What is Movie News After Dark? It’s waiting to watch the latest episode of Community because it promised its girlfriend it would. And that’s really hard to do, because that show’s really good. Also, Josh Holloway from Lost guest stars in the two-part season finale. How can that be resisted by the world’s most interesting nightly movie news linkdump? Must… hold… on… Must… do… the news… Quentin Tarantino went big when he cast Brad Pitt as his lead in Inglorious Basterds. So to see him considering Will Smith as the titular character, a freed slave trained by a German bounty hunter that sets out on a quest to save his wife from a head slave, is an act of pure bravado — he’ll just go get anyone he effing pleases to star in his movies, won’t he? And if that wasn’t enough to blow your mind, consider this: Christoph Waltz is said to be circling the role of the German trainer, with Samuel L. Jackson in consideration as the bad guy. That’s potentially a perfect storm of awesome, so we’ll see.

Quentin Tarantino’s “next” film is an amorphous and constantly shifting entity that seems to only find its final form once the cameras start rolling, but that’s never stopped the internet from bandying about titles, plots, and cast lists as if they were confirmed plans. At various times the divisive director has been reportedly about to start work on The Vega Brothers with John Travolta and Michael Madsen, a follow-up to Inglourious Basterds that would place Brad Pitt and his merry men in the racist South of the 1950′s, a re-imagining of The Shadow, a third Kill Bill film, and even a remake of Russ Meyers’ Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! None of these have come to fruition (yet), but recent days have seen speculation that Tarantino’s upcoming film would be a Western set in the American South. Adding nothing concrete at all to the rumor was the apparent leak of the cover page to his just completed script for a film titled Django Unchained. Yes please.

What is Movie News After Dark? Like your collegiate sex life, it will be in and out quick with nothing very interesting to say. It will, however, deliver unto you all the magical and wondrous movie news of the day. And it promises to call you the next day, because you’re a person, dammit. We open tonight with images of humans running away from fireballs. It must be time for a Michael Bay update. This one is from Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and it includes zero robots. Not quite as interesting as the ones that include robots, but still quite ‘splosiony.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly column about movie news that wasn’t big enough to get quality real estate on the home page. Or the stuff that everyone else missed. But you won’t miss it! Because it’s all right here! “I think he has a script ready to start of a new film, a Southern. I think it’s really exciting. It’s another new story and a fresh piece of material that he is channeling at the moment.” That’s Uma Thurman, talking about Quentin Tarantino’s next film.

In case you didn’t catch it, there was a pretty awesome art show back in November. This art show was called Bad Dads, and featured some art inspired by the films of Wes Anderson. Well if you did catch it, you knew it was awesome. Now we have an exclusive to show you something ever more awesomer.

Italian actor Franco Nero talked to reporters at the Los Angeles Italia Festival recently and caused a bit of a stir when he mentioned Quentin Tarantino’s name while discussing his next project. Nero described it thus, “The film will be called The Angel, The Bad, and The Wise and is a tribute to Sergio Leone. It’s a movie that contains humor, lots of action, but also a great plot. We have already been signed by a dozen people who will be part of project. Among the filmmakers involved include Quentin Tarantino , Keith Carradine, Treat Williams, fifteen people in all Americans who want to do this movie and so we are trying to produce it outside of Italy.” According to an update from Aint It Cool, the title may be totally wrong, but Tarantino is definitely planning to do a spaghetti Western, and Christoph Waltz will be co-starring in some capacity. Treat it with the grain of rumor salt for now, but it sounds plausible. The earlier quote, taken in context, could mean that Tarantino might have any number of itty-bitty little insignificant roles in the production; but people are already going ahead and speculating that this is going to be the next film he directs anyways.

What is Movie News After Dark? This is a question that I am almost never asked, but I will answer it for you anyway. Movie News After Dark is FSR’s newest late-night secretion, a column dedicated to all of the news stories that slip past our daytime editorial staff and make it into my curiously chubby RSS ‘flagged’ box. It will (but is not guaranteed to) include relevant movie news, links to insightful commentary and other film-related shenanigans. I may also throw in a link to something TV-related here or there. It will also serve as my place of record for being both charming and sharp-witted, but most likely I will be neither of the two. I write this shit late at night, what do you expect?

The year 2010 may have ended, but the cycle of movie news keeps on a-cyclin’. Most of the news this time of year has something to do with a list — the best, the worst and the otherwise notable performances, directorial efforts and nude scenes, just to name a few. Everyone wants to have their say and we at FSR may be the worst among them with our Year in Review. So you’ll have to excuse me if my innagural edition of Movie News After Dark, the movie news column you can read while mostly asleep, is full of other people’s “best of” lists. There are also some worthy surprises, I assure you…

Remember when all of the chatter online was about a Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez double feature team up known as Grindhouse? This is in a time before it made a less than impressive box office run in April 2o07. At the time, the still unknown power of the internet was cited as the reason for the event film’s surefire success. Then it failed at the box office. But that didn’t stop us from enjoying it. Nor did it stop us from counting down the days until the home video release, one that would undoubtedly include a two-disc edition with both movies and all of the awesome intermission trailers. And then that didn’t happen. The two films were released separately, much to the dismay of the world of geekdom. Now here we are, more than three years later, and today will see the release of Grindhouse in its intended form: as a two-disc Blu-ray set complete with trailers, extras and more. So why aren’t we talking about it with the fervor of yesteryear? Why hasn’t this release taken its place among the year’s most anticipated? Well, it has been three years since all of the hoopla was squelched by sad box office numbers and pundits who were quick to point fingers at the internet’s lack of clout. And perhaps we’ve all forgotten that this is the release we’ve been waiting for all along. It has me wondering, quite simply: do we even care anymore? Or was our love for Grindhouse [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 Steven Spielberg’s ET, why is the alien brown? No reason. In Love Story, why do these two people fall madly in love with each other? No reason. In Oliver Stone’s JFK why is the president assassinated by a complete stranger? No reason.” And just like that, we begin the story of a tire that terrorizes a Midwest town by making people’s heads explode. A tire. That picks itself up from the desert floor and begins a wobbly journey of self discovery by crushing cans and bottles, exploding rabbits and birds, and maybe even falling in love with a lovely brunette in a Cabriolet convertible. Or maybe not. Point is, it’s a goddamn tire that makes people’s heads explode.

If you’re a long time reader of this column (be honest, you can’t start your week without it) you may recall me blasting off against films that are “presented by (big name)” or those that otherwise try to capitalize on a big name that, in reality, has little to do with what you’re about to watch. Like “from Executive Producer Steven Spielberg” or “Quentin Tarantino presents.” Nothing against these gentlemen, but hell, more than 99% of the time they’ve had absolutely zero to do with what you’re watching. I think the last time I went down a similar road was when JJ Abrams was getting all the credit for Cloverfield and less than 10% (made up statistic!) of people knew who Matt Reeves was, despite the fact that he directed a smart and enjoyable film. The recently released Devil faced a similar situation, though one in a much more negative way. Virtually all critics and a relatively wide swath of audiences dismissed Devil once the name M. Night Shyamalan appeared on the screen. After all, the guy’s said some ridiculous stuff about his own career, has made a handful of junk movies, and recently stunk up screens with The Last Airbender. So maybe Devil does deserve a lukewarm reception. Except that M. Night didn’t write or direct it so it’s not really fair to judge the film on his name.

I know no cinephile whose taste in movies survives completely the decades of aging and growing as a filmgoer. I have little doubt that others like myself look back at films they loved ten or more years ago with different eyes, either with a more informed context, renewed appreciation, or even developing befuddled questions as to why they felt such affection for these films in the first place. I recently found an interesting connection and disparate paths of meaning-making with regard to two films that originally inspired my love and appreciation for cinema, and it is in the respective ways in which these films use ambiguous objects.

Editor’s Note: Today we launch a brand new column called Pixel to Projector, by Dustin Hucks. It’s our way of staying at the center of where video games and film meet. For more, check out the Pixel to Projector homepage. The five hundred year old Meikyokan Dojo, teaching the disciplines of Master Narukagami Shinto, is hidden within a large modern city; a secret society of assassins knows as Kage reside within. Utsusemi, an honorable swordsman, loses his position as leader of the dojo to the skilled fighter Hanzaki, in a fierce battle. Hanzaki gained respect as the head of Kage, until his discovery of the cursed sword Yugiri. He began to change; disregarding the honor and traditions held by the assassins and the students of the ancient dojo. One day, a Kage escapes the confines of the dojo with its secrets. Several members of the society are sent to dispatch the defector…on penalty of death.

The first image from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life has emerged online, featuring Jessica Chastain. And so begins today’s rundown of entertainment news on The B-Roll.

Last week I wrote about the history of the auteur theory and its strengths and weaknesses when applied to actual film practice. Regardless of the theory’s apparent problems, it’s clear that the idea of the auteur still holds great weight in framing the way even the most casual of filmgoer goes about experiencing cinema.

Read as we break down the films nominated for Best Picture and what their chances are of taking home the prize. We’re pretty sure it won’t be Crash.

Best Director is a tricky category with, like many awards bestowed at the Oscars, a questionable track record. Venerated filmmakers like Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Altman, for instance, never won the award. While it’s arguably impossible to objectively compare different works of art, Best Director is an especially elusive and subjective category that forces one to compare apples to oranges, especially with this year’s nominees.

It’s Academy Awards time again, and even though we all know the awards are basically an irrelevant exercise in mutual masturbation it’s still fun to watch. This year sees a wide variety of films gain entry into Oscar history via nominations for Best Screenplay, Original and Adapted. Some deserve the honor, while others are based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire.

One of the things that I like most about this year’s overall South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival line-up is the diversity. And if there’s one thing you’ll see in this year’s panel and shorts lineups, it is just that. Diversity.

Film fans, please take a moment from your usual routine of not watching sports — and more importantly, complaining about those of us who do — to watch the following video. SlateV (via our friend Katey Rich at Cinema Blend) has created this little video showing us what the Superbowl might be like if it were made by auteurs.