The last time there was news about David O. Russell’s upcoming film The Silver Linings Playbook I lamented the fact that we hadn’t been giving it enough coverage. No more! The drama about a former mental patient trying to rebuild his life keeps adding intriguing names to its cast, so I’m going to keep blathering on about it. Russell and company started off strong by getting Bradley Cooper to star as our hero mental case. That’s enough to catch my interest right there. Cooper’s career is on fire right now and he hasn’t even really had the chance to work with great directors yet. Seeing him and Russell do something together sounds like a great time. But the movie didn’t stop there, it followed the Cooper casting up by getting a couple of Oscar Nominees in Jennifer Lawrence and Jackie Weaver to play his new love interest and mother respectively. If there were two actresses that left a huge impression on me by the end of 2010, it was Lawrence and Weaver, so I can’t wait to see what they bring here.

It has come to my attention that we here at FSR have left David O. Russell’s upcoming film The Silver Linings Playbook criminally uncovered. We’ve got one little mention of it being announced in a Movie News After Dark and that’s it. Probably it’s time to remedy that, because Russell is a director who always makes interesting stuff, even when it ends up being kind of a mess. And this time around he’s assembled a pretty intriguing cast to yell at and be mean to during filming.

If you love video games and hate David O. Russell, then boy do I have some good news for you. You might have to help me on this one, I don’t really know video games, and I’m not sure what “Uncharted” is all about. But it was my understanding from being around a lot of movie buzz that fans weren’t too happy with Mark Wahlberg starring as Uncharted’s protagonist Nathan Drake. And I also heard some rumblings that O. Russell was taking the property in his own direction and not paying much heed to the source material. While that might have made a good movie, it wouldn’t have done much for video game fans. They need not worry though, because O. Russell is out, Limitless director Neil Burger is in, and it looks like this entire video game to movie adaptation process is starting over.

Akira, at this point, is starting to look like a modern-day Watchmen. Plagued with difficulties, personnel changes, and misfires – maybe it’ll be a couple of decades before it actually gets made. Someone being born this year might end up playing Kaneda. But, still, Watchmen eventually got made, so who knows what fate has in store for the live-action remake of the anime classic. What it doesn’t have in store, according to Deadline Osaka, is Albert Hughes as director. One half of the Hughes Brothers directing team was set to make the film, but now he’s reportedly off the project and parting on friendly terms. It leaves a job open, though, and it allows film fans to dream of who their top choice for the job would be. For weirdness’s sake, I’d say either Terrence Malick or Terry Gilliam channeling Brazil. It’s not the only project to lose a director today, though. Variety is reporting that David O. Russell is off of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. The profound change there comes, also, from creative differences, but it will mean finding a new screenwriter as well. Thus, Uncharted is back to square one. Does that mean he might be able to go back and finish Nailed or get an early start on the Untitled Ice Cube Project? One can only hope.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that enjoys having Saturdays off. But it’s not Saturday yet, is it? That means it’s time for another round of the best movie-related links from around the web. So lets get on with it. We lead tonight with the first shot of Bruce Willis in Rian Johnson’s Looper, which includes a look at Willis likely eviscerating something or someone. This one comes to the world via Empire, who has promised that they will be bringing you some news from the set. I’ll read that.

What is Movie News After Dark? It is a nightly movie news column dedicated to featuring painfully overtread characters from the part of the Marvel universe owned (cinematically, at least) by the 20th Century Fox corporation. It might as well be called X-Men After Dark. Hmm… maybe Fox will buy some sponsorship rights. They need all the help they can get after X-Men Origins: Wolverine. “A good Wolverine film could be an amazing thing.” Duncan Jones said this mere days before he confirmed that he will take a meeting with 20th Century Fox about the possibility of directing The Wolverine, taking a director’s chair left empty by the departure of Darren Aronofsky. As geek cred goes, Jones has perhaps as much as anyone working right now following Moon and Source Code, and he’s smart enough to pull it off. Here’s hoping the project is a good fit and that Fox makes the right call.

If there’s one thing that’s really great about the Academy Awards it’s the manner in which they decide who gets nominated and, ultimately, who wins for each category. It makes little sense to have directors vote on who did the best acting, or musicians deciding on who had the most splendid photography, or screenwriters deciding who made the best non-scripted picture. Professionals in their field decide on which other professionals in their same field did the most exemplary work to represent their profession.

And thank God, because I can’t imagine how you would define what constitutes great directing. The job encompasses so much that great directing can be equally applied to someone obsessively anal about their “vision” just as much as someone who relies on spontaneity and ad-lib to achieve the best results. It can be applied to someone with incredible photographic technique and an eye for scene setup, and another who seems to have little regard for visual appeal. As the matter of fact, as of last year it no longer even matters whether you have a penis or not.

I absolutely have no clue what constitutes great directing despite having my own opinion, which carries no weight because I’ve never done it in my life. I probably couldn’t direct traffic let alone tell someone to film me doing it from a specific spot and focus on my anxiety in close-up and then cut to a slow-mo clip of me weeping when drivers don’t pay attention to me. If I could do that then maybe I’d have an idea what a great director really does.

Thankfully, I don’t have to as the Best Director is decided upon by others who have been there, done it and conquered it in their own way to acknowledge how difficult it must have been to focus all collaborators’ attention to the right areas at the right times to arrive altogether at the same, desired destination; which is ultimately arriving at a final product they can all be proud of.

Here are this year’s nominees for Best Director:

But first they are probably going to work on a project called Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, which is apparently a video game adaptation. If both of these films end up getting made, the Wahlberg and Russell team is going to start looking like one of those important Hollywood power duos. They might have to challenge Scorcese and DiCaprio to a three-legged race. I’m not so interested in video game movies, but I’m ready and willing to be surprised, and Russell seemed to be enthusiastic about Uncharted when talking to The Playlist. He said, “I’m really digging it, I think the story’s coming together in a really intense, cool way …” That’s all well and good, and I hope it turns out great, but the project I’m instantly interested in is Cocaine Cowboys. It will be a dramatization of a 2006 documentary of the same name that was about the ins and outs of the Miami drug scene of the 80s. The doc, directed by Billy Corben, was a pretty interesting watch. It had turf wars, illegal plane flights to Columbia, secret boat rendezvous off the coast, a hitman that talked like Benicio Del Toro, and an evil kingpin lady who chops everyone up into little pieces. Plus it’s one of those classic, “hey look at all this coke, money, and girls; everything in the world is perfect right now and nothing could possibly go wrong” stories. If Boogie Nights taught us anything, it’s that Wahlberg is at his very best when [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]

This year, someone who has never won a DGA award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement will win a DGA award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. The filed includes three first-time nominees – Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan; Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech; and David O. Russell for The Fighter – as well as two returning nominees – David Fincher for The Social Network (who was previously nominated for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and who has won several commercial directing awards from the DGA) and Christopher Nolan for Inception (who was previously nominated for The Dark Knight and Memento). None of these directors has won the award, which means the Director’s Guild of America’s pattern of celebrating new talent (even talent that’s been around a decade) will continue. In the past 25 years, the DGA has only had 4 repeat winners – Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood and Oliver Stone. With this list of nominees, it’s guaranteed that yet another new name will join their ranks.

The power that The Fighter displays is immense. As unconventional a conventional sports film as has been seen, David O. Russell has directed a film where the comedic impact is just as strong as the emotional. It is a triumph of real people on screen in a film culture that has become more and more frightened of stories that are well-rounded enough to not need a dimension tacked on. Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) is a blue collar worker with a dream of making it big as a boxer. In his corner is Dicky Ecklund (Christian Bale) who once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard and has lived off the local fame and crack cocaine ever since. His mother (Melissa Leo) is the older version of a pageant mom who desperately wants success for her boy but struggles against her own selfishness. Everyone in his corner is working against him until he meets Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams) who helps him get his career and his life on track.

The Fighter is the perfect type of film for David O. Russell to followup I Heart Huckabees with. I Heart Huckabees was a very divisive and alienating film for many, most not being into the ‘existential comedy’ vibe. It isn’t what you would call the most accessible film to certain audiences, and O. Russell even referred to it as an experiment. The Fighter is a lot safer, on a commercial level. It’s the type of film that practically excludes no one, but instead is a film with open arms. With I Heart Huckabees, David O. Russell went unrelentingly artful, in an excellent and under-appreciated way, but now with The Fighter he strikes a perfect note of art and commerce. Russell and I spent most of the time in our 13-minute interview discussing this. If you’ve ever seen one of his films, then you know he shows a true love for his characters. No matter how moronic they act or how much they do wrong, David O. Russell still strives for nothing but empathy and love. This is even more understandable when you talk to the acclaimed filmmaker, who was quite friendly and talked very passionately about his process. He took time in his responses, and gave what felt like honest answers.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr heads to the movie theater to enjoy the holiday releases and the award films. But how do they stack up against each other. After being swept into Narnia in post-converted 3D, Kevin takes a trip to Venice where he watches a portly Johnny Depp play an everyman to Angelina Jolie walking around a lot. Finally, he takes another award season trip to Boston to watch Mark Wahlberg get punch drunk..

The web is abuzz with the confirmation from Mark Wahlberg that he will take the lead in David O. Russell’s video game adaptation Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. “I’m obviously in whatever David wants to do,” the star of Russell’s The Fighter told MTV News. “But the idea of it is so off the charts: De Niro being my father, Pesci being my uncle. It’s not going to be the watered-down version, that’s for sure.” He also added: “Say hello to ya mother for me.” (He didn’t, but in my mind he did.) This has sent the movie blogosphere into a feeding frenzy over the thought of Wahlberg, who is no stranger to video game fare, as Nathan Drake.

Paramount Pictures has released the first trailer for David O. Russell’s The Fighter, a boxing drama starring Mark Wahlberg as “Irish” Mickey Ward, a 30-something brawler from Boston who takes a long, bumpy road to redemption and a fighting chance at a title. Christian Bale stars as his good-for-nothing druggie brother, the guy who taught him everything he knows about punching holes in other dude’s faces. Amy Adams, lovely as always even hidden behind that thick Bahhston accent, plays his supportive (and at one point combative) lady friend. If you remember back, this is the film that went through something like 35 casting changes before settling on Wahlberg and Bale. Looks like they got it right, from a distance…

This week’s Culture Warrior is getting its bunker ready for Y2K.

Wahlberg, Bale, and Leo are on board – now it looks like Amy Adams might also be ready to step into David O. Russell’s ring with The Fighter.

Not much is known at this point but Christian Bale could be ready to fight in two weeks.

Production of the indie comedy Nailed, starring Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal has been shut down yet again, making this the fourth time the film has been put on hold.

It’s been well-chronicled that Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees director David O. Russell has some ‘tude. But this time, according to James Caan, he has gone too far!

Hollywood may just be running out of ideas, having to resort to stealing plots from your favorite adult and late night Skinimax flicks.