This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr dresses up in his Jedi robes and grabs his lightsaber, heading to the theater to see the 3D re-release of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. While there, he faces a sea of estrogen as ladies of all type swarm into the multiplex to see Channing Tatum’s abs multiflex. After using his lightsaber to break through the wall of pre-Valentine’s Day ladies, he faces more obstacles with twentysomething dudes heading out to see Safe House and obnoxious families to see Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. Fortunately for Kevin, he is able to dispatch everyone with his Rock-inspired “pec pop of love.” It was an early Valentine’s Day massacre.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly collection of movie and television news that throws caution to the wind, but never ever pees into the wind. That’s just not smart, friends. We begin this evening and this week with artist Kinjamin’s depiction of the Community cast as the characters from Street Fighter. It was found via Twitter, as posted by the show’s executive producer Dan Harmon. Needless to say, it’s inspired. So inspired, perhaps, that it makes us hope that Harmon is writing this one down. How about a Street Fighter episode in season four? Hey NBC, how about a season four?

A week and a half ago, Anthony Hemingway’s Red Tails was released. On the surface, the film breathes Hollywood oxygen through-and-through. It’s a WWII era action film that uses its setting for broad family-friendly cheese-banter and CGI-heavy eye candy rather than an opportunity for a sober interrogation of history. Red Tails looks and feels like any Hollywood film geared toward as mass an audience as possible. But the studio that’s distributing it – 20th Century Fox – didn’t pay a dime to produce it. The reported $58 million cost to make Red Tails came solely out of the pocket of producer George Lucas, who had been attempting to get a film about the Tuskegee Airmen made since the early 1990s. He was continually met with resistance from a studio system that saw anything less than the biggest guaranteed appeal to the largest possible audience as a “risk,” including a heroic true story about African-American airmen. The ideology that closed the doors on George Lucas of all people reflects the same business mentality that inspired Jeffrey Katzenberg’s lengthy warning to other studios in a memo written during the same years that Lucas was first trying to get Red Tails financed.  In the memo, Katzenberg warned studios regarding their practice of exponentially centralizing all their resources in a few very expensive projects, resulting in high risk, little room for experimentation, and an increasing reliance on that coveted monolith known as the “mass audience” (which, to make things even more complicated, now includes [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 Mayans, the wise race of ancients who created hot cocoa, set December 21st, 2012 as the end date of their Calendar, which the intelligent and logical amongst us know signifies the day the world will end, presumably at 12:21:12am, Mountain Time. From now until zero date, we will explore the 50 films you need to watch before the entire world perishes. We don’t have much time, so be content, be prepared, be entertained. The Film: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) The Plot: When the Nazis threaten to find and unleash the power within the Ark of the Covenant, the US Government turns to the only place that can save them: Academia. Back in the 1930s, Professors and Archaeologists were made of a lot tougher stuff, and were far more attractive to co-eds than they are today. The manliest among them, Indiana Jones, fresh off a disastrous trip to a South American jungle, embarks on a global quest to find the Ark first.

As much as I admire the incomparable films made during the era, New Hollywood (the term referring to innovative, risk-taking films made funded by studios from the mid-60s to the mid-70s) is a title that I find a bit problematic. The words “New Hollywood” better characterize the era that came after what the moniker traditionally refers to. Think about it: if “Old” or “Classical” Hollywood refers to the time period that stretches roughly from 1930 to 1960 when the studios as an industry maintained such an organized and regimented domination over and erasure of any other potential conception over what a film playing in any normal movie theater could be, then if we refer to the time period from roughly 1977 to now “New Hollywood,” the term then appropriately signifies a new manifestation of the old: regimentation, predictability, and limitation of expression. Where Old Hollywood studios would produce dozens of films of the same genre, New Hollywood (as I’m appropriating the term) could acutely describe the studios’ comparably stratified output of sequels, remakes, etc. What we traditionally understand to be New Hollywood was not so much its own monolithic era in Hollywood’s legacy, but a brief, strange, and wonderful lapse between two modes of Hollywood filmmaking that have dominated the industry’s history.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that is celebrating Monday Funday with what amounts to a bunch of shenanigans. Don’t worry though, we’ve slipped in at least one legitimate piece of news. We’ll get to that shortly. We begin tonight with something found a few weeks ago via Warming Glow, where an image from the Twitter account of Charley Koontz, best known as Fat Neil on Community, shows that Executive Producer Dan Harmon is just as bitter about Community‘s ratings as the rest of us. Seriously, who is the Nielsen Family? In other news, I hope Dan Harmon never changes.

For a project that’s been over two years in the making, the ambition of those who created this sweded Star Wars seems to have paid off. I’ve yet to watch the whole thing, but I’m already struck by the fact someone, that someone being Casey Pugh and many contributors, spent so much time sweding every single scene from Star Wars. Talk about dedication, right?

In 1995, HBO produced a film called The Tuskegee Airmen chronicling the heroic story of the first squadron of African-American fighter pilots during WWII. The HBO version stars Laurence Fishburne, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, John Lithgow, and Cuba Gooding Jr. I don’t mention this film because of its obscurity, or to thereby prove my film knowledge by pointing it out. I offer this film as favorable alternative to wasting two hours of time on the irrecoverable nosedive that is Red Tails. I’ll say it again, the story of the Tuskegee Airmen is beyond heroic and deserves multiple competent cinematic revisits. These were men who fervently, and with their very lives, defended a country that made policy of oppressing and mistreating them. Not only that, but they also proved to be one of the most effective and successful fighter battalions of the entire war. The larger themes of honor, duty, and sacrifice so inherent and alive in their story are reduced to After School Special platitudes in the George Lucas-produced and Anthony Hemingway-directed Red Tails. Instead of genuine traits, all of the characters occupy loosely-fitting archetypes mined from the most trite of “guys on a mission” tropes. That guy is the hot-headed glory hound, that guy is the goofy one, that guy has a drinking problem, that guy is in love, that guy looks like Denzel Washington. Okay, that last one is actually specific to Red Tails but it no less proves to be that actor’s only marketable skill.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that has a bit of a fashion sense, a sometimes sexy side and perhaps even a creepy streak. It will use and abuse all of these facets of its game in tonight’s edition. This one, as they say, is a must-read. We begin tonight with an image of custom Attack the Block themed shoes made by Toni Taylor-Salisbury, whom you may know as Mrs. Junkfood Cinema. The lovely Kayla Kromer tweeted them earlier this evening, as yet another example of Mrs. Salisbury’s amazing work in the realm of geek footwear. You can check out her other work over on her Etsy store. Do it now. Then come back, because there’s more news.

It’s one thing when we’re talking about Alfred Hitchcock having a walk-through in every single one of his films, including one that exclusively takes place on a lifeboat (he appears in a newspaper ad for that one). Sure it’s eccentric but it’s not surprising because, well, they’re his films and he can appear in them as he pleases. What does strike me as weird is when a director shows up totally unexpected in someone else’s film. Usually there is a good reason – either they are producing the film or friends with the cast. However despite the later explanation, it’s still a bit jarring to see, say… the director of Kill Bill in an Adam Sandler comedy…

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that had one hell of an extended weekend this week. For starters, its author had a birthday. He’s old. Moving on. And then it had a “reaction” to “ice cream cake” that is too embarrassing to describe in detail. It’s also now very well acquainted with Rooney Mara’s body. All of it. But that’s another story for another time. Lets get back to doing what this column does best: things that are almost news. We begin tonight with a first look at Lara Pulver as Irene Adler in Sherlock, the second series of which will hit BBC screens early next year. The much-anticipated second frame of the Steven Moffat produced series will build on the events of the last series, including showing us what the hell happened in the pool house! 

In an interview with Empire Online, legendary director Steven Spielberg talked about the development of future sequels for two of the biggest properties he has ever launched, Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones. While both of these franchises are huge name brands, and future sequels will probably rake in boatloads of cash no matter what, they’ve also both had some less than stellar installments already. So, artistically, if Spielberg is going to get us movie geeks to buy into the fact that more movies in these series are necessary, he’s got some explaining to do. Spielberg seems to readily admit that Jurassic Park 3 was a B-level film unworthy of carrying his weighty name in its credits, because he comes right out and assures us that a fourth installment won’t resemble that film in any way. He said, “The screenplay is being written right now by Mark Protosevich. I’m hoping that will come out in the next couple of years. We have a good story. We have a better story for four than we had for three…” Protosevich has been the writer on films like Thor, I am Legend, and the remake of Poseidon, so probably you can judge how much you trust Spielberg to get his story told correctly based on how you feel about those films.

It’s hard to say how many words have been written over the course of Internet history about the Star Wars movies. I can’t say for certain what the first site ever constructed for the web was, but I imagine it was either a photo gallery of Cindy Crawford bikini pics or a fansite dedicated to Boba Fett. So I imagine that ranking the Star Wars films has happened at least a dozen times before. Maybe a few more. All of the movies recently got released on Blu-ray, however, and Lucas’s babies seem to once again be a popular topic of conversation, so I figure what’s one more time gonna hurt? Plus there has always been one popular opinion long held by the Internet faithful that has stuck in my craw. The original Star Wars (now titled A New Hope) is universally viewed as being a watershed moment in modern culture, a groundbreaking film that launched one of the most successful franchises of all time and changed the way that people make movies. Return of the Jedi though, it’s often mentioned as being the weakest of the original trilogy. People say that it’s where Lucas lost his way and started making action figure movies with toy stores more in mind than movie theaters. Though we can all agree that The Empire Strikes Back is the strongest of the original Star Wars films (can’t we??), I’ve always felt like Jedi was my second favorite, and a more than satisfying way to end [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]

If you’ve been fortunate enough to avoid this news until now, I’m sorry, it’s about to get shitty. George Lucas, in a move that surprises no one but angers anyone who’s ever seen Star Wars, has excessively tinkered with the movies in the saga, taking the beloved and dropping a pile of turds on it. It’s true Lucas has been wallowing in the sewage pool after tweaking the original movies in shitty ways (Greedo shoots first, Jabba looks like ass, etc) and making three bad movies to utterly destroy the awesome coolness that was Darth Vader and irreparably rupture the continuity of the franchise. Not content to stop there though, ol’ Georgie-poo has decided to add another notch to his bulbous neck by ignoring (mostly) fan outcry and amplifying the shit we already hate. Let’s break it down.

It was only a matter of time before George Lucas started making more changes to his Star Wars movies. The guy has seemed to crack the code that the more versions of something he makes, the more times he can sell it to his hopelessly devoted legion of fans. Or, more accurately for what he did with the Special Edition Star Wars DVDs, all he has to do is sell everybody a screwed up version of the movies they love, and then he can go back later and make double the money by selling them the original versions that they wanted in the first place. The only thing he has to worry about is fanboy gripes, but I’m sure he’s able to get over that as he cries himself to sleep on mounds of fanboy money.

Why Watch? Because once you’ve seen an Ewok rocking out to the Mos Eisley Cantina Band, you can never un-see it. I wish this short film were somewhere in better quality, but someone has clearly taken the time to blend the usable parts together here (along with what, sadly, looks like bootleg footage from a theater showing). This mockumentary features Warwick Davis on his quest to find meaningful work, and after turning down the idea of playing football for Chelsea, he discovers the universe of Star Wars, where he thinks he’ll fit in nicely. It features the entire main cast of the films both as themselves and as their characters as well as some behind-the-scenes footage from the set. Funny, sweet, and a blast of nostalgia, this is definitely a cool little ride back through the universe. What does it cost? Just 25 minutes of your time. Check out Return of the Ewok for yourself:

Howard Hughes just pissed himself. Or maybe he pissed in a few hundred bottles and then poured them all over himself, because the trailer for Red Tails is out and the aerial work in it is phenomenal. The George Lucas-produced movie, directed by Treme producer/director Anthony Hemingway tells the story of the Tuskegee Airman (or the 322nd Fighter Group if you want to get technical) as they broke racial boundaries in WWII. It stars Terrance Howard, Bryan Cranston and Cuba Gooding Jr in a role that might launch his career back on track. Regardless, the trailer leads off with its strongest suit and follows it up with a few snippets of dramatic acting:

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that rounds up junk and stuff. It also likes J.J. Abrams’ movies, but not so much that it can’t laugh at them, as well. It is also currently being written by an author who is distracted with Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules. It’s surprisingly charming. Geek icon Simon Pegg released a book recently, “Nerd Do Well,” chronicling his life as a now-famous nerd. Personally, I can’t wait to read it. In the mean time, one passage about George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels has become a topic of discussion. Did Lucas apologize for the prequels? That’s the question of the day.

When I write this column, I typically don’t get the opportunity to write about movies from my teen years. I, like many, came into a cinephilic love for art and foreign cinema during college, and in that process grew to appreciate The Criterion Collection. Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), however, is a movie that’s followed me through various changes in my life for (I’m just now realizing as I write this) about half of my time thus far spent on Earth.

Remember how much everybody loved Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and how fandom has been clamoring for further father/son bonding adventures between Indy and Sia Labeouf’s Mutt ever since it left theaters? Me either, so why are all the cast members of that film going around talking to MTV cameras about another sequel? Probably because George Lucas and company know that no matter how bad it looks, we’ll all go and see it anyways. We can’t help ourselves; it’s a sickness. And because of that, Ford seems to be busy preparing his creaking old body for a fifth go around in the iconic Indy togs. According to Shia LaBeouf, “I talked to Harrison Ford. He said he’s staying in the gym, he said he’s heard no word, but he does know that George Lucas is out there looking for a MacGuffin. He said he’s staying in the gym, so it means the movie is not so far off.” If the amount of time it took Lucas to find a MacGuffin for Crystal Skull is any indication, then Ford may be in that gym for quite some time.