This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr dresses up in his Jedi robes and grabs his lightsaber, heading to the theater to see the 3D re-release of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. While there, he faces a sea of estrogen as ladies of all type swarm into the multiplex to see Channing Tatum’s abs multiflex. After using his lightsaber to break through the wall of pre-Valentine’s Day ladies, he faces more obstacles with twentysomething dudes heading out to see Safe House and obnoxious families to see Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. Fortunately for Kevin, he is able to dispatch everyone with his Rock-inspired “pec pop of love.” It was an early Valentine’s Day massacre.

Leo (Channing Tatum) and Paige (Rachel McAdams), in many ways, have the ideal life. They are hopelessly in love, happily married, and living in an urban, pseudo-bohemian hipster paradise. She’s an artist, and he runs his own recording studio. One romantically snowy night, the two share a moment in a parked car…an ill-advised decision. A truck plows into them and sends Paige into a coma. When she awakes, she finds her anxiety-riddled husband sitting at her bedside. The trouble is that she can’t remember that they are married or even who he is at all. She is suffering from a severe form of retrograde amnesia in which she can only remember events up the point shortly before she moved to the big city and met Leo. Suddenly her parents, with whom she hadn’t spoken during the course of her relationship with Leo, show up, insisting to take her back home. Leo hopes against hope that his wife will regain her memory of him, their love, and their life together before it all disappears for good.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column born exactly one year ago today. And it’s very happy to still be around and well on its way to taking over the planet. It is convinced that it will have a very productive 2012 in that area, especially once humanity’s reign of terror ends later this year. In the mean time, it would like to thank you all for reading. Now enough of that mushy stuff, lets do the news. We begin this evening with an image of biker Jemaine Clement in Men in Black III. He’s playing an alien biker who turns out to be the villain in this time-traveling storyline…. And we wonder why that movie has had so many production problems? Either way, I’ll watch Jemaine Clement eat soap if I have to, as that guy is quite funny.

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]

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr goes rogue and infiltrates his local IMAX theater. First, he scales the wall of the plus-sized building and slides in undetected through the air vents. He slowly lowers himself into a theater seat to enjoy an early screening of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Unfortunately, he finds himself in the middle of a wild crowd of six-year-old kids for the early screening of the latest Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. To deal with the psychological damage, Kevin then stumbles into the Sherlock Holmes sequel and later finds an extra seat in Young Adult, where he can imagine that his chubby caboose could land a hottie like Charlize Theron.

The ridiculous trend of foreign language films getting English-language remakes immediately after they leave theaters marches on. This time around we’ve got Brian De Palma looking to remake the French film Crime d’amour, which just opened in U.S. theaters in September. The original film is a sort of psychological thriller in which a high-powered executive played by Kristin Scott Thomas takes on a young assistant, played by Ludivine Sagnier, so that she can toy with and corrupt her. A turn happens, however, when Thomas’s character overestimates the Sagnier character’s innocence and naiveté, and eventually the student becomes the master of manipulation. I haven’t seen it, but it sounds kind of sexy. De Palma is taking the film, which was released in the U.S. as Love Crime, and remaking it as Passion. And according to a report from Indiewire, he’s got his two lead actresses in mind. Apparently he’s looking to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows co-stars Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams to fill the roles, and is currently in negotiations to sign them up.

Enjoy playing Count The Explosions in the next trailer for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. While there’s still a subdued kind of excitement to the proceedings, it’s not short on very quick chemical reactions. Hopefully the film will be an improvement on the first. At any rate, Guy Ritchie is raising the stakes by including Moriarty, Holmes’s greatest foe, played by Jared Harris. Of course Robert Downey, Jr. is back alongside Jude Law, and while they’ll be joined by Noomi Rapace, we’ll also apparently see the return of Rachel McAdams to the series. Check it out for yourself:

The film adaptation of Claire Messud’s gorgeous novel The Emperor’s Children has faced an unfairly bumpy trip to the screen. Back in 2009, Ron Howard was slated to direct the film from a script by Noah Baumbach. Then the project seemingly fell dead, with no news until March of 2010, when Howard left the project entirely, leaving both writing and directing duties to Baumbach. At that time, a list of attached cast members was announced (including Keira Knightley, Eric Bana, and Richard Gere, with buzz about some other names like Michelle Williams). Production was supposed to start last summer, but of course, it didn’t, and know Baumbach appears to be back out of the director’s chair, with Crazy Heart helmer Scott Cooper stepping in to direct from Baumbach’s script (according to an insider report from Twitch). Cooper burst on to the scene with his Jeff Bridges-starring Crazy Heart back in 2009, a directorial debut so lovely and assured that it earned its star his first Oscar (after being nominated no less than six times). Since then, Cooper has had his own fair share of project whiplash, with rumors that he was on the shortlist for Gangster Squad, news that he was developing his own take on The Hatfields and the McCoys, and attachments to the Carancho remake, Empire of the Summer, and Black Listed The Low Dweller. Which is all a nice way of saying that, just like The Emperor’s Children, there’s been a lot of talk about Cooper, but no [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]

Editor’s Note: Our Cannes coverage kicks off hard and heavy here, so everyone welcome Simon Gallagher and forgive him his British spellings that slip by the editing process. Also, all Cannes reviews are best read with a glass of champagne. Day one on the Croisette and we’re already opening with a name as big as Woody Allen. For the second year in a row, the director who never seems to tire of making films, and who can still occasionally make exceptional ones, has a film showing on the Croisette. Following last year’s inclusion of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, the 64th Cannes festival opened this morning with the New Yorker’s latest – Midnight in Paris – a screening that for me came laced with both excitement, and an underwhelming sense that I was about to see essentially the same Woody Allen film I’ve been watching for the past decade or so. It’s not that I don’t enjoy seeing Allen muse on the nature of love and relationships, or seeing him create a slightly grotesqued portrait of himself (this time taken on by Owen Wilson), I just think there is only so much enjoyment to be had when a filmmaker so obviously resists the urge to evolve through his art, no matter how good it is. But I had no reason to be suspicious, as it seems that Allen has taken it upon himself to debunk the idea that he generally makes and remakes the same film, throwing a [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]

Woody Allen built a legendary career and a pretty hefty catalogue of films by making movies set in New York. His movies not only told the stories of people from New York talking like New Yorkers while walking around New York, they also just seemed to have some extra New Yorky something going on with them. Recently he has started making movies set in London, and while they are never really panned by critics, all anybody can ever say about them is that they don’t hold up to classic Woody. With this film we see Woody trying his hand at Paris, and from the trailer alone I find myself looking forward to a Woody Allen film more than I have in a long time. Midnight in Paris combines three things that I’m always a sucker for: Owen Wilson rambling about things in his charming drawl, scenes of people walking around and experiencing Paris, and Rachel McAdams. Really, it feels like Woody heard that I wasn’t too interested in his movies lately and made this just to get my attention. And look at that cast, that’s nothing to sneeze at. I should also say that I found myself laughing more in this little trailer than I have during his last few full-length features put together. But that may just be because I feel pandered to. Watch the trailer below and decide for yourself where you think this one will fall in the pantheon of Woody:

Now that Zack Snyder’s upcoming Superman film has found it’s Clark Kent, it only makes sense that they would begin testing for a Lois Lane that works well with him on screen. What’s Playing got the ball rolling by releasing a list of names that were in the running. The list included Kristen Stewart, Malin Akerman, Dianna Agron, Jessica Biel, and Rachel McAdams. The speculation began. Which of these girls has the right mix of brunette and feisty to pull the part off? Stewart was taken off the list pretty early, mainly due to having too many commitments, but probably also do to a complete lack of feistiness. Akerman was dismissed as being too old for the role, because that last Superman movie worked so well with casting high school kids as decades seasoned reporters with a six year old kid. So that left the choice as being between Rachel McAdams, Jessica Biel, and some girl I’ve never heard of. Decisions, decisions.

We have had precious few comedies of quality made about high school students over the past ten years. Teen comedies used to be a staple of the multiplexes, the places where studios grub money from teens and tweens who have borrowed a twenty-spot from their moms, but they have been all but decimated in recent times by the merciless reign of the generic horror flick. Election came out in 1999, so what good ones did that leave us in the aughts? Only Mean Girls by my estimation. You did like Mean Girls right? Combining a great script from a pre-30 Rock Tina Fey and perhaps the most buxom cast of young actresses ever assembled made it one of my favorite comedies of the decade. One time I watched it with a room full of hung-over college friends mostly in slow motion. It took us about five hours, but it was worth it. Well, Paramount has decided to rob us of our treasured memories by creating a low budget, direct to basic cable/DVD sequel, and unleashing it upon the unsuspecting masses.  Mean Girls 2 debuted Sunday night, January 23rd on ABC Family, and until about 3 PM the next day the term “REGINA GEORGE” was trending on Twitter. Regina George is a character from the first film, played by Rachel McAdams, and one click on the trending topic revealed a steady stream of Twitter users who loved the first film bemoaning a sequel that doesn’t include the character. I can’t imagine [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]

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr is like a runaway train filled with toxic chemicals. He could derail and explode at any moment. And it’s a good thing Tony Scott isn’t making a movie of his life because there aren’t enough whip pans and helicopter shots to capture his awesomeness. While he raps Scott’s knuckles with a railroad tie, he also gets giddy over the beautiful Rachel McAdams and gives some props to the Brothers Strause for the effects in Skyline. And then he explodes, and all the toxic chemicals threaten to wipe out a small town in Pennsylvania.

The inner workings of the media have not been depicted onscreen with the incisiveness of Morning Glory in years. Twenty-three of them to be exact, since James L. Brooks released his seminal Broadcast News, the ensemble comedy that convincingly revealed the behind-the-scenes machinations and romantic triangles at an evening news program. Roger Michell’s film is the 2010 morning show set answer to Brooks’ work. Above all, it trades in two fundamental truths: the media has gotten dumber and even more filled with personalities slavishly devoted to a fast-paced, go-getter, plugged-in workaholic lifestyle. Fundamentally ensconced in the longstanding tradition of screwball boardroom comedies, Morning Glory is nonetheless attuned to the way we get our information and to the pressures of a society placing an increasingly sharp emphasis on networking and fraternization — superficiality over substance.

As the only literate Reject, it’s my duty to find the latest, the greatest and the untouched classics that would make great source material for film adaptations. I read so you don’t have to. This week, Print to Projector presents the story of a young man named Michael Rogers who’s ambitious but lacks focus. He wants the entire world, but he also wants to settle down into his dream home with the woman he loves. He finds her – a beautiful, poor little rich girl named Ellie – while window shopping at a land auction for a tract called Gypsy’s Acre. They fall in love, build a gorgeous house, and set up shop on cursed land. Of course, it isn’t long until that curse comes crashing down on Ellie’s head.

It may have something to do with the fact that I’ve recently watched both Knocked Up and a marathon of How I Met Your Mother, but everything feels like it revolves around struggling broadcast journalists and/or producers these days. Local television morning show producer is the new executive assistant.

Like other prolific directors over the course of history, Woody Allen has become known not only for his films, but for his choices in leading ladies. In recent years, the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz, Evan Rachel Wood and Radha Mitchell have been among his cinematic harem of beauties. Now he’s looking to Rachel McAdams and Marion Cotillard. As I said, the man has taste.

Kevin Carr sits his chubbiness down and sees if Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, Sherlock Holmes and It’s Complicated can make the grade.

2009 comes to a close at the movies not with a whimper, but with a bang. And while you may think it’s due to a blockbuster movie featuring beautifully animated CGI characters that leap off the screen and impress with their stunningly life-like appearances, Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel actually has nothing to do with it.

Someone on the inside is talking, and they’re talking about Spider-Man 4. And leave it to us to be last on the block to hear this ice cream truck ‘o fun.