More than a few people are going to look at the new teaser trailer for Planes and think of it as the next evolution of selling out for Pixar. The thing is, despite John Lasseter’s presence as a producer, this straight-to-DVD sequel that got bumped up to first class has DisneyToon Studios written all over it. In fact, you won’t see the Pixar logo anywhere in the trailer — even though they’re aping the look of Cars right down to the font choices. The movie stars Dane Cook, voicing Dusty Crophopper, a plane whose afraid of heights but desperately wants to compete in a massive flying contest. It’s being directed by Klay Hall (Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure) and comes right at the tail end of the Summer blockbuster season. Check out the teaser for yourself:

While Disney’s Cars series has been the proverbial whipping boy for many fans of the House of Mouse’s better animated outings, the franchise is a perennial favorite for the younger set (if you spend any time with five-year-olds, you know this is true) and has made a trunk-load of cash for both Disney and Pixar. That said, of course the studio is planning spin-offs of the transportation-minded series, and while we’d love to see a Disney take on Jetskis or Steam Engines or even Segways, the studio is going simple – Planes. And, because everyone knows how much children love comedian Dane Cook, the erstwhile actor has been tapped to voice the lead of this summer’s Planes, as a height-averse plane named Dusty (we can only assume he’s a crop-duster). The film is billed as a “comedy adventure about Dusty’s dream of competing as a high-flying air racer—and his decidedly unfortunate fear of heights.” Aw, Dusty, that’s so sad for you. Soar, little plane, soar!

There are bad movies. There are BAD movies. And then there’s The Guilt Trip, a cinematic abomination that offends by being heinously, obscenely bland. This is the blandest bland movie you’ll ever see, a comedy bereft of comedy and a road trip flick in which the most exciting occurrences feature a character eating a giant steak and getting her ears pierced. If that’s your idea of a great time at the multiplex, and if your enthusiasm for such an enterprise is only matched by your affection for Barbra Streisand, well, here ya go. If, like most of us, you demand actual content from movies when you shell out your ten bucks or so for a ticket, you’ll leave the theater in a state of heightened anxiety at best, and downright fury at worst. This lazy slop from director Anne Fletcher and writer Dan Fogelman stars Streisand as Joyce Brewster, overprotective mom to struggling inventor Andy (Seth Rogen). When Andy needs to drive across the country to pitch a cleaning product to various big box retailers and other major potential clients, he invites mom along for the ride. His reasons for doing so are too convoluted to be addressed here, but before the pair leaves their starting point in New Jersey, you’ll wish he hadn’t bothered.

Joseph Kahn‘s new movie Detention is essentially The Breakfast Club meets Prom Night meets the kitchen sink. A group of diverse high-schoolers are stalked by a serial killer named Cinderhella, and the terror culminates during their collective stay in after school detention. The film is far from a straight forward thriller though as Kahn plays with the medium in different ways and fills the story with crazy distractions like time travel, homages to The Fly, grizzly bears and more. It’s pretty nuts. Detention was released earlier this week, and if you haven’t picked it up yet we have some good news. We’re giving away a copy of the film on Blu-ray and another on DVD. And because we care how you look in public we’re also throwing in a Detention t-shirt, beanie and baseball cap (pics below). Keep reading to see how you can win!

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.

There is a lot going on in the trailer for Joseph Kahn’s Detention. It’s got hipsters. It’s, apparently, got aliens. A high school killing spree. And, most importantly, Dane Cook as a school principle. Obviously, it’s a fairly overstuffed and messy trailer, but everything this trailer hints at could make for pure cinematic gold. The director of Torque bringing aliens and hipsters together in one movie could be magical. Who doesn’t like seeing hipsters suffer bloody and brutal deaths? In the movies, of course. It’s the joyful type of bloodshed we rarely get to see on the big screen. The last half of the trailer really picks up and finds a smooth groove. Hopefully the film is as balls to the wall as the trailer is selling it as. In almost 2 weeks time, we’ll get confirmation at its SXSW premiere. There’s promise in this trailer, and I cant wait to see whether or not Kahn managed to deliver a worthy followup to his hilarious motorcycle epic.

It was another losing weekend at the box office generally and for one Mr. Dane Cook in particular. His flick My Best Friend’s Girl crashed into third place at $8.3 million, allowing Samuel L. Jackson to win his own personal box office battle with Lakeview Terrace.

Kevin and Neil are recovering from the righteous wind storm that swept through the Midwest… or at least they’re using that as an excuse for not having seen all the movies this week.

We here at Film School Rejects are huge fans of comedian cum actor Dane Cook. Well, sort of. So you can imagine our joy when we saw that he is going to be in another movie…

The weekend is here. That means it’s time to sit back, relax and enjoy the Best of the Rejects.

This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. It’s a revelation I had a while ago that came to the front of my mind after seeing Reynolds in Chaos Theory. It seems pretty obvious that where one is a talented comedic and dramatic actor the other is a one-note comedian that can’t translate stand up success to the box office.

The movie is half-understated, intimate comedy, while the other half tends to veer into screwball comedy territory. There’s no excuse for Peter Hedges to take a story that should be a character study of what it’s like for a middle-aged man raising three daughters on his own and film it like Meet the Parents mixed with Wedding Crashers.

Audiences are getting too old for this shit.

We all have guilty pleasures. Chocolate. Hannity & Colmes. John Tesh music. Snorting blow off the buttocks of a Thai hooker. The one thing all those have in common though is their general acceptance by polite society. My own guilty pleasure is more embarrassing than these, and I rarely find myself able to talk about it without fear of recrimination and judgment. I like Kevin Costner. This is not a new affliction for me. I’ve been a fan since he stole Silverado from the more seasoned ensemble around him. The rest of the movie-going public joined me in the late eighties through the early nineties as he churned out hit after hit… movies that not only made money but were actually damn entertaining. No Way Out, The Untouchables, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Dances With Wolves… How quickly people forget. Granted the man then went on to make some incredibly bad movies, like 3000 Miles to Graceland, which was without question the worst film released in 2001. (Yes, the same year that saw Freddy Got Fingered, Pearl Harbor, and Britney Spears’ Crossroads.) But mixed in with the bad and mostly mediocre there have been some great performances in really good films… Tin Cup and The Upside of Anger come immediately to mind. Which brings me to the newly released DVD of Costner’s latest film, Mr. Brooks. Costner plays Earl Brooks. Husband, father, businessman, serial killer… This isn’t a spoiler as the movie’s entire advertising campaign was built around Costner’s portrayal

I didn’t expect to like Mr. Brooks although I was originally intrigued by the idea of Robin Hood playing a serial killer.

Well, it’s about time that we had a big weekend at the box office. Saw IV cleaned up this weekend with a big take of $32 million.

Dan in Real Life is simply a film that doesn’t live up to what its title and slogan promises. As far as the movie feeling like real life goes, this is far from it, despite a few honest and sincere moments. The slogan for the film is “plan to be surprised,” but I found most of it to be formulaic and predictable.

This weekend British hottie Emily Blunt will share a few moments of screen time with the classic beauty of French starlet Juliette Binoche. And while it is Binoche who gets the most lines in Dan in Real Life as she plays the love interest to both Steve Carell and Dane Cook, it is Blunt who steals a bit of the show.

Actor Steve Carell and comedian Dane Cook have one distinct thing in common — in the year 2007, they have each made for which they were completely wrong. Thankfully they’ve both found a movie that was absolutely perfect for them — and it just happens to be the same film.

There’s a threat facing America, and the world at large. It’s not as high profile as other issues. You don’t see it talked about on the news like you do the Iraq war. You don’t hear the President address it like he does global terrorism. You don’t hear the CDC put out any alerts about it. But it’s out there, it’s a threat to the very fabric of our entertainment sensibilities and it is going unchecked, reaching epidemic levels. The threat, my friends, is Dane Cook.