Possible introductory pieces of wordsmithery to lead off this post – “not worth nyuk-ing about!” or even “better than a poke in the eye!” or possibly a longer rife on the use of “just say Moe” as the film’s tagline. Yet all of those cracks at humor are rendered absolutely and starkly unnecessary by this first trailer for the Farrelly Brothers‘ The Three Stooges, which is so painfully unfunny that it makes even related humor feel useless. The Farrellys have been wanting to make a Stooges feature film for years, proclaiming it a passion project, but its journey to the screen has been filled with its own pratfalls and slams to the face – development delays and huge casting issues abounded. The film was originally rumored to star Jim Carrey, Benicico del Toro, and Sean Penn, but when they all dropped the project, other potential casting options were mentioned and reported, including Hank Azaria, Johnny Knoxville, Andy Samberg, and Shane Jacobson. Which doesn’t explain how we ended up with a cast that includes Chris Diamantopoulos as Moe Howard, Sean Hayes as Larry Fine, and Will Sasso as Curly Howard. And Snooki is there, because why not make something that looks terrible look even more bogglingly awful? If you don’t value your eyes, your soul, or the possibility that Hollywood would greenlight an original and creative project, check out the first trailer for The Three Stooges after the break.

It’s not often these days that you hear word of a new Robert De Niro project that doesn’t sound completely awful. Recently, when I think “De Niro,” I don’t think Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, I think Meet the Parents sequels and cameos in the New Year’s Eve trailer. So when word of something as promising as Sean Penn’s next film, The Comedian, comes across the news wire, I take a moment to breath deeply and cherish the feeling. Penn’s first effort as a director since 2007’s Into the Wild, The Comedian will tell the story of an aging comic who is filled with angst and rage due to his fading star power. He’s even hit such a low point that he’s been arrested and assigned community service because he hit an audience member in the head with a microphone. Just the thought of seeing De Niro once again taking on the role of a comedian should be enough to stir up all sorts of positive memories of The King of Comedy, but his casting isn’t the only thing this project has going for it. Once De Niro’s character gets started with his community service, he ends up meeting a gorgeous redhead who turns his world upside down. That redhead will be played by Kristen Wiig, fresh off her star-making performance in this year’s Bridesmaids. Not only is Wiig the hot thing right now, she’s also completely hilarious and a really unique persona, so I can’t wait to see her [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]

If you haven’t been reading along, I’ve been gushing about Ruben Fleischer’s upcoming crime drama The Gangster Squad for quite a while. Story details about the cops and gangsters flick about real life gangster Mickey Cohen can be found in my first article about the movie, where it was announced that Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, and Ryan Gosling had all been cast in key roles. Penn is in the starring role as Cohen, and Brolin and Gosling are two of the members of the titular gangster squad that is put together to take him down. After hearing that, I didn’t think that life could get much better, but then it did. The second Gangster Squad related bomb that Fleischer dropped on me was that man about town Bryan Cranston would also be joining the cast as a rough and tumble member of the LAPD by way of Texas. Suddenly the original Triumvirate of Awesome that was the Gangster Squad cast became the Cornerstones of Awesome instead. And now that the film has such a solid foundation to build a metaphorical house on, it’s time to start picking out pretty curtains and stuff by filling out the cast further. The big news of the day from Deadline Monowi is that grizzled, crazy actor Nick Nolte has also been cast. He will play Bill Parker, the incorruptible chief of police who takes it upon himself to form this so-called gangster squad. That sounds like a big role. Seeing as Nolte’s upcoming movie [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]

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column, sure. But at its core, it is a hunter. A hunter of the most interesting film-related tidbits of the day. Can you feel the heat? It’s not enough for director Alex Proyas will make Paradise Lost, the story of the break between Heaven and Hell. But he’s also bringing Djimon Hounsou as the Angel of Death. If there is one actor that I look at on a consistent basis and think, “that man would bring death to me,” it’s Hounsou. It sure beats Bradley Cooper as Lucifer, so we’ll see how it shakes out.

Zack Snyder has been involved with the upcoming, set in Afghanistan drama The Last Photograph from the very beginning. Since the project’s inception he has served as a co-writer and a producer. When you hear that Snyder is involved with a drama set in a war torn country, the concept instantly sends up some red flags. How would his flashy, comic-booky style fit with more real-world, dramatic subject matter than men in loin clothes eviscerating each other or girls in short skirts fighting giant robots? In the past this wasn’t too much of a concern, however, as Snyder was just in a producer’s role. The director’s job was going to go to someone else, and that someone else ended up being The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo helmer Niels Arden Oplev. He’s good, right? Yay, everyone cheers, and we all live happily ever after. Not so fast. Twitch is now reporting that Oplev has dropped out of the project for mysterious reasons, and seeing as he is already so engaged in it’s development, Snyder is going to step into the director’s role as an easy fit. The Last Photograph should fit perfectly into Snyder’s schedule, as he can slip right into shooting after he finishes work on the Superman reboot Man of Steel. That brings up some problems. Will Christian Bale’s reporter character be doing slow motion spin moves, snapping off photographs in mid air, while mortar shells explode around him? Will we get a scene of Sean Penn’s character [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]

When it was announced that Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, and Josh Brolin were all starring together in the upcoming Gangster Squad, I went as far as to call them a tri-force of awesome. That’s some ridiculous hyperbole, but the limits of my excessive enthusiasm for this project haven’t even begun to spin out of control yet. Wait until I hear that Bryan Cranston is also joining the cast, and then see what happens. Oh wait, I just found out. So now I’m ready to declare Gangster Squad the greatest movie ever made, before it has even been filmed. How’s that for hyperbole? For a quick recap, Gangster Squad is to be directed by Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer, from a script based off of this L.A. Times article and written by a retired cop named Will Beall. Penn will play famous gangster Mickey Cohen, Gosling and Brolin will be the duo of police trying to bring him in, and now Variety reports that Cranston will be playing, “Max Kennard, a laconic LAPD officer from Texas who enforces the law ambitiously.” I take “laconic” to mean that he’s going to be doing a lot of his Cranston glare. And the phrase “enforces the law ambitiously” to mean that he’s going to be planting evidence, taking bribes, and dropping guns with the serial numbers filed off onto the bodies of young punks that he shoots. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go quit my job so I can properly prepare for this [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 Tree of Life isn’t a film for everyone. You have to meet it halfway, it tests your patience at times, and it doesn’t fit normal storytelling conventions. If a viewer isn’t at all into experimental filmmaking and doesn’t know what “non-linear” means, then it’s most likely not a film for them. Because of this, some filmgoers should probably do their homework before going to Terrence Malick’s epic. “Brad Pitt? Sean Penn? Dinosaurs? And the creation of earth!?! Awesome!” Some patrons must’ve gotten that impression, and the art house Avon Theater in Stamford, CT is responding to those theatergoers who would prefer a refund, rather than enduring a two and a half hour poem. Here’s the “no refund” warning the theater put out:

The Tree of Life is a film that, as most of you have surely already noticed, will be hailed for its beauty and visual ecstasy. Everyone will discuss how every frame could make for a great photo or whether or not Terrence Malick is actually saying something with all those incredibly long non-narrative shots, but thematically, Malick backs up his eye-candy. While the headline title and statement made by actress Jessica Chastain could be read as being very hyperbolic, it couldn’t be closer to the truth. The Tree of Life does not hit the standard narrative beats, something that will either excite or annoy viewers. When there’s a 20-minute sequence of seeing the beginning of time unfold, you’ll quickly realize you’re not watching your typical drama. Here’s what Jessica Chastain had to say in our quick conversation about the film’s truthful exploration of childhood memories, the film’s structure, how Malick’s scripts read, and her interpretation of the ending.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr follows Jamie Chung to Thailand, hoping to get married. Unfortunately, someone slips him roofies, which made him black out and spend a drunken night in Bangkok. Once he got out of that city, he headed over to China to become the new pot-bellied dragon warrior. After all, if a cartoon panda can do it, why can’t he? That didn’t stop him from spending another night in the hospital, and maybe a little time in a Bangkok jail. And then the real horror happened… Kevin saw The Tree of Life.

Each Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the most important holidays on the Jewish calendar, there’s an extraordinary prayer read in synagogue. Called the “Unetanneh Tokef,” it evokes the awesome power of judgment day, extolling God’s capacity for punishment, his propensity for mercy and man’s insignificance in the face of it all. I thought of the third part of that prayer while watching The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s ambitious, meditative stab at codifying the cosmos. It gets close to the essence of the reclusive auteur’s much-anticipated new picture: “A man’s origin is from dust and his destiny is back to dust. At risk of his life he earns his bread; he is likened to a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust, and a fleeting dream.” In paralleling the origins of the universe with flashes from the everyday 1950s childhood of a young boy from Waco, Texas, Malick’s film captures the ethereal nature of life. Beginning with the Big Bang and the dinosaurs and cycling through Jack O’Brien’s (Sean Penn) memories of his youth — of ballgames on the lawn during muggy summer nights, his younger brother’s warm gaze, contentious family dinners and the first stirrings of sexual feelings — Malick offers one man’s story writ large and small.

Sean Penn‘s second appearance at this year’s fest – though in truth his first main once, since he was relegated to a side player in The Tree of Life - sees him don his finest goth garb and make-up to take an impressive shot at a Robert Smith type character. He plays Cheyenne, an aging former rock star, who seems happy to live off his royalties in a grand country house in Ireland with his wife (Frances McDormand), though really he is stagnating: depressed or bored, he can’t work out which. He gets an opportunity for respite when his father dies and he travels home to America for the funeral, subsequently learning that his father had been obsessed with tracking down a former Nazi Auschwitz guard who tormented him, and using the information he had already compiled to take on the task himself. In essence Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place is a one-man road movie, and in traditional fashion it presents both a metaphorical and a physical journey through undiscovered or at least unfamiliar lands. And it all hangs on yet another stellar performance by Mr. Penn, who now must be getting close to being sick of the praise.

In anticipation of Terrence Malick’s much-buzzed and much-argued-about Tree of Life, Adam and Landon are doing a two-part series on Malick’s films in the Criterion Collection. Part 1 – The Thin Red Line. The Thin Red Line (1998) is a film that accomplished many things. Least of which is the fact that, as the film was released twenty years after his previous completed work Days of Heaven, it established Terrence Malick as still a working filmmaker. While Malick had developed and abandoned several projects in the two decades that straddled his second and third feature films, the notoriously private director temporarily retired to France and workshopped a variety of screenplays and stage plays that, for one reason or another, never manifested. Though Malick’s sparse filmography hardly grants him a persona of being a prolific artist, his twenty-year filmmaking “hiatus” was never a hiatus at all, but was instead brimming with activity for potential projects. The Thin Red Line, then, should be thought of not as a decided return to filmmaking which assumes that the film is either a project twenty years in the making or the only thing he came across in twenty years worth making (as an academic who almost completed his doctorate and as a working journalist before becoming a filmmaker, part of the mystery surrounding the very private Malick is that filmmaking is simply one of several trades that define him – he’s like a far less public James Franco). The Thin Red Line may be more [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]

It feels like a millennium has passed since it was announced that Terrence Malick – aka The Man Who Won’t Be Rushed – would be next turning his hand to The Tree of Life, which landed at Cannes this morning to shed light on its most infuriatingly purblind synopsis, and a mysterious trailer that didn’t exactly clear things up. Would Malick be able to live up to the increasingly stifling expectations heaped on him by his infamously ponderous post-production technique? Could the film recapture the director’s incredible eye for composition and visuals, or would we be treated to another mess of in-determination, whose quality of substance wildly misses that of its aesthetic, as some have come to predict? Flicking through the accompanying press pack, it is striking to note how much those involved in the film’s production seem to insist on its deep, universally appropriate meaning, and the fact that the film should be judged not as something conventional cinematic, but rather as a unique and visceral experience, infinite in scope, organic, which transcends words and definition. If the alarm bells hadn’t already been ringing, the bell-ringer would surely have collapsed with exhaustion at this point.

It was looking like Sean Penn might not be able to star in the upcoming organized crime film Gangster Squad after he entered negotiations to star alongside Christian Bale in The Last Photograph, but Variety is reporting that Penn is still in the running, and actually very close to signing. And now that Penn is almost on board, things are looking good for Josh Brolin to join the cast as well. Gangster Squad is the story of the LAPD’s battle against famed gangster Mickey Cohen and other mafia men trying to make the jump from East to West coast back in the 40s and 50s. The script is based off of a L.A. Times article written on the subject by Paul Lieberman. Penn is negotiating for the role of Cohen, and the previously rumored Ryan Gosling and newly rumored Josh Brolin would be a pair of police tasked with bringing him down. The original article was adapted for the screen by Will Beall, who is a former police officer turned novelist, and Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer will direct. I think everything that I mentioned in this article is awesome, so hopefully when you put them all together the results will be a movie that is super awesome. At the very least I can’t wait to watch Gosling and Penn trying to flamboyantly out act each other while Brolin is all squinty and minimal in the background.

The Last Photograph is a story about a war reporter in Afghanistan who is the only survivor of an attack on a group of Americans, and an ex-special ops soldier who is related to the victim of a kidnapping. The soldier has come to find and rescue his relation, and he convinces the reporter to help identify his attackers/the kidnappers in exchange for letting him tag along and report the story. Christian Bale is already set to play the reporter, and now Sean Penn is reportedly close to signing on to play the part of the soldier. I see this move as a risk. Everybody knows that Liam Neeson is the one who rakes in the big bucks when he’s hunting down kidnappers, not Sean Penn. The film is going to be directed by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s Niels Arden Oplev with the 300 gang of Zack Snyder, Deborah Snyder, and Gianni Nunnari producing. No funding for the picture is yet in place, but Dark Castle is reportedly close to inking a deal that would give them the task, with Warner Bros. handling the distributing end of things. With a couple of actors like Bale and Penn on board, this is a film that’s sure to get a lot of attention. And with a couple of actors like Bale and Penn on board, this is a film that’s sure to have a tense set. My best wishes go out to Niels Arden Oplev, who I think impeccably directed [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]

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.

Terrance Malick’s films have always seemed a bit too airy and enigmatic, and The Tree of Life seems no different based on the trailer. It looks like equal parts Stand By Me, The Fountain, and Introduction to Eastern Philosophy As Seen Through The Eyes of the 1950s Male. It might turn out to be mind blowing or mind numbing. Brad Pitt plays a father to Jack, a young boy who he leans on a bit too heavily. Now an adult (played by Sean Penn), Jack wants to find some peace within that relationship. He also, for some reason, wants to dance around in a cloud of DDT. Check it out for yourself in higher def over at Apple. On a side note, did anyone else get a slight rush of nostalgia seeing Brad Pitt asking another character to hit him in the face? The Tree of Life hits theaters in May 2011.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr puts on a wizard’s robe, wears a colorful scarf and dances around in the woods with his magic wand yelling, “Stupify!” And that’s just to celebrate the release of Fair Game in his home town. He also takes a look at this little independent film that few people have even heard of, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I. Sadly, a bizarre mishap with his wizarding skills causes a boulder to fall on his hand and pin him for 93 minutes, which was actually quite fortunate because it gave him just enough time to watch 127 Hours.

There’s something about the new poster for Terrence Malick’s forthcoming Tree of Life that has an E.T. quality about it. It’s tough to put a finger on, but it’s there. However, there’s nothing Amblin-like about the new synopsis coming straight from the director’s mouth. Except that it focuses on an 11-year-old boy and a family in the Midwest. Other than that, there’s nothing Spielbergian about it. Hop off your front porch swing, and check out the poster after the jump.

Earlier today a very juicy email from an exec at Paramount was let loose into the world by the folks over at The Wrap. Within said email was details on a good number of projects currently in development. Insider notes — like the fact that producers are “very happy” with the recent draft of G.I. Joe 2 from Zombieland scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. That’s encouraging, to say the least. But perhaps the most interesting piece of news to come out of this whole debacle — save for World War Z being on track, which is awesome — is a project that would re-team Oscar winners Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) and pair them with an ensemble of very big names.