you scripts for, turning the whole thing into a spiral of bullshit. It’s extremely difficult to break out of, and it’s ended numerous careers. (Some for the better.) Some actors get fed up with it, and then you get the roles where those actors try to break out of their type (often unsuccessfully) and as time goes by they end up looking like movies from some creepy alternate dimension or something. But what’s also weird is going back through an actor’s early filmography and finding insane gems where they’re going totally against their later-established type. For some more famous examples, just look at Keanu Reeves in the Bill & Ted movies or Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Neither of those guys would even put their cigarette out on those scripts now, and that’s what makes seeing them in those roles hilarious. So now, in a far from comprehensive list, we’re going to look at some of the weirdest roles that actors have done outside of their typical repertoire.

Anybody who saw Paramount’s original attempt at a G.I. Joe movie, 2009′s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, will tell you the same thing: the last thing anybody in the world needs is a sequel to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. There wasn’t a bit of fun to be had in that train wreck of a movie. Not even an ounce of nostalgia to be squeezed from its throwback subject matter. Even the most diehard apologists I know that were childhood fans of the Hasbro toy line/cartoon series didn’t dare say a good word about that urban assault suit wearing, pathetic excuse for a summer blockbuster. Unfortunately, according to Hollywood (and to some extent the ticket buying public), we need a sequel to everything, so we’re going to get another G.I. Joe anyways. The good news is that new director Jon M. Chu seems to be pulling out all of the casting stops to erase the memory of that lackluster first effort and draw people back into the theater with the promise of some big time star power. Already he’s made a couple of solid jabs at that goal by hiring Wu Tang legend the RZA to play Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow’s mentor the Blind Master and one of the hot chicks from Friday Night Lights (okay, Adrianne Palicki) to play Lady Jaye. And in addition to that, he’s landed a couple of really solid body shots by getting Rome‘s Ray Stevenson to play Firefly and Fast Five‘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]

While nudity is generally regarded as an awesome thing, the fact of the matter is that it’s just not necessary for a lot of movies. Enter the gratuitous nude scene, where an actress strips down to her birthday suit for reasons completely unrelated to the plot. Frequently, these roles are covered by B- and C-list stars who like to add an extra zero to their check in exchange for giving the movie-going audience a thrill. While many big name actresses refuse to do nudity — a totally respectable choice, don’t get me wrong — some change their minds when there’s a chance their career can benefit from it. When those women go for a gratuitous nude scene, it usually takes one of four forms:

Word went around over the weekend that Fox is moving forward with Die Hard 5. The proposed project would be about Bruce Willis’s iconic character John McClane and his now adult son getting into some terrorist related hijinx over in Russia, and reportedly Max Payne director John Moore had an offer to direct on the table if he wanted it. Well, it turns out that’s half true. According to Deadline Vershina the movie is definitely going forward, it will most assuredly be set in Russia, but Moore is far from a lock to direct. As a matter of fact, they say he’s one name on a short list that contains far more interesting choices. Joining Moore on Deadline’s short list is Attack the Block director Joe Cornish, Bronson director Nicolas Winding Refn, and Fast Five director Justin Lin. Despite the fact that I didn’t seem to be as taken with Lin’s revival of the Fast and the Furious franchise as everyone else, I would have to say that every one of these names is more interesting to me than John Moore. Refn showed that he can handle darker, action oriented material with Bronson, and he’s riding a lot of momentum right now due to positive buzz on this year’s Drive, but he might already have too much on his plate to step into the Die Hard franchise. He already has two more films planned in Only God Forgives and a possible remake of Logan’s Run, both set to star Ryan [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]

David Varod is the CEO of a Bulgaria based film studio called Nu Boyana. This is notable because Sylvester Stallone and his new director pal Simon West are filming scenes for their upcoming sequel to Stallone’s team-up movie The Expendables in Bulgaria. This is newsworthy because Varod is claiming that some big names, not previously confirmed as being in The Expendables 2, are on their way to Bulgaria to film for the movie. When speaking to Novinite, Varod first confirmed that shooting was taking place in September, and then hinted that a lot of Hollywood stars would be moving into the country to do work, “Yes, we are definitely going to do that project. It is going to be a sequel the (sic) The Expendables. The shooting is going to take place the second week of September. The movie is on, definitely. It will be a very good thing for Bulgaria, since there are some very big stars coming.” Big stars, that makes sense. It’s long been assumed that the stars from the original film like Stallone, Jason Statham, and Mickey Rourke would return. There was even some notion that guys like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who only made small cameos in the first film, might return in larger roles this time. But when pressed to name off the “big stars” that would be making their way into the country, Varod named a few that could potentially be huge casting announcements.

And welcome back to Commentary Commentary, our weekly scouring of the DVD shelves and all the vast film knowledge held therein. It’s time once again to listen to a feature length film commentary from one of our most beloved films and go over all the great pieces of information we learn from it. This week, we’ve got another classic, a film that sparked a whole sub-genre of other films. And, before you pitch the idea of “Die Hard on a Film Blog,” know that Joel Silver probably has three screenplays in his office with that exact same pitch. That’s right. This week, we’re cracking open our copy of Die Hard and going through the commentary. So sit back, enjoy how not Christmas-y it is right now, and drink some eggnog anyway. Hey, it couldn’t hurt.