Recently, I found myself looking for a movie to watch that was Christmasy and festive, but not necessarily something so holiday-themed that it had Santa Clauses, reindeer, and Jesuses in it. You know, something about normal people but set around the time of the holidays. While perusing all of the top ten holiday movie lists that I could find around the web, I saw one title keep popping up again and again, Richard Curtis’s Love Actually. I never saw this one when it came out, it just looked like another generic romantic comedy to me, but it turns out a lot of people love to watch it every year around the Christmas season. And further research led me to the fact that a lot of people mention it as one of the few romantic comedies that’s actually good from the last decade as well. Sounded strong enough for me to give it a watch. It turns out I didn’t much care for the film, though, and my need for something Christmasy had been left unsated. Not willing to go out on another limb, I decided to revisit a film that I had already seen before, one that I remembered enjoying much more than I was expecting to back when it was released. This second choice was Thomas Bezucha’s 2005 film The Family Stone, which already seems to be rather forgotten. Luckily for me, time did not prove my idiocy, because upon a second watch I found that I still enjoyed [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]

Part of me is in complete disbelief that the release date of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums will have been a decade ago next month. It doesn’t feel so long ago that I was sixteen years old, seeing it for the first time in a movie theater and spending my subsequent Christmas with The Ramones, Elliot Smith, and Nico playing on repeat in my car (two years later, after hearing of Smith’s death, my friends and I gathered together and watched Richie Tenenbaums’s (Luke Wilson) attempted suicide with new, disturbing poignancy). And ten years on, even after having seen it at least a dozen times, and armed with the annoying ability to know every beat and predict every line, something about Tenenbaums feels ageless and fresh at the same time. But when you look at the movie culture that came after Tenenbaums, the film’s age begins to take on its inevitable weight. Tenenbaums was Anderson’s first (and arguably only) real financial success. Previously, Anderson was perceived as an overlooked critical darling following Rushmore, a promising director that a great deal of Hollywood talent wanted to work with (which explains Tenenbaums’ excellent cast and, probably, its corresponding financial success). With this degree of mass exposure, other filmmakers followed suit, establishing what has since been known as the “Wes Anderson style,” which permeated critical and casual assessment of mainstream indies for the following decade and established a visual approach that’s been echoed in anything from Napoleon Dynamite to Garden State to less [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]

It seems like somebody working for the upcoming NU Image/Millenium production Straight A’s has been burning up the phone today trying to get word out about the project. So far Variety has come out with not one, but two casting reports for the film. First, a little bit about what the movie is. James Cox, who has not done much, but is probably best known for his last film, 2003’s Wonderland, is set to direct. The script, from writer Dave Cole, is about a man who has been in and out of rehab for a decade, and who is haunted by the ghost of his dead mother. This pesky old ghost continually gripes at him that he needs to seek out his family and make amends with the people that he turned his back on long ago. Armed with a cache of pills and weed, this man makes his way back to his hometown of Shreveport to spend some time with his brother and his brother’s wife, who still pines after our main character, as he was her first love. Oh what a tangled web we weave.

Paramount Pictures has released a full red band trailer for their upcoming internet porn opus, Middle Men. For those who missed it when we posted the first trailer — of the green band variety — this film tells the story of the guy who invented the method of collecting money for subscriptions to adult websites. His innovation almost singlehandedly led the rise in the internet pornography business, which is now one of the world’s most lucrative entertainment sectors. Why? Because they made it fast and easy — and people like fast and easy, especially when it comes to porn. Check out the film’s synopsis and the new red band trailer after the jump.

This far into the age of the internet, we all just know and accept it as a porn filled cesspool – but do you know the story behind the digital hooters? The Middle Men explores the unexpected birth of the online porn blow-up.

If you are like me, then you are sick and tired of Earth and humanity being the victims in alien invasion movies. Get over it, pesky humans — no one really wants to come down to our dying planet and take over. Now we finally have a movie that tells it like it is…

Controversy is all over the place as Kevin calls for a boycott of Tropic Thunder due to insensitivity to fat people while Neil takes some shots at Tim Shriver. Nothing is sacred, and everyone should be offended at this week’s Fat Guys at the Movies.

Sometimes we just can’t avoid a little commentary that veers into the world of politics — especially not in an election year and especially not when studios are releasing movie posters like this.

One of our snoopy readers gives us an update on the straight-to-dvd horror prequel.

At root, Vacancy is a horror movie about two characters who gradually become aware that they’re two characters within a horror movie, but Antal keeps the tone straight-faced, blessedly avoiding any Scream-style, self-aware cheekiness. Packed full of conventional set-ups, the film stars Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale as a married couple on the verge of divorce, on their way home from Beckinsale’s mother’s home on a side road, having made the fundamental mistake of getting off the interstate. (Never get off the main road!) A lot of “we’re not lost!” bickering ensues, then the car breaks down, the mechanic can’t fix it till morning and there’s a nearby motel with no other guests, only a creepy night clerk (a mustachioed Frank Whaley). Beckinsale refers to their stay in the filthy room they rent as their “one last great adventure together,” but she is unaware of the real adventure about to unfold! In a well-crafted sequence of Wyler/Toland-esque close-ups—the film is full of artsy angles and is gorgeously lit, courtesy cinematographer Andrzej Sekula, of Pulp Fiction fame—Wilson starts popping-in video tapes lying on top of their room’s television set, finding a series of gruesome snuff films that he slowly begins to realize have been filmed in the very room he and his wife occupy. With hardly a moment to think, the events that start off the tapes begin to happen to them: there’s deafening banging on the wall; the power flicks on and off; the door, chained shut, rattles on its [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]