What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news round-up that finds the darndest things. Like Sacha Baron Cohen’s beard, creepy Musketeer posters, Mark Wahlberg, Simon Pegg, Paul Walker and a way to make your tweets into epic cinematic adventures. You need this and you know it. We begin tonight with Sacha Baron Cohen looking crazytown as The Dictator, his latest mockumentary prank film. Only this time, it’s got a more concise narrative. Cohen will play the dual roles of a ruthless dictator who heads to the U.S. for a meeting at the United Nations and finds that his number two has replaced him with an unsuspecting sheepherder lookalike. The big guy has sort of a Cosmo Kramer meets Mr. T vibe going on, with all the frills of the late Saddam Hussein. That feeling deep in your loins is unbridled excitement. That’s a good thing.

In a recent addition of Movie News After Dark the honorable Neil Miller let us all know about a new Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell comedy called Turkey Bowl that suspiciously sounded like an already existing indie film called, well… Turkey Bowl. In an interview with Inside Movies producer Adam McKay dished out some more details about the impending project. Firstly, the film was originally conceived as a vehicle for Wahlberg to reteam with Alec Baldwin and rekindle some of that meathead chemistry that they had going on in The Departed. It wasn’t until later that Ferrell heard about the project and it also became a reteaming of he and Wahlberg. Baldwin will play the Kennedy-family-obsessed patriarch of a clan of misfits who organizes a touch football game every Thanksgiving with the snooty family from across the park. His dream is to one day take the rich folk down and recreate his own little version of the Kennedy dynasty. Ferrell is going to be the father of the opposing family, one in which all of the children are going on to do successful things. Wahlberg is playing Baldwin’s eldest son, the one who gets tasked with putting back together his family of addicts and cons and finally getting one over on the folk from across the way. It’s Baldwin’s last wish after he goes down from a heart attack. Oh, and Rob Riggle will play a ringer who has been ejected from the family due to gayness, but who must

Seth McFarlane needs to run a tighter ship because details are starting to leak out about his upcoming feature film Ted. Flash Gordony details. Secret informants have told Flixist that Ted makes several references to the 1980 version of the intergalactic epic. They’ve even recreated one of the vehicles from that film and have gotten Sam J. Jones to sign on and make a cameo.  What does the 80s version of Flash Gordon have to do with a film about a Teddy Bear come to life? You’ve got me, but it sounds like this movie is going to have all sorts of crazy crap in it. For those uninitiated, Ted is the story of a young boy who wishes that his stuffed bear would come to life and be his friend for real. Though the wish is granted, the results are not what the kid expects. The boy grows up to be Mark Wahlberg, and the bear grows up to be still a living stuffed animal that just won’t go away. To make that situation sound even weirder, those anonymous tipsters have tipped that Ted also works in a convenience store. Filming was done recently on a scene where Ted takes a lady back into the storeroom and gives her the business end of his fluffy package. How the logistics of a stuffed bear working at a convenience store or sexing up a lady work out is a mystery to me, but then again this is a movie that has

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly column dedicated to things happening in the world of entertainment. It’s also deathly afraid of Kevin Bacon. It would like to reassess it’s number of degrees and somehow increase from its usual 2 to at least 8. That way Mr. Bacon and his X-Men character can’t clamp its nether regions in the contraption above. At least we think that’s what that thing is. We begin our night with X-Men: First Class and a massive dump of images over at Gamma Squad. From high-res shots of the meticulously crafted costumes to high-res shots of cool CGI mutants to a high-res shot of whatever the hell Kevin Bacon is doing in the photo above. I almost don’t want to know. But I do, because this movie continues to look better and better with every little marketing bit.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that enjoys having Saturdays off. But it’s not Saturday yet, is it? That means it’s time for another round of the best movie-related links from around the web. So lets get on with it. We lead tonight with the first shot of Bruce Willis in Rian Johnson’s Looper, which includes a look at Willis likely eviscerating something or someone. This one comes to the world via Empire, who has promised that they will be bringing you some news from the set. I’ll read that.

Go tell your mother that Mark Wahlberg has developed a film with Justin Bieber over at Paramount that will see Wahlberg playing mentor figure to a basketball playing Bieber. According to Deadline Lawrence, the tone of the film has been described as The Color of Money meets The Karate Kid. The remake or the original? Why don’t they clarify? It matters! This is a perfect moment of reflection for Wahlberg. He started as a pop star, transitioned into serious acting while holding a basketball (and while playing yet another character named Mickey), and here’s a chance for him to come full circle with a kid who’s a pop star but clearly wants to enter the world of acting. Ladies and gentlemen, Justin Bieber is this generation’s Mark Wahlberg. Does that mean that in a few years, Bieber will play a porn star in a tragedy, then a soldier in the Middle East, then get a role on a Planet of the Apes movie, then alternate action roles with existential comedies on the road to two Oscar nominations? Yes, yes it does.

What is Movie News After Dark? Someone said something nice about it the other day, so it’s feeling sort of full of itself. Luckily this means that there will be more news, more snark and even a few surprises in tonight’s entry! There really is nothing like a self-aware movie news column with a sense of purpose. In addition to the surprisingly dark first trailer, Fox has released some HD concept art for the ineptly titled Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The art is also quite stunning, showing off some large scale scenes. Most interesting is the fact that it hints at a movie that focuses much of its time on the actual ape uprising, rather than the build-up. I’m ready to see humanity swallowed by simian rage. Aren’t you?

It’s being reported by Variety that Mark Wahlberg is soon going to be starring in another comedy. Universal has attached him to a spec script written by a guy with no previous credits named Matthew J. O’Neill that is titled Bait and Switch, and is described as being an “action-comedy.” We already know that after this year’s Contraband Wahlberg is set to star in the teddy bear come to life movie Ted by Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane, and that he is looking to get together a sequel for The Fighter, so presumably this film would either be sandwiched in between those projects or come right after them. I guess my biggest question is how I feel about Wahlberg doing another comedy. For the longest time he was doing pretty straight dramatic stuff, but now he seems to be looking to reinvent himself a bit. We’ve already seen him in another “action-comedy” alongside Will Ferrell with The Other Guys, and I was pretty lukewarm about that. I guess whether or not Ted is able to produce the laughs will be my deciding point on whether or not Wahlberg has what it takes to become a comedic actor. I’ve laughed at him a little bit when he plays the clueless doofus in otherwise dramatic movies like Boogie Nights or I Heart Huckabees, but I’m just not sure if I’m ready to accept him in a strictly comedic role. The dude modeled in his underwear. Leave comedy for the weird looking, gangly

Whenever I talk to boxing fans about last year’s critical success The Fighter, they all have the same reaction. That is to say they liked the movie, but don’t understand why it ended before it got to the best part. The best part they were envisioning was Micky Ward’s legendary trilogy of fights with Arturo Gatti, which catapulted both men into boxing superstardom. The three fights, which are renowned for their brutality, started as a fierce rivalry and ended with the two men in a close friendship. While talking to Extra’s Mario Lopez on the Academy Awards’ red carpet, Wahlberg had more than a little to say about those fights. When discussing his future plans, he said, “Now we’re gonna talk about doing number two. We’re gonna do the Ward/Gatti trilogy and make it real.” So there you go fight fans and fans of The Figher, it appears that we’re going to get an entire film focused on the Micky Ward and Arturo Gatti story. I just hope Christian Bale will be okay having to smoke more crack.

The Family Guy creator’s funny looking upcoming comedy Ted just got funnier looking. Joining such names as Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, and Giovanni Ribisi will be the star of the much lauded and loved NBC sitcom Community, Joel McHale. You might also know him as the handsome yet goofy host of The Soup. Or maybe you’ve seen him touring around out on the standup circuit. Look, point is that Joel McHale has a lot of jobs. He’s a funny man. McHale joins the cast playing the unsavory boss of Kunis’ character. He reportedly spends much of the film making inappropriately forward come-ons to Kunis. And who among us could blame him? Usually when we see McHale on screen he is playing some version of likable, or at the very least he is a cad with a whole lot of charm. It will be interesting to see him really sleaze it up playing a character that sounds like a villain and see what kind of humor he can create with that. Being a member in good standing of the Church of McHale, I have faith that he will produce good things. And while I haven’t bothered to watch The Family Guy in years, the more I’m hearing about this raunchy teddy bear movie, the more I’m starting to think that it could be something good. I just wonder who’s running all of McFarlane’s hundreds of Fox cartoons while he’s away. Source: Deadline Greendale

The film, called Ted, sounds interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, it will be the first live action work that we get to see from the main brain behind Family Guy, which has become a boundary pushing institution over the last ten years that people mention in the same breath as other edgy animation like The Simpsons and South Park. Secondly, it will be the first time we get to see McFarlane create in the R rated realm of raunch. Family Guy has done everything it can to push the boundaries of what is acceptable to its audience since its very inception, but it is still just a prime time network show when you boil things down. We’ve maybe not even scraped the surface of the depravity that might be lying hidden inside McFarlane’s mind. Also, Mila Kunis is reportedly attached to the project as well. Any movie that I hear pitched instantly gets at least twice as intriguing when you tell me Mila Kunis is going to be in it. The film centers on a man, played by Mark Wahlberg, who made a childhood wish that his teddy bear would come to life. Several decades later, when he’s well into adulthood, having a living, breathing teddy bear following him around everywhere isn’t as great as it seemed when he was 7. As a matter of fact, it gets pretty annoying. Especially when the bear, Ted, is a drinking, smoking lout. The bear itself will be stop motion and voiced

But first they are probably going to work on a project called Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, which is apparently a video game adaptation. If both of these films end up getting made, the Wahlberg and Russell team is going to start looking like one of those important Hollywood power duos. They might have to challenge Scorcese and DiCaprio to a three-legged race. I’m not so interested in video game movies, but I’m ready and willing to be surprised, and Russell seemed to be enthusiastic about Uncharted when talking to The Playlist. He said, “I’m really digging it, I think the story’s coming together in a really intense, cool way …” That’s all well and good, and I hope it turns out great, but the project I’m instantly interested in is Cocaine Cowboys. It will be a dramatization of a 2006 documentary of the same name that was about the ins and outs of the Miami drug scene of the 80s. The doc, directed by Billy Corben, was a pretty interesting watch. It had turf wars, illegal plane flights to Columbia, secret boat rendezvous off the coast, a hitman that talked like Benicio Del Toro, and an evil kingpin lady who chops everyone up into little pieces. Plus it’s one of those classic, “hey look at all this coke, money, and girls; everything in the world is perfect right now and nothing could possibly go wrong” stories. If Boogie Nights taught us anything, it’s that Wahlberg is at his very best when

The power that The Fighter displays is immense. As unconventional a conventional sports film as has been seen, David O. Russell has directed a film where the comedic impact is just as strong as the emotional. It is a triumph of real people on screen in a film culture that has become more and more frightened of stories that are well-rounded enough to not need a dimension tacked on. Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) is a blue collar worker with a dream of making it big as a boxer. In his corner is Dicky Ecklund (Christian Bale) who once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard and has lived off the local fame and crack cocaine ever since. His mother (Melissa Leo) is the older version of a pageant mom who desperately wants success for her boy but struggles against her own selfishness. Everyone in his corner is working against him until he meets Charlene Fleming (Amy Adams) who helps him get his career and his life on track.

The Fighter is the perfect type of film for David O. Russell to followup I Heart Huckabees with. I Heart Huckabees was a very divisive and alienating film for many, most not being into the ‘existential comedy’ vibe. It isn’t what you would call the most accessible film to certain audiences, and O. Russell even referred to it as an experiment. The Fighter is a lot safer, on a commercial level. It’s the type of film that practically excludes no one, but instead is a film with open arms. With I Heart Huckabees, David O. Russell went unrelentingly artful, in an excellent and under-appreciated way, but now with The Fighter he strikes a perfect note of art and commerce. Russell and I spent most of the time in our 13-minute interview discussing this. If you’ve ever seen one of his films, then you know he shows a true love for his characters. No matter how moronic they act or how much they do wrong, David O. Russell still strives for nothing but empathy and love. This is even more understandable when you talk to the acclaimed filmmaker, who was quite friendly and talked very passionately about his process. He took time in his responses, and gave what felt like honest answers.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr heads to the movie theater to enjoy the holiday releases and the award films. But how do they stack up against each other. After being swept into Narnia in post-converted 3D, Kevin takes a trip to Venice where he watches a portly Johnny Depp play an everyman to Angelina Jolie walking around a lot. Finally, he takes another award season trip to Boston to watch Mark Wahlberg get punch drunk..

The Peruvian director who earned some buzz for the action-fueled, CGI chase scene The Raven will have a chance to stretch his feature length legs now that Paramount has acquired the rights for the short. The plan is to have Justin Marks (the abysmal Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li) write the film as a starring vehicle for Mark Wahlberg. The concerns here are obvious. The short is fun, but it’s just a chase scene, and while other shorts have had the foundation to become larger stories (like District 9), others turned out to be butter spread thin over far too much bread (like 9). The Raven doesn’t seem like it has the meat to be anything more substantial, but it also has the blank slate of potential that doesn’t have the burden of a plot. Either way, it’s good news for directors trying to make a mark with calling cards, it’s another chance for Paramount to dip into the world of sci-fi, and it’s another opportunity for Mark Wahlberg to run away from something shooting at him. Check out the original short below:

The web is abuzz with the confirmation from Mark Wahlberg that he will take the lead in David O. Russell’s video game adaptation Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. “I’m obviously in whatever David wants to do,” the star of Russell’s The Fighter told MTV News. “But the idea of it is so off the charts: De Niro being my father, Pesci being my uncle. It’s not going to be the watered-down version, that’s for sure.” He also added: “Say hello to ya mother for me.” (He didn’t, but in my mind he did.) This has sent the movie blogosphere into a feeding frenzy over the thought of Wahlberg, who is no stranger to video game fare, as Nathan Drake.

It’s a cult classic in the exact meaning of the phrase, so it’ll probably upset more than a few diehards to know that Mark Wahlberg has been offered the lead role in the new film baring the Crow pedigree. Even though I’m not obsessed with the original, the idea of Goth Wahlberg doesn’t sound all that appealing. Isn’t pro wrestler Sting still around somewhere? He owes the franchise his livelihood. Nick Cave is busy with script duty (although his mustache could probably play the role all on its own), and Stephen Norrington is set to direct so it’s a toss up between the popcorn brilliance of Blade and the giant mess of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Either way, Wahlberg just isn’t right for this role. The Crow isn’t even from Boston. [Bloody D]

Paramount Pictures has released the first trailer for David O. Russell’s The Fighter, a boxing drama starring Mark Wahlberg as “Irish” Mickey Ward, a 30-something brawler from Boston who takes a long, bumpy road to redemption and a fighting chance at a title. Christian Bale stars as his good-for-nothing druggie brother, the guy who taught him everything he knows about punching holes in other dude’s faces. Amy Adams, lovely as always even hidden behind that thick Bahhston accent, plays his supportive (and at one point combative) lady friend. If you remember back, this is the film that went through something like 35 casting changes before settling on Wahlberg and Bale. Looks like they got it right, from a distance…

No doubt you’ve read about it if you haven’t seen it. The Other Guys, the latest collaboration between masters of the sophomoric Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, concludes with an animated chart-and-graph sequence over its end credits detailing the inner workings of Ponzi schemes, the exponential disparity between the wages of corporate CEOs and their average worker, and the rather comical eventual release date of currently imprisoned white-collar criminal Bernie Madoff. It seems startling at first, for one of the most hilariously dumb comedies of the summer (I certainly don’t mean this as an insult, as true silliness is hard to come by and McKay/Ferrell routinely pull it off masterfully) to conclude with something of a visual lecture. It’s confounding for a film that asks the bare minimum of its viewer to conclude with what seems to be a message built from populist outrage, a message for which there seemed, on the surface, little if any buildup toward. The best course of action – for most critics, anyway – has been to read and enjoy The Other Guys wholly separate from its end credits (films, after all, are often misread as ending before their credits; we’re conditioned not to any pay attention to them). I find this reading of The Other Guys too selective, and its end credits – as didactic and ill-placed as they may seem at first to be – paint a rather different film in hindsight to the one we think we have been seeing.