“There becomes this idea, this narrative that says, ‘Well, it’s going to be 13-30-year-old white men which is the target. Because we want to open.’ Because everyone makes their money opening weekend. Well that’s actually not the audience. There is an audience for all of this. We’ve just forgotten it.” That’s George Clooney discussing the condescension inherent in the mindset of some executives in the studio system. His comment comes after a question to newly minted double Oscar nominee Viola Davis (The Help) is asked in the Newsweek Oscar roundtable why this is her first starring role. The answer? “I’m a 46-year-old black woman who really doesn’t look like Halle Berry, and Halle Berry is having a hard time,” said Davis. A clever turn of phrase underlining the reality that there are few roles for women of a certain color and a certain age. It’s certainly a complex issue with any number of historical, social and artistic causes, but the numbers are certainly there.

Has a titular character for a tentpole film ever been muted in their own previews? That seems to be the case for Universal Pictures’ flashy-looking Snow White and the Huntsman, which so far seems hellbent on not letting its lead, played by Kristen Stewart, utter a single word in the previews. It’s probably wise to let Charlize Theron do all the talking, but how do you not give Snow White at least one line? Even Chris Hemsworth gets to open his mouth and yell in slow motion once again, Thor-style. Stewart is only given the exciting task of gazing off and acting lost. This is only a 60 second preview and I’m sure we’ll see Stewart say something before the film comes out, but after two previews with zero dialogue, it’s starting to get a bit comical. Check it out after the break.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Young Adult, Shame, and The Descendants. 2011’s holiday movie season ended the year with a barrage of relatively conventional heroes. From Ethan Hunt saving the world from yet another MacGuffin to Sherlock Holmes solving an additional mystery to a cyberpunk and a journalist battling wealthy Swedish career-misogynist neo-Nazis, December was packed with varied iterations of good triumphing over its clearly delineated evil opposition. In contrast, the holiday season’s slate of smaller-scale filmmaking brought forth several protagonists who function in strict contrast to your conventional hero. These protagonists are (decidedly) so toxic, broken, unheroic, and even unlikeable that they can’t even be deemed antiheroes. These characters (to varying degrees of success) challenge the assumed connection that filmic convention makes between the “main character” and the “film itself” by presenting protagonists who don’t triumph over adversity, who don’t fight or win a “good” battle, and who frankly don’t warrant an act of rooting. These protagonists trip up an oft-unquestioned notion conditioned by cinematic tradition: that films should serve as a means of rooting for a clearly demarcated, pre-telegraphed, unassailable idea of goodness. These are three protagonists that we aren’t often asked to spend ninety minutes with.

All I want for Christmas is for the bizarre trickle (leaks and all) of Prometheus marketing (teaser trailers for teaser trailers? seriously?) to stop and for everyone to stop ruminating on how Ridley Scott‘s latest fits into the Alien universe. It’s clearly a prequel, but that could just be the eggnog talking. The film stars a seriously wonderful cast that includes Noomi Rapace (in just her second English-language role), Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, and Idris Elba. The film was once touted as a direct prequel to Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien, though since the film’s initial conception, the cast and crew of the film have turned cagey, tossing off terms like “being in the same universe of” the Alien films, which was weird enough already. And that was until said marketing trickle, with all signs pointing to “yes, this is a prequel.” And, today, finally the first trailer for the film, which hits two notes – “incredibly awesome” and “totally a prequel.” I’ll stop hemming and hawing now and let you take in the trailer for one of 2012′s most anticipated new releases. Check out the first (really, actually, truly official) trailer for Prometheus after the break.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly collection of things you’ll want to read, even if they didn’t originate on this website. We know, we know, all the good stuff can only come from Film School Rejects. But every once in a while (at least 8 times per day), other websites strike gold. And we’re here to celebrate their modest victories. We begin tonight with an image from Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie, one of a number released today by Magnolia Pictures. It features Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim as… well, I have no idea what’s going on in this picture. But apparently people find this funny. Having watched numerous episodes of their show, I’m not convinced that they’ve ever been funny. But who am I to argue with the masses? Oh right, I do argue with the masses. Seriously, guys, this stuff isn’t funny. At all.

“Guys like me are born to like girls like you.” If you’re one of those guys – someone who finds unrelenting asshole women irresistible – Young Adult will leave you with a new crush. If you’re a socially normal human being who knows how destructive an asshole can be, Young Adult will leave you with a new on-screen enemy. I fall in the middle. Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) could not be further from likable and sympathetic, and that’s the whole point. The young adult writer, not the most subtle character trait, is never glorified as being a “cool smokin’ bitch,” something that she only starts off as. As the film progresses, the beautiful womanchild is stripped down to something so ugly, unappealing, hopeless, and, in some uncomfortable ways, a little relatable.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr goes rogue and infiltrates his local IMAX theater. First, he scales the wall of the plus-sized building and slides in undetected through the air vents. He slowly lowers himself into a theater seat to enjoy an early screening of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Unfortunately, he finds himself in the middle of a wild crowd of six-year-old kids for the early screening of the latest Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. To deal with the psychological damage, Kevin then stumbles into the Sherlock Holmes sequel and later finds an extra seat in Young Adult, where he can imagine that his chubby caboose could land a hottie like Charlize Theron.

Good morning from Los Angeles, where we announce major award nominations at 5:30AM on a Thursday morning. That’s how much we value your sleep patterns and sanity. Now that I’ve pulled myself out of a state of under caffeinated shock over some of the Golden Globe nominations – namely, that Ryan Gosling was nominated for lead actor in both the drama and comedy and musical categories, though neither of those nods was for Drive (Crazy, Stupid, Love.? really? I had no idea that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was so into abs!). Beyond that jolt to the system, there were a number of standard choices for the awards. The Artist? Well, of course? But all that Ides of March love? Interesting. The Artist leads with six nominations, followed by The Descendants and The Help with five each, and The Ides of March, Midnight in Paris, and Moneyball with four nods. But despite the overwhelming sense that (per usual) the Globes are just softball awards, there are some surprisingly good picks buried amongst the fluff – Tilda Swinton getting a lead actress (drama) nomination, Michael Fassbender earning a lead actor (drama) nod for Shame, Bridesmaids and Midnight in Paris up for Best Picture (comedy or musical), Charlize Theron getting a lead actress (comedy or musical) nomination for Young Adult, The Skin I Live In up for Best Foreign Film, and Albert Brooks getting his nod for supporting actor for Drive (drama). The Golden Globes will air live on January 15. Check out [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]

Last week, the Internet was swarmed with a bevy of information and bootlegged marketing from Ridley Scott‘s upcoming Prometheus, his Alien maybe-kinda-sorta-in a way-prequel. Various spots around the web posted a variety of material, from a bootlegged trailer to some scanned stills from the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, and (most interestingly enough) a reported official synopsis. If you saw any of those things, this batch of official stills from the film will look quite familiar, but you didn’t, these five photos will be pretty intriguing. Scott’s latest crack at his own mythology features an all-star cast that includes Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, and Noomi Rapace. And, well, you know, a giant metal head. What does it all mean? I don’t know either, but at least we’ve got something much more officially official to look at until the film opens on June 8, 2012. Check out four more stills from Prometheus after the break.

Every bit of movie news has to be taken with a fistful of salt. With so many moving parts, even the biggest players in the game sometimes see their work fall into the tall grass of development hell. That’s the bad news. The good news is that all of those times you shake your fist at a new project (be it remake or reboot) are warranted, but they don’t always get made. Sometimes, the stuff we’re dreading goes down in flames too. So it’s with that bittersweet spirit that we look back on a few announced projects that still haven’t been made. And might never be.

When The Lord of the Rings trilogy hit theaters and became a money-making juggernaut at the beginning of the last decade, a rash of fantasy epics soon followed, trying to ride the coattails. None of them were really up to the task of cashing in on the Rings craze though, unless you count Harry Potter, which was going on at the same time and was mostly its own thing. These days, HBO has a popular show called Game of Thrones, which is also based off of a series of fantasy novels and, at first glance, looks a lot like The Lord of the Rings, and the Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit is on its way as well, so it’s looking like we might see another fantasy epic craze hit theaters soon. If that’s the case, then Snow White and the Huntsman is the first of the bunch. This movie isn’t just part of a potential spate of fantasy movies though, it’s also one of a number of Snow White movies that will be hitting theaters in the coming years. And it has the honor of being the first out of that group. So, when all is said and done, what will this film be remembered as? Another attempted Lord of the Rings copycat or the creator of the Snow White craze? After seeing the first trailer for the film, I would guess copycat. If you listen to the dialogue, you can tell that this is a telling of [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]

Universal Pictures has released a big tri-scene banner for Snow White and the Huntsman. It’s a very stylish piece, the entirety of which we’ve included after the jump, and it’s here in the lead up to the release of the first trailer this Thursday on Apple.com. The film stars “Kristen Stewart (Twilight) plays the only person in the land fairer than the evil queen (Oscar® winner Charlize Theron) out to destroy her.  But what the wicked ruler never imagined is that the young woman threatening her reign has been training in the art of war with a huntsman (Chris Hemsworth, Thor) dispatched to kill her.  Sam Claflin (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) joins the cast as the prince long enchanted by Snow White’s beauty and power.

For the past few weeks, director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody have quietly been bringing special “pop up screenings” of their new collaboration, Young Adult, to small arthouse theaters across the country (and Canada!). Invites were scarce, but those who were quick enough (and savvy enough) to get into one of six screenings was treated to a first look at the film, a special Q&A with its makers and stars, and a unique poster to take home with them. I was lucky enough to get into this week’s Los Angeles pop up screening at the New Beverly, during which Reitman trotted out Cody, Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, and Elizabeth Reaser for a pre-screening introduction and a post-screening Q&A. While it’s been widely speculated as to why Reitman didn’t take Young Adult on a more traditional festival jaunt (which he’s previously done for his biggest hits), the director himself explained it simply, he wanted to take the film on its very own festival route, picking cities and venues that fit the film. To add to that festival atmosphere, each pop up screening got its own specially crafted poster, made by a local artist and distributed to the audience at each screening. Young Adult is a departure for Reitman and Cody, shunting aside the sunniness of their previous collaboration Juno for a much darker (and deeper) tale of female maturity gone totally wrong. After the break, check out all six posters for each of the pop up screenings, each taking a different [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]

In a post-Juno world, director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody have re-teamed for a much darker spin on inappropriate maturity levels and their inevitable consequences. Whereas their hamburger phone-chatting, bon mot-spouting teen Juno was almost too mature for her own good, their latest heroine is undoubtedly too immature to even be considered a real adult. In Young Adult, Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary, a YA author who has much more in common emotionally and intellectually with her characters than she does with anyone her actual age. Mavis heads back to her small hometown, still gorgeous as ever, but with a real chip on her shoulder (to put it mildly). Mavis wants her high school sweetheart back (Patrick Wilson), and she doesn’t care if he’s married, and she doesn’t care if she’s a real bitch to everyone else, and she just…well, she just doesn’t care. Check out the first trailer for Young Adult after the break, with bonus Patton Oswalt as one of Mavis’ former classmates who is also a bit stuck in the past.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s just a nightly movie news column that wants its rug back, man. We open tonight with a first look at Charlize Theron playing what we can only expect to be an emotionally stunted character in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult, his second collaboration with writer Diablo Cody. Please excuse whatever sarcasm came out of that first sentence — I have liked every bit of Reitman’s previous work and this one includes Patton Oswalt, so I see no reason why it won’t be excellent.

It was pretty clear from the Prometheus Comic-Con footage that there are more ties to Alien than the film makers are letting on. Whether or not it deals with the Xenomorphs is still up in the air, but the look of the film clearly fits into that universe. Bleak, beautiful, and epic were all adjectives that came to mind while watching the brief footage. This is a pure sci-fi horror film. While it may be PG-13, and I’m betting it will be, that may not matter all that much. As writer Damon Lindelof says below, this is a film that relies heavily on atmosphere. The story also deals with the obvious: playing God. The title alone gives you a big hint as to what the film is about. The tale of Prometheus tells the story of man stealing fire from the Gods. Here, it’s about man searching for answers to questions they probably should not be looking for. Here’s what writer Damon Lindelof had to say about fusing his own sensibilities with Ridley’s, making a hopeful horror movie, and writing distinct women:

It used to be that shilling your film at a festival meant you were some scrappy up-and-comer who needed a break (or, at the very least, a hot shower). But as festivals have gotten bigger and more dazzling (any event that serves free Stella Artois is dazzling by its very nature), bigger name filmmakers have used them as launching pads for new projects. Jason Reitman is a prime example of this – he premiered both Juno and Up in the Air at the Telluride Film Festival and took them on to Toronto to pump up buzz so that cinephiles everywhere were primed when they finally hit theaters. Did it work? Heck yes it did. So it seemed a bit of a no-brainer that Reitman would bring his next collaboration with Juno scribe Diablo Cody to Telluride and then TIFF. Apparently, not so. Young Adult won’t make an appearance on the festival route this year, and though there’s nothing I love more than needless negative speculation and crying that a festival non-appearance or a release date change means that a film is a flaming brown bag of excrement, that may not be the case with Young Adult. As those eggheads over at The Playlist note, the film “is decidedly darker and much different than what we’ve seen from Reitman before.” The film stars Charlize Theron as a novelist who writes young adult fiction, who heads back to her small town to hook her high school sweetheart, played by Patrick Wilson. It’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]

Director of the Mad Max franchise George Miller sat down with The Daily Telegraph to give an update on the status of his delayed project Mad Max: Fury Road. The film, which has Tom Hardy set to star as the new Mad Max and also includes Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, and Teresa Palmer in the cast, was already set to begin filming, but has been shut down due to extreme flooding in Broken Hill, Australia, where it was scheduled to shoot. If you’re a fan of Mad Max, then you know how important its dry, desolate, scorched Earth setting is to the story. Getting that post-apocalyptic desert landscape feel to resonate on film is pretty hard when you’re standing in ankle deep water. Miller said, “The week we were to start, it rained the heaviest it had in 10 years. I’ll never forget the first day — we were holed up in a big sort of shed watching the rain. We couldn’t shoot. If you want the rain to come, just send a film crew there.”

Scott is doing a great job stirring up a bunch of hype and speculation for his upcoming sci-fi epic Prometheus. First it was supposed to be an Alien prequel, and then it wasn’t an Alien prequel. Eventually it was explained to have some thematic tie to the Alien universe. What has been clear for a while, though, is that the cast looks impressive. Already on board to play key roles were Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, and Charlize Theron. Fassbender and Rapace have become pretty hot properties in the film world over the last year or two, and Theron is a big name that has turned in great performances in the past. This should indicate that the source material of Prometheus is nothing to sneeze at. I can’t imagine this being any sort of cookie cutter sci-fi romp and still being able to lure in all that talent. Well, a couple more names have started to fill out the cast, and I’m excited about one in particular. The Daily Mail reports that Idris Elba, Kate Dickie, and Sean Harris have joined the cast. I’m not familiar with any of Harris or Dickie’s work, but I’m always glad to see Elba signing on for film roles. He is, of course, an actor from the constantly pimped to you everywhere you go HBO series The Wire, which is the best thing on television, ever. That show was full of great acting, and Elba’s role as Stringer Bell was one of the most important [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]

Those holding their breath for the Alien prequel to go away, or to pass over without doing much damage to the franchise can breathe easy now. They may even want to use that fresh influx of oxygen to cheer. Deadline Bisbee is reporting that from the bones and ashes of the Alien prequel comes Prometheus, rising like a phoenix who invented fire. Mixed metaphors aside, the universe of Alien is expanding and opening its arms for an original story with original characters. Noomi Rapace is on board to play a scientist named Elizabeth Shaw, and the second major role of Vickers is being battled over by Charlize Theron and Angelina Jolie. So what the hell is it about?