What is Casting Couch? Today it’s a casting column that’s relying on the dreaded “short list” for content. You can’t really say that The Switch is a Jackie Brown prequel. Its story doesn’t really connect with the goings-on of Jackie Brown in any way, and Quentin Tarantino isn’t involved or anything. But it is an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel that features many of the same characters Jackie Brown did. Case in point: Variety reports that fiery redhead Isla Fisher is in negotiations to play Melanie, the same stoner surfer girl that Bridget Fonda played in Tarantino’s film. The Switch also features Mos Def and John Hawkes in the roles Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro originally played, and Jennifer Aniston as a kidnapped housewife. Fisher’s character is said to be the manipulator of the story, and isn’t that always the case with these pretty girls?

We aren’t really going to be seeing Star Wars rumors and updates all the way through 2015, are we? As much as that might be the boost the American economy needs (when bloggers make money, bloggers spend money…), it could become very tiresome and result in absolutely no excitement for the actual film upon its release. Maybe once a director is chosen we’ll see a decrease in coverage. Well, maybe we’ll at least see a stoppage of “this director isn’t directing Star Wars” posts, unless we get a start on carrying them over to Episode VIII. Before we look at the week that was mostly just more Star Wars content, here’s your weekly reminder to read our reviews of new movies in theatrical release (Skyfall, Lincoln, Chasing Ice, Starlet, The Comedy, 28 Hotel Rooms, and The Citadel) and interviews with Skyfall producers Barbara Brocoli and Michael G. Wilson and cinematographer Roger Deakins and 28 Hotel Rooms composer Will Bates. We also watched new trailers for zombie movies World War Z and Warm Bodies, Wong Kar-Wai‘s The Grandmasters, Arnold Schwarznegger‘s The Last Stand, Alan Moore‘s Jimmy’s End, the remake Silent Night, the 3D re-release of Jurassic Park and our very own exclusive debut of the new spot for the wonderful Only the Young. Now, check out our biggest and best stories and original content from the past week after the break.

What is Casting Couch? Today it’s a casting column that’s debunking a couple of rumors that will probably come true anyway. Absolutely Anything is a project that’s long been on comedy nerds’ radars, not only because it’s being directed by Monty Python member Terry Jones, but also because the film will see Jones re-teaming with the other members of his legendary comedy troupe to do voiceover work. According to The Wrap, filming is looking to get underway on this one soon, Gemma Arterton has joined the cast, and Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) is currently negotiating to come on board, as well. The story is about a bumbling but magical school teacher, something that Cumberbatch would likely knock out of the park; which is one more positive that will help you forget Robin Williams is also going to be doing his voiceover thing here.

If you can’t beat the Internet, join them! At least, that seems to be Michael Bay‘s mentality when it comes to his (good God) fourth Transformers film. Late last month, a rumor broke free from the gnashing, mewling, almighty Internet machine that held that Bay was looking to his Pain and Gain star, Mark Wahlberg, to lead the latest installment of your little brother’s favorite franchise. At first, Bay was like “oh, no, that’s totally not going to happen. Nope, not at all,” but let’s get real – this is totally going to happen. Bay has now posted about the speculation on his website (via ComingSoon), writing: “I squashed a rumor that was on the internet last week. It was about Mark Walhberg. Mark was rumored to be staring in Transformers 4. We are working on another movie together, not T4. I had such a great time working with Mark on Pain and Gain, and he gave such a great performance – well let’s say that very internet chatter gave me some ideas. We are at the inception of our story process right now on T4. Let’s say some ideas are gaining traction with me and my writer – so I’m here to say thanks internet chatter.”

Though Michael Bay was initially reticent to commit to making a fourth installment of his hugely successful Transformers franchise, the money in these things is just too good, so it was really only a matter of time before he relented and agreed to sign on for a fourth. And though the news of another Bay-directed Transformers movie is going to be enough to earn groans from a lot of film fans, there have been some promising indications that a fourth film could be the best yet, even with the same director in place. From the very beginning, Transformers 4 has been thought of as a retooling of the franchise. Gone would be the north of $200m budgets and focus on Shia LaBeouf’s goofy Sam character and his ridiculously annoying family, and in their place would be a more traditional action plot starring a more traditional action actor. Heck, at one point it was even rumored that the studio was going after Jason Statham to star. Say that Bay made a Transformers movie without a focus on all of that family-friendly humor, with a budget that forced him to rely a little less on technical wizardry and a little more on his ingenuity…that could result in a watchable movie, right? The final battle of Transformers 3 was a lot of fun to watch, what if that were the whole movie?

We are more than halfway through the month of October, which means we’re in the home stretch to Halloween and in the thick of great content pertaining to scary movies and horror films. So, welcome to another filling recap of a week’s worth of original writings and coverage. First, though, let’s remind you of the regular goodies here at FSR, such as our reviews of new releases (Paranormal Activity 4, Alex Cross, Bestiaire, The Sessions) and interviews with Alex Cross director Rob Cohen and star Matthew Fox and The Black List creator Franklin Leonard. We also caught some new trailers for Carrie and Jack Reacher and, in addition to our regular TV column, we have begun a weekly recap for the TV series The Walking Dead. Also this week, we saw the New York Film Festival end (stay tuned for a look at our critics’ highlights and favorites) and the Austin Film Festival begin. So rummage through our coverage of the former (including a review of Flight) and bookmark the tag for the latter — also check out some AFF recommendations below. Check out our ten best features from the past week, plus some other recommended reading, after the break.

For our 150th episode, we decided to go back to the first show’s conversations, and we discovered something mildly depressing: that the discussions are pretty much the same. In 2012, we’re still talking about the topics of 2009; Transformers (a fourth is on the way), G.I. Joe (a delayed sequel is coming), Avatar (a dozen follow-ups will keep James Cameron busy until he retires), Marvel flicks (which have dominated) and remakes (which have not). Good thing we changed the format of the show a while back. Beyond the great repetition, reviewing the news from 3 years ago reveals a lot about the state of modern filmmaking through the lens of hindsight. Werner Herzog is a highlight, and revisiting the releases (Drag Me To Hell and Up) gives us an idea of what might actually endure. On this week’s show, we re-form the team from that pilot episode – site publisher Neil Miller and associate editor Rob Hunter – to dip ourselves in the cool waters of nostalgia and try to figure out what, if anything, is different about the movie-making landscape after 150 shows. Download Episode #150

Some time ago, not so long that I’ve forgotten, but so long that I can no longer totally remember, I watched a film that was bad. Upon completion of said film, I went with the cliched statement of “I want my money back.” This prompted a response from an acquaintance and colleague who took some exception to this statement, for whatever reason. It was his opinion that asking for one’s money back is somehow offensive to the people making the movie and he asked what I would do if the filmmakers asked for their budget back. Rather than getting into an internet fight over it, I stewed for a bit, but recently decided to get vocal, especially once I realized that the entire business side of making money is actually studios asking for their budget back.

Owing to the sheer size of the event, the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl ad contest has become its own institution over 7 years. The annual contest (alongside a growing number of other venture filmmaking contests sponsored by companies) has created an opportunity for the aspiring to have their work shared on the largest stage possible while winning a stupid amount of money. Now, according to The Hollywood Reporter, the winner will also get to work with Michael Bay on Transformers 4.  The prized crew position has yet to be determined, so it could be Second Unit Director or Awesome Clean Up Crew Member, but either way it should prove to be a fantastic hands-on opportunity to work on a major film set. The official rules are on the contest’s Facebook Page along with past winners to give you an idea of what they might be looking for. Although this announcement just caused an automatic rise of EPS (explosions per second) in the entries, I’m looking forward to the intimate, subtle look at the emotional subtext Doritos can provide (but this should win for subversiveness alone).

Michael Bay has stepped away from massive blockbusting in order to get a bit more intimate, but as with all things Bay, even intimacy gets steroids. With a smaller budget and no transforming robots, Pain & Gain tells the story of two body builders – played by Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson – who get caught up in a world of extortion and kidnapping and cooking human hands. What will those Hollywood writers think of next! Oh, and it’s based on a true story. The movie hits theaters April 12, 2013, but it has a poster that will make you fail a urine test. Check out the supplemental one sheet for yourself:

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that cares about your in-theater experience. We want you to have the best seat and be able to avoid having someone do something heinous to your corpse. We care so much. We begin tonight’s multimedia-heavy presentation of your favorite after-hours movie news column with an article I quite enjoyed over at Gizmodo, titled simply How to Find the Best Seat in a Theater. This is the kind of expert knowledge that many people assume I have, given the number of movies I see in theaters every year. But I’ve never quite dug into the science behind what makes the sweet spot the sweet spot.

On a gut level, a lower budget seems like it would be the best thing for the next Transformers movie. The franchise has made an absurd amount of money, sure, but the quality of the movies has always been hampered by excess. A little constraint can actually mean a lot of freedom. Of course, the normal laws of physics might not apply to Michael Bay. In an excellent feature by Geoff Boucher at Hero Complex, Bay opens up the new theme park ride alongside someone in a large Bumblebee costume and lays down some notes about the fourth installment (the one which he said he absolutely wouldn’t return for before absolutely returning for it). Among the details, a lower budget by $30m. That would bring Transformers 4 down to the earthly range of $165m or so, counteracting the tide of bloated blockbusters that can’t seem to nail down two hours worth of action without spending at least $200m. It feels strange to praise Paramount and this franchise for being sensible, but credit should go where credit is due. At the same time, Bay said that the action might take place in outer space. “That feels like the way to go, doesn’t it? I want to go a little off but I don’t want to go too sci-fi. I still want to keep it grounded.That’s what works in these movies, that’s what makes it accessible.” Of course, no matter where the action is, the true significant change will be the cast.

An array of familiar faces flitter in and out of Lorene Scafaria‘s directorial debut. Be it Rob Huebel or Patton Oswalt, they all have a minute or two to shine before the apocalypse strikes the world at play; amongst some of those soon-to-perish characters is Rob Corddry, an actor well-known for bit parts and the “asshole” role. In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Warren, played by Corddry, briefly revels in his final days, and in the way we’d hope to see him do onscreen. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World also shares a connection to another film Corddry has coming up: Michael Bay‘s Pain and Gain, based on a true (and insane) story. The doomsday bit isn’t the common thread, but the voices behind them are. Scafaria’s voice is shaping up to be a notable one, as Michael Bay’s is globally known. We’ll see Bay stretch some storyteling muscles the next time out, but, as Corddry tells us, his behind-the-scenes methods remain both the same and beneficial. Here’s wha Rob Corddry had to say about the crux of over-preparing for roles, having no frame of reference in acting school, and why Ed Harris was smashing a lot of phones for Michael Bay:

Remember that reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise that Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes was making? The one that was just called Ninja Turtles and that spawned a bunch of fan debate when it was said it would re-write the turtles’ origins to make them aliens? Well, if you came down in the camp of those who were dreading a possible bastardization of your beloved childhood icons, the latest developments surrounding the film’s production might have you breathing a sigh of relief. Despite the fact that the film has already done quite a bit of pre-production for its planned shoot in Vancouver, THR is reporting that work has stopped on set and the film’s release date has been moved from December 2013 to May 2014. How long has work on the project been delayed? Some sources are saying ten weeks, but some are saying that they’ve heard the production’s hiatus will be “indefinite.”

Well, kind of. According to The Province (via ComingSoon), the Jonathan Liebesman-directed, Josh Appelbaum- and Andre Nemec-penned, and Michael Bay-produced Ninja Turtles might start filming later this summer in Vancouver. Well, Canadians are by and large a very welcoming people. The outlet reports that word is out in “casting and pre-production circles around town” that the turtles are coming to the fair city to film a new version of the heroes in a half shell and their adventures in being both totally awesome and completely weird. As with most reboots/remakes/relaunches, this new film will be more “grounded” and “gritty” and, as producer Brad Fuller told us earlier this year, the film will likely use Rise of the Planet of the Apes-inspired motion-capture performance to tell its story.

“If Michael Bay directed Raiders, the Ark would be opened in the first act, and people’s heads would explode through the rest of the film.” I don’t typically seek out wisdom from Twitter, but this below-140-character observation (made by @krishnasjenoi and retweeted by @ebertchicago) struck very close to something that’s been occupying my mind as we enter the fifth week of the summer movie season. Though the statement works better as a fun hypothetical critique than a contestable thesis (in other words, there’s no way we’ll ever really know, thank goodness), the sentiment feels relevant. Though the modern Hollywood blockbuster has been a staple of studios’ summer scheduling for almost forty years, the films that become blockbusters don’t look or feel very similar to the films of the 70s and 80s that somehow paradoxically led to today’s cavalcade of sequels, franchises, adaptations and remakes. Criticizing Hollywood’s creative crisis is nothing new. But with the mega-success of The Avengers and the continuing narrative of failure and disappointment that has thus far characterizes every major release since, it seems that this crisis has been put under a microscope. The moment where unprecedented success is the only kind of achievement Hollywood can afford and the well of decade-old franchises and toy companies become desperately mined for material is something we were warned about. But Hollywood’s creativity-crippling reliance on existing properties is not the only, or even the primary, problem faced by mass market filmmaking’s present moment. The bloated numbers sought after each and

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; we’re always a hit…with elderly mimes and people whose favorite band is The Jerky Boys. This is the Internet’s best place to wait around for articles on the sites you like to load – sort of a cyberspace truckstop. And like a truckstop, we celebrate things that most people cast off as “trivial” or “base” or “seriously detrimental to one’s memory and critical thinking skills.” We are too! Wait, what was I saying? Anyway, this week we’ve had the very rare privilege of stumbling across a little gem of a rotten turd that will be playing a limited engagement of roughly ten shows a day in every single theater across the country. The arthouse maestro Peter Berg has taken the board game Battleship, that wonderful tool for teaching children all the necessary tenets of blind, desperate warfare, and extrapolated its meager mechanics into a two-hour cinematic testament to the struggle between Hollywood and your brain. Incomprehensibly bad as Battleship may be (read: totally is), I couldn’t help but wonder if the “plot” on the screen wasn’t merely a smoke screen for something that, like the invading alien ships, lurked just below the surface. So I gathered all the best minds in the Junkfood Cinema war room, which may or may not be my pet name for the corner booth at my local TGI Friday’s, and formulated some theories on just what the hell was going on here. My hope was to come up with a

A remake of The Birds has been kicking around for some time now. As Platinum Dunes’ Brad Fuller tells us, the project won’t happen until it’s “cracked.” Remaking such a beloved film is a challenge, but finding new and original ways of showing birds attacking, and in a 21st Century environment, must make for an even bigger problem. As Fuller puts it, it’s a part of the reason why we have yet to see the remake get made. When I asked about the status of the film in a recent interview, Fuller said, “It’s interesting, because we have been developing that movie for five or seven years, and we haven’t cracked. You know, we’re not going to go out and just make a movie because we have a great title. We’re only going to make it if we feel like we thought of something that doesn’t exist. It’s a daunting and ongoing process. Frankly, I don’t even know what will happen with that. I hope we can crack it.” But just what does Fuller consider the essential element of “cracking it”?

When we heard that Platinum Dunes and the director of Battle: Los Angeles were planning on rebooting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it was pretty easy to jump to conclusions about what type of film they would be making: gritty, lots of shaky-cam, and like most modern action filmmaking, trying to ground ridiculousness as much as possible. But Platinum Dunes producer Brad Fuller tells us that we should definitely expect a grounded, but not “gritty” take on a movie with alien turtles coming to Earth. Fuller also shared that a part of this “grounded” version may come courtesy of motion-capture. Based on Fuller’s tone and his love for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it would be a shock if the filmmaking team behind the project do not go with mo-cap Turtles. Here’s what Brad Fuller had to say about Ninja Turtles:

When you watch a Tarsem Singh film, you figure out pretty damn quickly that you’re watching a Tarsem Singh film. The auteur filmmaker isn’t the type to play it safe, and he’s clearly not afraid of polarizing an audience. Even with his modern take on the classic Snow White fairy tale, Mirror Mirror, he goes for an unabashedly childlike and wacky tone – which may not be for everyone. Tarsem’s films are rather similar to his persona: unfiltered, without any hint of compromise. This is the third time I have spoken with Tarsem in the past year, and although heaps of ground can be covered with him in mere minutes, courtesy of his rapid conversational style, it was a real treat to finally have an actual conversation with the filmmaker. Tarsem is one of a kind in terms of his filmmaking and demeanor. Whether you love or despise his films, the man is certainly an original. Here’s what Tarsem Singh had to say about polarization, the goal of not being different for the sake of being different, and the glory days of hanging with the college versions of Michael Bay and Zack Snyder: