What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that has been working really hard lately at its other job. So if it gets a little loopy this evening, please cut it some slack. We begin tonight with Keanu Reeves and Chloe Moretz reenacting a scene from Taxi Driver. It’s part of a photo spread in Harper’s Bazaar celebrating the work of Martin Scorsese. Something about this is a little creepy.

You may already be a film industry cynic. Maybe you think Hollywood is a barren wasteland, devoid of creativity and originality. Maybe you’re sick of seeing talented people get ignored and vapid hacks get splashed all over the trades. Maybe you’re tired of 3D everything and having to re-buy your movies every five to ten years. I’m not here to dissuade you of any of that. Hell no, I’m here to make it worse. Get ready, because this is some of the rottenest shit of which the film industry is capable. These are the things so terrible that Hollywood has to cover them up, lest God see their sin and smite them accordingly (and keep various government entities and lawyers off their backs, of course). If you still had any kind thoughts toward Hollywood, I suggest you prepare yourself for crushing disappointment. But first, I’d like to give a very huge shout out and thank you to writers C. Coville and Maxwell Yezpitelok for their help on this article. You guys are great! And now back to the shit storm, already in progress:

I used to love collecting TV seasons on DVD almost as much as collecting movies on DVD. But what the movie discs always added, things like commentary and behind the scenes docs, the TV discs completely lacked. After season 1, what’s left to say? We know how the show got made, why people got cast as they did, what a pain in the ass it was to get the pilot produced, the re-casting that occurred after the pilot. Extra content was hard to come by. For crying out loud, the most recent season of Dexter’s special features included episodes of other Showtime programs. Those are ads, not bonus features. A movie on DVD is easy. It’s a single thing, the story exists in that movie and that movie alone (usually). I don’t have to pop in the next five discs just to get to episode 22 where I find out that House is still a drug addict or that Jack is still really angry about something. In order to re-watch a TV series, especially a serialized one, I have to re-watch the entire thing. Very few shows exists that I enjoy watching single episodes of. I recently spent the last few weeks selling all my old TV on DVD sets, even the ones I had the complete series for, simply because I wasn’t watching them. As I packaged each one and put it into the mail box, I realized how much money I spent on the set, and how useless of a purchase it really was.

What is Movie News After Dark? Most of the time it’s a nightly dose of movie news from around the world. Sometimes it feels like a sentient being hell-bent on enslaving humanity. Tonight it’s taking the night off from both quests to celebrate a most favorite holiday in the land of the Reject, April Fools’ Day. There were a great many pranks on the web this year, and we’d like to point out our favorites, movie-related or otherwise. Then we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled shenanigans Sunday night. We begin tonight with a story from our own home town, Austin, TX, featuring a good friend of the site, critic Scott Weinberg. As you can see in the image above, The Austin Chronicle‘s front page story (and most of the article, for that matter) was about “The Dome,” a city planning solution to completely contain the riff-raff during SXSW. Excellent.

Every week, Landon Palmer and Cole Abaius log on to their favorite chat client of 1996 as MichaelBayFan2938 and Sharktopus11 in order to discuss some topical topic of interest. Not every movie is on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime, but we’re heading down a path that could change the way we watch and own movies. As Robert Lloyd points out at the LA Times, we’ve already got a shifting library of movies at our fingertips, and that might alter our viewing habits. We don’t have to drive to the rental store anymore (for the most part), but we also don’t have to toss down money every single time we make a decision to watch a movie. We can watch as much as we want. Isn’t that a good thing? Check out what we had to say and let us know what you think.

Back home from my trip to Vegas, I will now begin auctioning off the ownership of Film School Rejects to pay for the incredible debt brought on by my unexpected gambling addiction and legal fees incurred by an incident that I’m not at liberty to talk about yet. My recommendation to all of you: when Charlie Sheen calls and says “lets go on a bender,” you should politely find a way to say no. Alas, here is your weekend ending, week starting edition of News After Dark.

Netflix and services like it have defined a formative love of cinema for movie fans, but are there severely negative implications for the growing dominance of this increasingly dominant home video distribution model?

Like LL Cool J said, “Don’t call it a comeback. The Early Edition’s been here for weeks.” Or something like that.

It looks as if the folks at Hulu are once again looking for ways to keep me from being productive. Now I might be able to ignore work and watch old episodes of Doogie Howser, M.D. on my iPhone.

For those of you who missed last night’s Superbowl, let me start by saying that you missed one hell of a game. Secondly, you missed some pretty great commercials wedged uncomfortably between obviously desperate promos for NBC’s Heroes.

IMDb.com’s site founder Col Needham said Monday, “Our goal is to show our users every movie and TV show on the Internet for free on IMDb.com.” Needless to say, I can see many of the wandering movie-lovers of the interwebs being down with that.