This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr puts on some 3D glasses to look at some puss… in boots, that is. He proceeds to rewrite fairy tale fiction to include more bodily function humor, an egg-shaped Zach Galifianakis and a hairy but still sexy Salma Hayek. Then, he heads to the reference department of his local library to discover who really wrote the complete works of William Shakespeare. When all signs point to Neil Miller as the real author, Kevin gives up, realizing he’s out of time. So he brings sexy back and heads out to kidnap Amanda Seyfried so he can occupy Hollywood and start a revolution together… or get arrested.

Back in 1996, a little movie about Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum saving the world from aliens was a gigantic success. It was called Independence Day, it showed the White House getting blown up, and it raked in about $800m in worldwide sales. I don’t have any numbers in front of me to prove this next statement, but let me shuffle some papers around on my desk to pretend like I have them somewhere and then just say it: Independence Day is one of the biggest box office successes of the last 20 years to not get a sequel. In a society where everyone is always asking for more, it’s crazy that we’ve only seen Smith punch an alien once. And that’s not just me talking, Fox thinks it’s crazy too. That’s why, since back in 2009, they’ve been doing everything they can to get back-to-back Independence Day sequels off the ground. The holdup has been money issues. First, director Roland Emmerich wanted an undisclosed, but very hefty sum of money to come back and blow up some more famous landmarks. And then star Will Smith was reportedly asking for $50mto come on board the lengthy shoot. Spending that much money just to get two men attached to a project would be pretty asinine, so things had stalled out on the Independence Day sequels front, until very recently. Vulture is reporting that an inside source has let them know that the finishing touches are being put on the scripts for [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]

The L.A. Times is reporting that Roland Emmerich’s latest film, Anonymous, set to open in theaters on October 28th, isn’t going to be playing on as many screens as originally planned. The film was at first slated to get a full-on wide release on thousands of screens, but after some pre-release polling showed that nobody really wants to go see this thing, Sony Pictures has decided to scale back the number of screens it will be showing on to 250. The public seems to really love Roland Emmerich, so I can only imagine the lack of interest in the film comes from the fact that it’s about Shakespeare and not New York City blowing up. Sony hasn’t lost all hope for the project’s success, though, as their distribution president Rory Bruer said of the move, “We love the picture and think it’s going to get great word of mouth. We’re committed to expanding it until it plays wide.” The plan is to open the movie in the biggest markets, trick people into forgetting how much they hated reading Shakespeare in high school with movie magic, and then open in the ‘burbs sometime in November after everybody has heard about how much this movie rules and how badly they need to go see it for a couple weeks. That’s a pretty ambitious plan. This better be a damn good movie.

For the past few weeks, cinephiles, journalists, and critics have been grappling with the notion of what ‘post-9/11 cinema’ is, has been, will be, and/or looks like. What they’ve come up with are a group of wildly different, potentially specious, but ultimately quite fascinating explorations on the relationship between art, commerce, and life – and by ‘life’ I mean, in this case, that rare type of event whose effect takes on an enduringly profound, universally personal, omnipresent ripple. The overwhelming conclusion that most of these observations end with is, rather appropriately and naturally, “I don’t know, but here are some thoughts.” Besides those works of audiovisual media that were directly inspired by, intentionally referenced, or somehow directly related to 9/11, it’s difficult to say exactly what a post-9/11 film is unless one allows for literally every film made afterward to potentially enter such a category. But perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.

They say that staring into the sun is bad for you, but that weird kid in your fourth grade class didn’t listen, and he turned out fine. Filmmaker Tim Fehlbaum didn’t listen either, and the result is a blistering trailer for Hell – a movie set in a world where the sun is no longer the earth’s friend. Produced by Roland Emmerich (a man who loves watching the planet destroyed), the synopsis (found via Quiet Earth) goes a little something like this: “It was once the source of life, light and warmth. But now the sun has turned the entire world into a baked and barren wasteland. Forests are scorched. Animal carcasses line the roads. Even the nights are dazzlingly bright. Maria, her little sister Leonie and Phillip are heading for the mountains in a car with tinted glass. Rumor has it water can still be found there. It is a hazardous trip to nowhere. Along the way, they run into Tom. He turns out to be a first-rate mechanic and becomes indispensable. But can they trust him? The tension grows. As if things weren’t bad enough, they are lured into an ambush and their real battle for survival begins…” Put on some sunglasses and watch the trailer for yourself:

For whatever reason, Roland Emmerich has decided to jettison his traditional style of destroying the world on film by way of pre-destined end-times or global warming or goo-covered aliens and has taken his cinematic endeavors in an entirely new direction. This time around, Emmerich doesn’t want to blow up the world – he wants to blow up literary history (and, by doing so, also blow up the minds, hearts, and souls of English lit majors everywhere). In Anonymous, Emmerich riffs on the theory that William Shakespeare didn’t actually write all of his works, and that the entire literary world has been at the mercy of the widespread lie that he did. At its heart, Anonymous is a conspiracy flick. About Shakespeare. It’s a Shakespeare-icy flick (you’re welcome). Somehow, Emmerich’s bizarre left-hand turn into historical whodunit gathered a solid cast that includes Edward Hogg, David Thewlis, Vanessa Redgrave, Rhys Ifans, Joely Richardson, and Rafe Spall. I don’t know if they’re in on the joke or not, but Anonymous still looks like the cheap punchline of a terrible joke that doesn’t quite make sense. Even the jokes about this film seem too strange to be real:

If you’re like me, then you probably don’t pay much attention to what goes on in towns outside your own. As far as I knew, the only thing Toronto had going on was gripes about Maple Leaf hockey and reminiscing about when The Kids in the Hall used to play that tiny theater down the street. But what do I know? I haven’t been there since The Ultimate Warrior pinned Hulk Hogan at Wrestlemania 6. Turns out they have a really awesome film festival every year. This year the events go down between September eighth and the eighteenth, and the first fifty or so films announced for the lineup have me wanting to take a trip. There are too many to discuss, but just to give you an idea of what we’re working with, let’s look at a few.

This fall Roland Emmerich will release his latest film, Anonymous, a period piece drama about the true origins of William Shakespeare’s work. Yes, that Roland Emmerich. But fear not, fans of movie that blow up the entire Earth but still don’t manage to get beyond boring, the master of that genre will soon be back at his craft, where he belongs. THR is reporting that the director of such fine disaster fare as 2012, and The Day After Tomorrow is readying to shoot a new script that he wrote himself, probably over at Columbia.

The game of Asteroids and Roland Emmerich‘s career have something in common: they both consist solely of sitting in the middle of the action and blowing things up. Thus, it seems more than fitting that he would be asked to direct a feature adaptation of the Atari favorite. According to Vulture, Asteroids is being put together by Universal and uber producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, and they’ve asked Emmerich to destroy giant space rocks in his post-destroying Earth phase. Even purists and game fanatics can’t complain too much here, right? There’s no plot to the game. It could be the dumbest action movie of all time and still stay true to its subject matter (except for those who spent lonely nights coming up with stories about whomever was sitting in the 8-bit ship. This is cinematic obviousness, and it can only lead to greatness. Either Emmerich accepts, and we can expect more explosions, or he turns it down and proves that he really is over giant pyrotechnics. As for plot, the story is about Earth people who have been relegated to living in an asteroid belt after the Earth’s destruction. They see their neighborhood non-Earthlings as friendly, but soon learn that it was actually their film’s director those non-Earthlings that blew up the planet. That’s dramatic irony. This thing is Shakespearean already! Emmerich is perfect.

It looks like everyone is throwing their hats into the ring. When the studios announced a plan to release movies in home theaters just 30 days after the theaters located outside the home (with a price tag of $30 per rental), the National Association of Theater Owners balked. Apparently their threat to boycott big blockbusters was a fake, but they haven’t kept secret their disgust for the new model that would limit their ability to make money showing movies (since studios take the 50%-100% lion’s share of the ticket split in the first weeks). Now, 23 directors and producers are speaking out against it. That list includes James Cameron, Michael Bay, Kathryn Bigelow, Guillermo del Toro, Roland Emmerich, Antoine Fuqua, Todd Garner, Lawrence Gordon, Stephen Gyllenhaal, Gale Anne Hurd, Peter Jackson, Karyn Kusama, Jon Landau, Shawn Levy, Michael Mann, Bill Mechanic, Jamie Patricof, Todd Phillips, Brett Ratner, Robert Rodriguez, Adam Shankman, Gore Verbinski, and Robert Zemeckis. The full, un-edited open letter is below:

We’ve already taken a look at what movies have destroyed the planet. Now, we have some helpful tips for saving the Earth while fueling your addiction to film (with some sort of butter-hybrid fuel of course).

Roland Emmerich loves destruction. If you can’t glean that little tidbit from his filmography — Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 — then you’re doing it wrong. The man loves to take something great, like Earth or humanity, and force us to watch it die in the most theatrical (not to mention implausible) ways. So it makes perfect sense that he will next tackle the work of William Shakespeare with Anonymous.

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we avoid getting hit by a volcano. By. That. Much.

Kevin Carr heads out to the movies this week, making a stop in a fox hole with the Fantastic Mr. Fox, and then moving on to the end of the world.

Kevin and Neil meet up in the Magical Studio in the Sky for an epic show about the end of the world. They gush (sort of) over Roland Emmerich’s movies and dance a jig around how awesome Fantastic Mr. Fox is.

You know how movies with ticking bombs almost always have the climactic scene where the good guys work feverishly to disarm the explosives before they detonate? Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is twenty-seven of those scenes stretched across two and a half hours.

Instead of plugging in other disaster movies into the formula, Roland Emmerich is finally being blunt about his desperate need to make more ID4.

Last night we sent Dr. Cole Abaius off to behold the 3-hours of destruction porn that is Roland Emmerich’s latest film, 2012. Which means that he was witness to some wicked destruction, some of which we’re now bringing to you.

When they tell you not to panic, that’s when you run. I’m almost certain that we’ll all be running when Roland Emmerich’s latest film, the über-apocalyptic thriller 2012 hits theaters.

Having seen the first trailer for Roland Emmerich’s 2012, I can safely say that the director has something against the planet Earth. This second trailer just reinforces that fact…