Actor/writer/musician Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola get along well, at least that was the obvious impression I got from Schwartzman at the A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III‘s press day. They’ve collaborated many times in the past, which seems to be a collaboration that Schwartzman is completely gung ho for. For Schwartzman, the more (good) cooks in the kitchen, the better. Since A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III deals with an artistic roadblock – and as did the last movie Coppola directed, CQ – it felt like the right opportunity to discuss Schwartzman’s own creative process. Here’s what one of the many stars of Charles Swan had to say about his collaborative nature, why fancy notebooks won’t help you, and problem solving:

Today is… GROUNDHOG DAY! That means you’re doomed to repeat the day over and over until you’re caught up with the best movie stories of the week. At least you don’t have to go back and relive the whole week in order to read every single post and article published in the last seven days. You just need the ten best, which I’ve compiled for you below (plus an exclusive film clip and TV coverage). And at least you have me to compile it for you, so it’s all nice and easily laid out. Then again, Groundhog Day is on a Saturday this year, so maybe you’ll want to take it slow. Enjoy the day off over and over again. The Recap will be here the whole time. The week started with the end of Sundance and later included a preview of our next favorite film fest, SXSW. We reviewed the major and some minor new theatrical releases, including the genuinely great zom-rom-com (Warm Bodies), the forgettable movie with the old action star (Bullet to the Head), the forgettable thing about old gangsters (Stand Up Guys), the strangely reflexive Charlie Sheen movie (A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan), the the political thriller written by Al Gore’s former spokesman (Knife Fight), the latest Korean dissection from Im Sang-soo (The Taste of Money) and the powerful slow-burn sequel to Yossi & Jagger (Yossi). And we interviewed one of the directors of The ABCs of Death (Angela Bettis) and the director

This February isn’t such a hot month for movie-going. When it comes to genuine “must-sees,” there are only two movies on this list which earn that title, and they’re the expected picks. January could have been worse, but this February won’t do 2013 any favors, unless the fifth Die Hard movie ends up blowing everyone’s socks off, and since it’s from the director of Max Payne, how could it not? In short, this year isn’t off to a good start. We got spoiled with last December, as we usually do, so hopefully we see something genuinely great soon, unless you thought Mama overcame a lackluster script, that Movie 43 wasn’t the Antichrist sent from Satan himself, and if you even remember that movie with Mark Wahlberg and Russell Crowe. The Last Stand isn’t included, because no more than five people saw it. Hopefully a few of you go out to see these movies and have a fun time, though:

Almost exactly two years ago, Charlie Sheen started a highly public meltdown that translated his acting fame into the kind of ravenous notoriety that’s an inch wide and a mile deep. Over a few months time, a celebrated film and television actor devolved into a reality star. We watched it in real-time, and even when the train had already wrecked, Sheen seemed impervious to the truth of what he’d done to his image. For those who didn’t tire of the schtick by his Comedy Central Roast in September of 2011, and for those who are thirsty for some severely watered down tiger blood, Sheen stars in Roman Coppola‘s A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III as a boring version of himself. In it, his character is a delusional ladies man who exhaustingly relives the break-up with his latest love Ivana (Katheryn Winnick) after a car accident sends him to the hospital with the sympathies of best friend Kirby Star (Jason Schwartzman), sister Izzy (Patricia Arquette) and accountant Saul (Bill Murray). His only other companion is his brain, a terrible thing that sends him into fantasy after fantasy. Anything to avoid what’s really going on.

Movies that spoof a bunch of other movies that already exist became really popular in the late ’90s. So popular that we’re creeping up on 2013 and people are still putting them out, even though none of them have been remotely watchable for as long as anyone can remember. Why won’t the studios stop punishing us with these painfully lazy, painfully unfunny pseudo-movies? Because far be it from those greed vampires in Hollywood to leave the corpse of any genre alone until they’ve drained it completely dry of every last possible dollar. That being said… MTV has posted a new trailer for Scary Movie 5! Despite the current state of the spoof genre, we shouldn’t have any fear about this one, right? Because this isn’t one of those lousy Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer movies that are so lazy they don’t even bother to write jokes—Scary Movie 5 was written by spoof veterans David Zucker and Pat Proft, who have credits on things like Kentucky Fried Movie, The Naked Gun, and Hot Shots, so it should probably at least be decent, shouldn’t it? Well, not from the looks of the trailer.

The trailer for Roman Coppola‘s Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is manic, but the star isn’t. In fact, Charlie Sheen is downright soporific in this thing, sleepwalking his way through ill-fitting costumes and outrageous situations that he only seems tangentially aware of. Basically, it looks like he may have done the entire movie on Oxycontin. It’s a colorful first look to be sure, but it’s a little troubling when Jason Schwartzman looks hung out to dry with no comedic partner to keep pace, but Bill Murray, fortunately, looks like he’s in rare form (especially when dressed as The Duke). Check it out for yourself, and be ready to think “Wes Anderson-Lite”:

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is Roman Coppola‘s first film in over ten years. His directorial debut, CQ, was received with a mixed response. It didn’t garner much love, but it’s a really fun movie which goes beyond the average “struggling director” stories. Since then, Coppola’s been keeping busy with his music video and commercial and his frequent collaborations with Wes Anderson. Now he’s finally returned to the director’s chair, with a movie which is exactly what we’d expect from the guy who co-wrote Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited. Apple launched the trailer today. Take a look:

After more than a decade, Roman Coppola has a second directorial effort hitting theaters, and A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III has a lot going for it. It also has a giant question mark lodged in its center: its star. It was thinly veiled stunt casting at the time, and that could have paid off, but even the morbid curiosity has fallen off of Charlie  Sheen – a man stuck in time between has-been TV star and triumphant comeback artist. The complicated version is that not enough time has passed to legitimize a comeback, and the simple version is that very few people give a good goddamn about Sheen after he jumped energetically off the deep end of the abyss and the tabloid shine wore off. Still, the positives of the movie read like a Wes Anderson side project. Coppola has, of course, worked with that yellow-loving director, and recently co-wrote Moonrise Kingdom, so it’s not hard to imagine that everything from the title of his sophomore project to the Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman-infused cast has a bit of Anderson flair to it. In that same vein, the marketing team has crafted a few symbol-centric posters that speak more to creating a stir than lazily photoshopping celebrity faces. Check them out for yourself, and enjoy the power of seeing Sheen’s name next to an unpeeled banana:

While inspirational sports stories usually prove to be box office draws, when you make them you still run the risk of alienating the portion of the film-going audience who just don’t like sports. If someone doesn’t like basketball or football, how do you get them to sit through a story where people play basketball or football for two hours? Brad Pitt’s 2011 starring vehicle, Moneyball, was hyped by its fans as being a baseball story that anybody could get into. Its focus was more on statistics and science stuff than it was gameplay. It was more about bucking the system than it was winning the big game. And at its heart was a story about a failed man reclaiming his life and growing as an individual. There’s no need to be into baseball to enjoy all of that stuff, right? Major League, conversely, is a 1989 comedy that was aimed squarely at baseball fans. If you didn’t know about the Cleveland Indians’ pathetic standing in the league, if you didn’t have a long-standing relationship with hearing Bob Uecker’s voice talk about the game, and if you didn’t know the ins-and-outs of each position and exactly what it takes to be bad at playing them, then a lot of the movie’s charms were likely going to be lost on you. And if you could care less about whether or not the Indians beat the Yankees in the championship game, would you even be able to get anything out of watching this

Forget the North Koreans. It was the Soviets with their Cuban and Nicaraguan allies that once posed a real threat to this nation. After all, it doesn’t take much to establish a beachhead in Washington State, as depicted in the Red Dawn remake due out in theaters this week. Real hardcore Communist armies invade from the center of the country, as seen with the occupation of Calumet, Colorado in John “Madman” Milius’s original 1984 film. The new film’s explosions may be bigger, and the actors may be more recognizable to today’s audience (though possibly not, considering the original starred Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Gray, Harry Dean Stanton, and Powers Booth), but Milius’s Red Dawn is perfectly primed for a stiff line of drinks. Re-live the action of this right-wing 80s war film, recently released on Blu-ray.

I doubt many people tuned into the premiere of Charlie Sheen’s FX show Anger Management thinking that it was going to be their new Thursday night fave. If you’re anything like me, then sheer curiosity is what brought you to Sheen’s latest, in which he plays, of all things, a therapist (get it? ‘cause he’s Charlie Sheen and he’s helping people with their problems! Oh brother! Cue laugh track). The vague, non-plot of the series opener finds Sheen counseling a group of sitcom archetypes (the senior citizen whose dialogue is filled with folksy bigotry, the young gay man who sits beside the folksy bigot on a couch, the socially inept guy who makes women uncomfortable, the superficial chick who’s made uncomfortable by the creepy, socially inept guy) and fuming over the values his ex-wife’s new boyfriend is passing down to his daughter. You see, he helps people with their anger management issues but he also has anger management issues, hence the title and hence the reason why you don’t really need to watch more than one episode. Honestly, the show wasn’t the wholly objectionable thing that I’d thought it would be. I did, however, find almost every aspect of it mystifying.  “How is it that this exists?” I thought to myself as I watched the premiere.

Director Wes Anderon’s period dramedy, Moonrise Kingdom, is a unique departure from his previous collaboration with co-writer Roman Coppola. The Darjeeling Limited was about three characters who, at first, could not care less about one another, and often went about showing it in hilariously cruel ways. None of that meanness is present in Anderson and Coppola’s Moonrise Kingdom, a story about the innocence of young love. For certain characters, not all is as fun and sweet as the young leads’ love. Considering this is a Wes Anderson film there’s a sense of tragedy underlining the playful style and witty jokes. Moonrise Kingdom explores themes of disappointment and lost love, something all the older characters are facing, and something the two kids may one day face as well. However, these themes and ideas to Anderson and Coppola’s work are not as deliberate as some suspect. As Roman Coppola puts it, it all comes from a place of intuition.

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, Associate Editor Kate Erbland drops by to play Best/Worst and talk Found Fauxtage Films. Plus, we speak with author Ray Morton to get the whole story of why The Beatles made A Hard Day’s Night and we get a special announcement directly from Vimeo that will sound like sunshine to weary independent filmmakers. That is, the filmmakers who want to save some money. Download This Episode

Round my way, 99% of all Halloween costumes these days are zombie-based. The knack, it seems is finding the right gimmick to zombify – so you’ll see grown adults dressed as zombie jailbait schoolgirls, zombie sportsmen or zombie auditors. But the movie world can offer all manner of appropriate costumes that don’t require an unnaturally pale face, lashings of ketchup and a stumbling walk – for instance you could terrify everyone by going as Gary Busey. Just inhale two cans of hairspray for that real not-quite-right look. Seriously though, this week’s column is dedicated to the great and the good of movie Halloween costumes: think of it as inspiration. And never say I don’t do anything for you. In all honesty, they’re not the greatest costumes, but they will certainly make you the center of attention…

After getting fired from his awful hit TV show Two and a Half Men Charlie Sheen had a very public meltdown that took public meltdowns to a new level by even including a public meltdown world tour. Though Sheen’s stage show was largely met with panning and boos, it still sold a lot of tickets. This country loves it when public figures fall off their pedestal. But we also love a good comeback story, and it seems like we’ve already reached that point in the Sheen narrative. These celebrity rise and fall stories are getting shorter and shorter every time they happen. I blame VH1’s Behind the Music for hammering the formula into everyone’s heads. Someone goes nuts from addiction and we can just go on auto-pilot in our response.

What is Movie News After Dark? It is a nightly movie news recap column that would like to make it all the way to the end of this thing without getting controversial, political or mentioning how much skinny Jonah Hill looks like President Obama. It’s just not likely. We begin tonight with the story that’s on everyone’s mind — no, not the Obama speech — the fact that Mel Gibson is developing a movie about Jewish hero Judah Maccabee, who led a second-century revolt against Hellenistic overloards in the name of the Jewish people. He’s brought Basic Instinct writer Joe Eszterhas on for the script work. There will be nothing controversial about this project.

Seeing as this is the first go around, you might be wondering to yourself what “Over/Under” is, and rightly so. It’s a new weekly column in which I will take to task a film that has gotten more than its fair share of success and praise, and then champion a related film that comparatively gets little play. This isn’t necessarily to say that the first film is bad and the second one good, just that the disparity in love between the two is a wrong that needs to be righted. But if you choose to believe that what I’m writing is more mean-spirited and antagonistic than intended, that’s fine with me too. Let’s spar in the comments; I could use the attention. For our inaugural column we’ll be looking at John Hughes’s 1985 detention drama The Breakfast Club, a film that the teenagers who work for me still mention as being a classic, and David Seltzer’s 1986 nerd meets girl movie Lucas, a film that I can’t get a darn one of those kids to give a chance.

Without dragging the back story out too much, back in January Two and a Half Men star Charlie Sheen went bat shit crazy to the point of no return. The highest paid actor on television (two million an episode) took all his winnings and flushed them down the toilet along with his heroin, crack, marijuana, alcohol, and what ever else he flushes down there when the cops show up. His behavior forced CBS and Warner Brothers to halt production on the show and cancel the rest of the season. A few weeks later the bomb shell came out that Warner Brothers (who actually produces the show) fired Sheen from the program for good. The question then became, who could replace him? Well that answer has come today in the form of former sitcom and “current” movie star Ashton Kutcher. Yup, Mr. Good Looking himself will indeed be coming on to replace Sheen for at least a season. No other details on how Kutcher will be integrated into the show have been announced, but there is no doubt that all of that will be revealed in the coming weeks.

For those of you who haven’t heard, there’s a new film festival on the scene and its name is Action Fest! Founded by three men including Chuck Norris’ brother Aaron Norris, Action Fest is the self-proclaimed film festival with a body count. Magnolia exec Tom Quinn is also behind the scenes for the festival alongside Colin Geddes, the man responsible for the Toronto International Film Festival’s venerable Midnight Madness slate. Action Fest is a whirlwind festival held over a weekend in early April in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina. Movies are jam-packed back to back over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I was able to attend all day Friday and Saturday and saw 9 films in my short time there. I’ve done full reviews for Ironclad and A Lonely Place to Die which you can read here and here. For the rest of the films I saw I’ll be breaking things up into two pieces with three mini-reviews each, one for each day. You can read the first installment here. Finally, I’ll do a wrap-up piece summarizing the fest and what played and talking a little about the experience. Yes, for you math wizards that only adds up to 8 of the 9 films. I also saw Battle Royale which I’ll discuss in my wrap-up. This is what I saw on Saturday.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s like watching CNN or the New York Times, but funnier and without all of the big words. It covers movie news every night in a way that no other movie news column set to run at 11p CST can. It was also far more punctual than President Obama’s speech tonight. So it’s got that going for it. Earlier this evening it was announced that Osama Bin Laden was killed by American forces. Great job to our fighting men and women. That guy was a real douche. Perhaps just as interesting, as Badass Digest points out, was the fact that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was aware of the news before anyone else. This is what happens when you kick ass in Fast Five and open with an $83 million dollar weekend.