This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr gets an added dose of tiger’s blood and Adonis DNA to make it through all the movie-watching he endures. He bats about .500 in his screenings, really liking some but struggling through others. After a visit to the wild west of Rango, he finds his fate adjusted by a mysterious fleet of men with stylish hats. Then, he realizes how ugly Number Four really is before staying out all night, drinking with Topher Grace and Teresa Palmer… who looks a lot like Number Six.

Rango is the first animated genre movie I’ve seen that, with no exaggeration, works as well as its live-action counterparts possibly could. Gore Verbinski’s latest is a damn fine western, an entertaining throwback to classic B-pictures that pays clever tribute to its predecessors. Sure, it’s populated by walking/talking lizards, rattlesnakes, and Gila monsters. So what? A lizard suffering from some serious existential torment, Rango (Johnny Depp) knows not who he is or of the world beyond the tank he’s called home and the pseudo-tropical knickknacks he’s made his friends. That changes forever when a karmic car accident finds the good-humored, tropical shirt-baring reptile abandoned in the Mojave Desert, his domicile destroyed forever. Making his way through the treacherous terrain, our hero dodges an enormous falcon, befriends roadkill named Roadkill (Alfred Molina) and is eventually escorted by fiery fellow lizard Beans (Isla Fisher) to the long-forgotten, crumbling town of Dirt.

While sitting down and chatting with Coming Soon, director Gore Verbinski explained why he would not be involved in the creation of a Bioshock movie after all.  It turns out he couldn’t find anybody to fund an R rated action film. To explain, Bioshock is a first person shooter video game where the playable character is a plane crash survivor who ends up stranded in a crazy underwater world. This undiscovered society has seen better days, is a little bit post-apocalyptic, and you end up needing to shoot pretty much everything that lives there to get your way through the story. Verbinski said of his position, “ … I wasn’t really interested in pursuing a PG-13 version. Because the R rating is inherent.” So studio accountants wanted to make a movie about a game where 90% of everything that happens is shooting things PG-13. What kind of a world are we living in?

At one point, George Clooney was among those rumored to play the titular role in Disney’s big screen adaptation of The Lone Ranger. Since then, we haven’t heard much about the project. In fact, producer Jerry Bruckheimer went as far as saying that they weren’t going to worry about it until they got a director. That was in 2008. They can now begin the search for a Ranger, as Gore Verbinski has been confirmed as director. Johnny Depp will still play Tonto, the film will likely hit theaters in 2012. The rest is to be determined. One thing we do know: Verbinski is definitely trying to give Tim Burton a run for his money in the “who can work with Johnny Depp the most this decade” competition. [The Wrap]

When the calendar page turns to October, we Rejects have only one thought: horror. To celebrate this grandest and darkest of months, we’ll cover one excellent horror film a day for the entirety of the month. That’s 31 Days of Horror and 31 Films perfect for viewing on a dark, chilly, October night. If you, like us, love horror and Halloween, give us a Hell Yeah and keep coming every day this month for a new dose of adrenaline. Synopsis: Beware unmarked video tapes. Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) discovers this when her niece, Katie (Amber Tamblyn) is found dead in her bedroom, her face horribly distorted like something out of an Edvard Munch painting. Keller’s a journalist and her reporter’s curiosity sends her on a journey to find the cause of her niece’s death. She discovers a legend about a video tape. When viewed it leads to the death of the viewer in seven days. Her investigation becomes an increasingly bizarre search for the truth about a girl named Samara. Her journey becomes more urgent after she watches the video, and even worse when her son does.

It was eleven months ago that Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, the 28 Weeks Later director, took over helming duties for a Bioshock film with Gore Verbinski still bringing his larger than life producing to the project. That means that in one month, we’ll have gone a full year without any serious movement on bringing the video game adaptation to life on the big screen. That also means that it’s about that time for someone with big guns to be talking about it again – and Verbinski is still talking a vaguely strong game about delivering for the fans.

Paramount Pictures has released the first teaser for Gore Verbinski’s upcoming animated flick Rango, starring Johnny Depp as a Hawaiian shirt wearing lizard who wanders through the Mojave desert in search of himself. Much of his world feels like a good peyote trip and everything around him is a talking animal of some kind. And we’re being told that it has nothing to do with Hunter S. Thompson. I’m not convinced.

The world finally has its first look at Rango, the character at the heart of Gore Verbinski’s upcoming animated movie that will star the voice of Johnny Depp. It’s also the character at the heart of that very strange teaser trailer, or non-trailer as the studio explained later. It’s all very confusing, but it will soon come into focus.

Considering that we post movie news, almost every trailer we can find, and speculate wildly on film casting, we’re all about mystery here at FSR. It’s because we, and the rest of the world, are so awash in information that we long for a movie that comes out of left field and hits us in the face. With a fish. This new teaser trailer for Rango does exactly what it needs to do. It teases.

After reporting mere weeks ago that Gore Verbinski’s big screen adaptation of Bioshock was about dead at Universal, we’re getting reports now that things are back on, with a new butt in the director’s chair.

What do you get when you take an awesome adult, science fiction fantasy comic and mix it liberally with James Cameron, David Fincher, Zack Snyder, Gore Verbinski, and Mark Osborne? A Heavy Metal movie that might actually kick ass.

News broke over the weekend that Universal is putting the breaks on the production of Gore Verbinski’s Bioshock movie. But they promise that it isn’t going to become another Halo movie. Really, scout’s honor.

As you may have read, Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski has a lot of films on his plate. And today it appears as if he’s begun clearing a few projects away so that he can focus on others.

It’s one thing to remake a lesser film like Michael Caine’s Get Carter or Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, but Hollywood has gone too far now… they’re remaking the 1985 classic Martin Mull film Clue!

Bong Joon-ho’s blockbuster 2006 film, The Host, has found a home for its inevitable US remake. Gore Verbinski has brought the film to Universal Pictures.

Depp isn’t getting $50 million. Russell Brand isn’t co-starring. The Earth is still round.

The web is full of casting rumors, but you already knew that. Yet, just because there are tons of rumors, that doesn’t mean that some of them aren’t fun — as well, there are those that actually make sense.

As if Johnny Depp wasn’t cartoonish enough in Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, the actor is re-teaming with the director for the animated film Rango.

Universal Pictures announced last night that they have signed on Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski to direct and produce the video game to screen adaptation of Bioshock.

…and hopefully it won’t contain a 50-foot woman who morphs into a thousand crabs.