Despite not coming with a cool rap video, the new teaser trailer for Men in Black III does everything right. It opens with the familiar faces of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith doing what they did in the previous movies, then quickly shifts to the high concept problem (and solution) of a missing K (and a trip through time that randomly involves a Hollywood-style stunt to work. Then again, jumping off buildings is all the rage these days. As a bonus, both Smith and new co-star Josh Brolin get to deliver a bright ray of sunshine known as the Tommy Lee Jones Signature Smile. Check it out for yourself:

At this point, you’d have to be insane to not trust an Oldboy rumor that comes from Twitch, as those wily boys have single-handedly dropped all the big news when it comes to Spike Lee‘s English-language remake of  Park Chan-wook‘s masterpiece. And this latest piece of casting news that they’re reporting? I’m not afraid to admit that I think it’s interesting and somehow both bold and spot-on. The Twitch-ers are reporting that Colin Firth has been offered the role of Adrian, a role that functions as the Woo-jin part from Park’s film – better known as the primary villain of the film. Firth would face off against Josh Brolin, who has long been attached as the film’s lead (the Oh Dae-su of Lee’s take on the material). While Firth was first known to most American audiences for his fluffier work in films like the Bridget Jones’s Diary films and the ever-charming Love Actually, he’s lately taken on considerably meatier roles, particularly his Oscar-nominated work in A Single Man and his Oscar-winning role in last year’s The King’s Speech. A true villain’s role in Oldboy would be a compelling addition to his resume, and one I’d cut out my own tongue to see.

If you haven’t been reading along, I’ve been gushing about Ruben Fleischer’s upcoming crime drama The Gangster Squad for quite a while. Story details about the cops and gangsters flick about real life gangster Mickey Cohen can be found in my first article about the movie, where it was announced that Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, and Ryan Gosling had all been cast in key roles. Penn is in the starring role as Cohen, and Brolin and Gosling are two of the members of the titular gangster squad that is put together to take him down. After hearing that, I didn’t think that life could get much better, but then it did. The second Gangster Squad related bomb that Fleischer dropped on me was that man about town Bryan Cranston would also be joining the cast as a rough and tumble member of the LAPD by way of Texas. Suddenly the original Triumvirate of Awesome that was the Gangster Squad cast became the Cornerstones of Awesome instead. And now that the film has such a solid foundation to build a metaphorical house on, it’s time to start picking out pretty curtains and stuff by filling out the cast further. The big news of the day from Deadline Monowi is that grizzled, crazy actor Nick Nolte has also been cast. He will play Bill Parker, the incorruptible chief of police who takes it upon himself to form this so-called gangster squad. That sounds like a big role. Seeing as Nolte’s upcoming movie [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]

In 2003, director Park Chan-wook made his presence in the film world felt by crafting Oldboy, a revenge film about a guy who is mysteriously imprisoned in a shabby room for fifteen years and then is one day released and given a limited amount of time to find and take vengeance on his captor. It rose above the legions of other rank and file revenge films through superior crafting and a great lead performance by Min-sik Choi. It was good, everyone liked it, and people were happy. Flash forward to recent months, and now there’s news that Spike Lee is going to direct a movie called Oldboy, a revenge film about a man who gets locked in a shabby room for fifteen years and is then one day released and given a limited amount of time to find and take vengeance on his captor. We don’t know if it’s going to be any good, everyone is mad that something else they like is being remade, and no one is happy. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Maybe some people are happy. And maybe I could be coming around on this project as well, because at the very least Lee has just found a great actor to play whatever his version of the Oldboy protagonist will be called. It’s been a rumor for a while that Josh Brolin was at the top of the wish list to star in this film, and now Deadline Ami-dong confirms that those rumors were most likely [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]

Why Watch? The sheer joy of watching a Coen Brothers’ film in three minutes. This segment from To Each His Own Cinema (which should be seen by everyone ever) is like taking the last bite of your favorite desert. It’s completely satisfying with its slow comedy, Josh Brolin’s fish-out-of-water-who-thinks-the-water’s-fine behavior, and the pocket of truth that everyone here is trying to find in its most common form. Maybe that’s what’s so appealing here. There’s nothing false about this scene at all, and yet it’s still so funny. What does it cost? Just 3 minutes of your time. Check out World Cinema for yourself:

This may shock some of you dear readers, but this year I decided to skip the Breaking Dawn panel and instead went with the Rick Baker retrospective panel. Getting to hear Baker talk at great length aside, it was a fun surprise getting to see his work for Men in Black III because of how exciting the glimpses were. The retro aliens that Baker designed looked fantastic. Whether the movie works or not, his contributions will be more memorable entries in his speaks-for-itself body of work. We all know the current buzz and rumors regarding MIB: III, but as Baker says below, its production is simply the way you make movies now. What’s going on with that film isn’t drastically different from most tent-pole releases, even the good ones. Before the retrospective panel, I got a few minutes to chat with the make-up effects guru on the matter. Here’s what Rick Baker had to say about copying the greats as a kid, acting like a schoolboy with David Byrne, and the difficulty of working on modern blockbusters:

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s the day’s best movie news and links exploding onto your computer screen. Can you handle that? MSN has debuted a new image of two new characters from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. “Two of the youngest Dwarves, Fili (Dean O’Gorman) and Kili (Aidan Turner) have been born into the royal line of Durin and raised under the stern guardianship of their uncle, Thorin Oakensheild. Neither has ever travelled far, nor ever seen the fabled Dwarf City of Erebor. For both, the journey to the Lonely Mountain represents adventure and excitement. Skilled fighters, both brothers set off on their adventure armed with the invincible courage of youth, neither being able to imagine the fate which lies before them.” Quick, get me a Tolkein nerd to translate that. Are these guys cool, or not? Because they look cool.

When it was announced that Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, and Josh Brolin were all starring together in the upcoming Gangster Squad, I went as far as to call them a tri-force of awesome. That’s some ridiculous hyperbole, but the limits of my excessive enthusiasm for this project haven’t even begun to spin out of control yet. Wait until I hear that Bryan Cranston is also joining the cast, and then see what happens. Oh wait, I just found out. So now I’m ready to declare Gangster Squad the greatest movie ever made, before it has even been filmed. How’s that for hyperbole? For a quick recap, Gangster Squad is to be directed by Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer, from a script based off of this L.A. Times article and written by a retired cop named Will Beall. Penn will play famous gangster Mickey Cohen, Gosling and Brolin will be the duo of police trying to bring him in, and now Variety reports that Cranston will be playing, “Max Kennard, a laconic LAPD officer from Texas who enforces the law ambitiously.” I take “laconic” to mean that he’s going to be doing a lot of his Cranston glare. And the phrase “enforces the law ambitiously” to mean that he’s going to be planting evidence, taking bribes, and dropping guns with the serial numbers filed off onto the bodies of young punks that he shoots. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go quit my job so I can properly prepare for this [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]

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s an obsessively curated column that collects the most interesting links from around the movie blogosphere. It includes a bit of commentary, but only when the mood strikes. Which, for the purposes of this column’s author, is all the time. Gird your loins and put on your power rings, because it’s about to get wild in here. Getting ready to see Green Lantern this weekend? Our review will be live tomorrow. But if you need a primer before then, I would defer you to io9′s very thorough beginner’s guide to Green Lantern. It should bring you up to speed just in time to become angry about whether or not the film is faithful.

There’s a ton of Oscar caliber piled high on Labor Day – the adaptation of the Joyce Maynard novel. Its plot asks the high concept question of what you’d do if you were approached by a mean-mugging, bleeding man while out shopping with your young teenager. The correct answer is, “run,” but the answer that divorcee Adele gives is, “offer him a ride in my car!” Bad life decision. Great set up for a thriller. Jason Reitman is directing, and EW is reporting that Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin have both signed on to star as Adele and the mean-mugging escaped convict respectively. Feel free to count the Oscar nominations and wins for yourself. The wins should be easy. With Young Adult already in production, Reitman is definitely exploring the concept of divorce seriously, but it’s also nice to see him branch out into a new genre. This stark thriller will make an interesting double feature with Juno. Winslet is no stranger to characters living in broken homes, and Brolin could let his mustache show up to set and garner another Oscar nomination. The point? This casting is insanely great and promises to continue Reitman’s winning streak. It will start filming next year in New England.

It was looking like Sean Penn might not be able to star in the upcoming organized crime film Gangster Squad after he entered negotiations to star alongside Christian Bale in The Last Photograph, but Variety is reporting that Penn is still in the running, and actually very close to signing. And now that Penn is almost on board, things are looking good for Josh Brolin to join the cast as well. Gangster Squad is the story of the LAPD’s battle against famed gangster Mickey Cohen and other mafia men trying to make the jump from East to West coast back in the 40s and 50s. The script is based off of a L.A. Times article written on the subject by Paul Lieberman. Penn is negotiating for the role of Cohen, and the previously rumored Ryan Gosling and newly rumored Josh Brolin would be a pair of police tasked with bringing him down. The original article was adapted for the screen by Will Beall, who is a former police officer turned novelist, and Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer will direct. I think everything that I mentioned in this article is awesome, so hopefully when you put them all together the results will be a movie that is super awesome. At the very least I can’t wait to watch Gosling and Penn trying to flamboyantly out act each other while Brolin is all squinty and minimal in the background.

Director Andrew Dominik proved with The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford that he could create an intensely beautiful film with an insanely long title. He also proved that he could handle a large cast of formidable talent. Fortunately for fans, he’ll get another chance to wrangle a murder of talent. Not only will Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck be starring in Dominik’s forthcoming Cogan’s Trade – a film about comedy and crime in Boston (the only city in the United States with crime) – but Sam Rockwell, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Zoe Saldana, Bill Murray, and Mark Ruffalo are also possible to come on board. If they do, Andrew Dominik will have single-handedly kept the great actors of Hollywood busy and unable to appear in anyone else’s films next year. Well played, sir. The film is set to shoot in Louisiana in March, and it creates another reason to be excited for 2012. [Cinema Blend]

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr dresses up in a big red suit and sneaks into people’s houses. The only difference is that he sneaks into the houses of all the naughty girls. But before he can manage that undertaking, he sets his sights on the last wash of movies hitting the multiplexes this season. He travels with Jack Black to the Bermuda Triangle in Gulliver’s Travels then heads out west to catch a killer with True Grit. Finally, he brings his Christmas movie watching to a close by stabbing himself in the face with Little Fockers. Ho ho ho, the humanity!

There’s a core lesson somewhere inside the remake (or novel re-adaptation) of True Grit about pulling on bootstraps, feeling the bitter cold of the ride, and doing what needs to be done. Of course, that lesson is buried beneath a lot of snide remarks and funny moments. Even if the lesson is hard to find, the film itself is a reminder that there are few things quite as entertaining as seeing a snotty little girl and an eye-patched drunkard go exact a little buck shot revenge. Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is desperate to track down the man who killed her father, so she enlists the reluctant help of sodden U.S. Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) who takes every opportunity to brag about himself. Through a tough ride in Indian Territory, Mattie comes gun barrel to gun barrel with murderer Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) with a chance to pull the trigger and right his wrong.

With the holidays approaching, the studios are releasing some pretty sweet collector’s sets of classic films. One of the big releases this week is the 25th anniversary of The Goonies, which comes with the Blu-ray, memorabilia and a board game. If you were a fan of this film as a child, you are clearly old enough to drink now. So raise a toast to One-Eyed Willy and have some fun.

Say what you will about the Men in Black franchise, but don’t say that they can’t get talent involved. In addition to the already cast Will Smith, Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement and Josh Brolin (who, after seeing Jonah Hex, may sign on to any project that offers him a free meal) for Men in Black 3, reports are now coming in saying that former Bond girl Gemma Arterton, microwave executive Alec Baldwin and silly South African Sharlto Copley are in talks to join the cast. According to Pajiba, Copley would play a “fast-talking Yoda type alien,” Baldwin would play the head of MIB in 1969, and Arterton would play is undoubtedly tortured, but tight-skirted secretary. Shooting is scheduled to begin in November.

I was living in New York in September 2008, and took some time a couple of days after the stock market crash to visit way downtown Manhattan and see what was going on. The quietude was shocking, as the alarms being sounded on cable news networks made it sound like I shouldn’t be surprised to see brokers peddling on the street, people running around on fire for no apparent reason, or CEOs segway-ing off of cliffs. As I rarely visited the Financial District, I had no idea whether or not this was normal. Maybe the crash had invoked a necessary meditation or speechlessness, a rare time of reflection for capitalists-run-amok. But the truth was that such panic wouldn’t be visible on the street amongst the common folk (houses around the country owned by low and middle-income families told that story), rather the chaos was happening inside the buildings themselves. Oliver Stone’s latest entry into his “W” trilogy dealing with major 21st century American events (alongside World Trade Center and W.), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, is an attempt to inquire on the conversations that may have gone on in those buildings.

Retribution. Revenge. That’s the theme at the core of the Coen Brothers’ upcoming reimagining of True Grit, based on the book by Charles Portis. The film follows Mattie Ross (played by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld), a 14-year old girl whose father is murdered by a vicious man named Chaney (Josh Brolin). To get the revenge she feels she deserves, she hires a trigger-happy, boozed up US Marshall named Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges). Together, they set out to avoid other more noble lawmen (Matt Damon) and bring Chaney to justice. All of this, as you’ll see, can be gleaned from the first trailer…

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr is coming at you in eye-popping 3D, and like money, he doesn’t sleep. He sets his time machine way way way back to 2002 to pick on Kristen Bell in high school. The story is loosely chronicled in You Again. Kevin also practices some insider trading with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps then takes flight with a bunch of CGI owls from Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

As if news that Jason Reitman was re-teaming with Diablo Cody wasn’t good enough, and as if Charlize Theron joining as the star didn’t cap it off, recent word is that Josh Brolin might be following up his 19 films in 2010 by co-starring for Young Adult. In the story that focuses on Charlize Theron’s divorcee author returning to her home town (what a classic trope) to reconnect with her now-married former love, Brolin may just be the married object of her affection. As per Reitman’s contract with Hollywood, the film will be nominated for Best Picture. [Showbiz 411]