What is Movie News After Dark? It is a nightly movie news recap column that would like to make it all the way to the end of this thing without getting controversial, political or mentioning how much skinny Jonah Hill looks like President Obama. It’s just not likely. We begin tonight with the story that’s on everyone’s mind — no, not the Obama speech — the fact that Mel Gibson is developing a movie about Jewish hero Judah Maccabee, who led a second-century revolt against Hellenistic overloards in the name of the Jewish people. He’s brought Basic Instinct writer Joe Eszterhas on for the script work. There will be nothing controversial about this project.

You may already be a film industry cynic. Maybe you think Hollywood is a barren wasteland, devoid of creativity and originality. Maybe you’re sick of seeing talented people get ignored and vapid hacks get splashed all over the trades. Maybe you’re tired of 3D everything and having to re-buy your movies every five to ten years. I’m not here to dissuade you of any of that. Hell no, I’m here to make it worse. Get ready, because this is some of the rottenest shit of which the film industry is capable. These are the things so terrible that Hollywood has to cover them up, lest God see their sin and smite them accordingly (and keep various government entities and lawyers off their backs, of course). If you still had any kind thoughts toward Hollywood, I suggest you prepare yourself for crushing disappointment. But first, I’d like to give a very huge shout out and thank you to writers C. Coville and Maxwell Yezpitelok for their help on this article. You guys are great! And now back to the shit storm, already in progress:

In honor of the hugely anticipated release of the Star Wars George Lucas Pays No Attention To His Fans Special Edition Blu-Ray Collection, this week was always going to have a definite Star Wars flavor about it. But rather than simply go with a conventional approach, and proffer my thoughts on three mint, boxed Japanese variant action figures, I thought I’d try and hunt out some bona fide curios. Because believe it or not, George Lucas has allowed the good Star Wars name to be taken in vain an awful lot of times, and there is a whole world of crap that was created as a result. So sit back, click on and enjoy as this week’s column navigates the sub-space perils of some of the strangest moments from Star Wars Merch history. And by Jabba it’s a good one…

If you’ve been fortunate enough to avoid this news until now, I’m sorry, it’s about to get shitty. George Lucas, in a move that surprises no one but angers anyone who’s ever seen Star Wars, has excessively tinkered with the movies in the saga, taking the beloved and dropping a pile of turds on it. It’s true Lucas has been wallowing in the sewage pool after tweaking the original movies in shitty ways (Greedo shoots first, Jabba looks like ass, etc) and making three bad movies to utterly destroy the awesome coolness that was Darth Vader and irreparably rupture the continuity of the franchise. Not content to stop there though, ol’ Georgie-poo has decided to add another notch to his bulbous neck by ignoring (mostly) fan outcry and amplifying the shit we already hate. Let’s break it down.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s out right now. Please leave a message. We begin tonight with some new concept art for The Adventures of Tintin, courtesy of the folks over at Hey U Guys. It’s yet another look at the smooth animation behind this film from Steven Spielberg, who may appear again later in tonight’s edition of Movie News After Dark.

What is Movie News After Dark? Usually it’s a nightly movie news column that finds a way to be verbose. Tonight, not so much. But it’s still going to do the news. We begin tonight with a look at Rooney Mara’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo meeting with what we can only assume is her parole officer. Those familiar with the original film or the books know how that relationship turns out. It makes my skin crawl — Rooney Mara is exactly the right amount of creepy.

It was only a matter of time before George Lucas started making more changes to his Star Wars movies. The guy has seemed to crack the code that the more versions of something he makes, the more times he can sell it to his hopelessly devoted legion of fans. Or, more accurately for what he did with the Special Edition Star Wars DVDs, all he has to do is sell everybody a screwed up version of the movies they love, and then he can go back later and make double the money by selling them the original versions that they wanted in the first place. The only thing he has to worry about is fanboy gripes, but I’m sure he’s able to get over that as he cries himself to sleep on mounds of fanboy money.

What is Movie News After Dark? Sometimes it likes to think that it is a carefully constructed Rube Goldberg machine constructed by a popular rock band that quickly became on online sensation. It also sometimes thinks that it’s a world famous traveling circus of puppets. Sadly, it’s just a nightly column of movie news and interesting links. Sorry. Have any of you seen a recent picture of actor Jonah Hill? He looks odd, to say the least, having lost a great deal of weight. Is it me, or does he look like a nerdy white version of President Obama? Slightly unrelated is his being cast in Neighborhood Watch alongside Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller.

Salutations from the seedy underworld of merch collecting, where myths are debunked, the fabrics of the finest secrets unfurled for discerning eyes, and the most glorious curios from lands far and exotic are offered as sacrifices to the Rejects’ lascivious hareem of readers. Well, not really, but that opening was far more poetic and sexy than the truth that I’m a slightly sad obsessive sitting in a Ghostbusters T-shirt and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pajama pants trying to convince other grown adults to buy what essentially amount to toys… Anyway, as film nerds (those of us who accept and embrace the term), we live in a world whose chief currency is fantasy, so this week’s offerings to the Merch Hunter Tomb of Essentials are each taken from a franchise that has made an unquantifiably massive impact on escapist cinema-lovers like myself. Read on, shell out and embrace the inner merch-nerd…

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly column that combines movie news remainders and interesting links, but at the moment it’s a column that can’t remember what day it is. Is it Thursday? How about Saturday? It’s had a rough week, and that’s putting it lightly. Anyway, lets do the news. After months of posturing, casting and even getting us all worked up over the prospect of Armie Hammer riding on ole’ Silver, Disney has put a bullet through The Lone Ranger. According to a Deadline report, the Mouse House didn’t like the $240 million dollar budget turned in by director Gore Verbinski, nor did they appreciate that 43% of it was to be used for Johnny Depp’s eyewear. With any luck, the project will get re-shopped, re-chopped and still happen. I did like the idea of that Winklevoss guy in the lead.

As the whole world (or England at least) goes absolutely Goddamn batshit and falls to pieces in front of my eyes, it’s time to declare an age-old addage, cast forth historically from some of the greatest minds of human history… “And now for something completely different.” Socio-cultural insurrection is a lot like merchandise collecting. It frequent leads to anger, there’s like looting… and like… okay, so it’s not. But aren’t we all glad of that?! I don’t really want to use this column as some kind of soap-box, other than to push the dirty evils of capitalism and commodity acquisition of course, but for God’s sake, we’re all essentially the same bags of bones and gristle. Can’t we all just get along? Anyway, since what we all need on this side of the Atlantic is a little escapism, and maybe a superhero or two, this week’s column features merch picks inspired by both. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, but mostly you’ll wish you had remortgaged your home enough times to afford everything.

Why Watch? Because once you’ve seen an Ewok rocking out to the Mos Eisley Cantina Band, you can never un-see it. I wish this short film were somewhere in better quality, but someone has clearly taken the time to blend the usable parts together here (along with what, sadly, looks like bootleg footage from a theater showing). This mockumentary features Warwick Davis on his quest to find meaningful work, and after turning down the idea of playing football for Chelsea, he discovers the universe of Star Wars, where he thinks he’ll fit in nicely. It features the entire main cast of the films both as themselves and as their characters as well as some behind-the-scenes footage from the set. Funny, sweet, and a blast of nostalgia, this is definitely a cool little ride back through the universe. What does it cost? Just 25 minutes of your time. Check out Return of the Ewok for yourself:

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that brings together all the most interesting stories and articles from around the web. It’s also fully immersed in Comic-Con week. Thus, another night of leading with an image of cosplay brilliance and advice from Comic-Con veterans. In our continued effort to get you ready to attack Comic-Con this week right alongside our own hit squad, here is another guide full of useful tips. Movies.com has put together a list of 10 Things Everyone Should Do at Least Once During Comic-Con, including one of my personal favorite things, “buy something new in Artist Alley.” Just remember that Twilight isn’t the only thing happening at SDCC, support those artists.

That the final Harry Potter film became the biggest opening weekend of all time seemed only natural and inevitable. Something so monumentally culturally pervasive could have only gone out with a loud bang. After all, it is – as I’ve been repeatedly reminded – the most successful movie franchise of all time, adapted from a series of books whose sales history rivals that of The Holy Bible. Yet unlike some head scratch-inducing huge opening weekends of the more uninspired entries of blockbusting franchises who rival Harry Potter in their monetary intake but not their longevity (Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest) and the former reigning champ whose buzz was accompanied by fascination with the untimely death of a star (The Dark Knight), the mass participation in the cultural event that was the release of Deathly Hallows Part 2 won’t likely be rivaled anytime soon. The Harry Potter films simultaneously represent the inevitable logical extent of franchise filmmaking as much as it is exceptional and anomalous in this same regard.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly collector of film and television news and links that is currently working for the weekend. It certainly wants a little romance. You won’t catch it goin’ off the deep end. Da nanana na na… We begin tonight with more photos from The Amazing Spider-Man. Sony is hoping that its Comic-Con presence next week helps the webbed wonder get back into the public eye, as they’re counting on this franchise reboot to be a big earner. In the mean time, we get a few looks at a slick new costume, practical web-shooters and an intimate moment between our bloodied hero and his blond dame. All this and more in the gallery found over at /Film.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news column that sometimes diverges off the path of cinema and into other forms of entertainment, such as Broadway musicals, art, politics, television or even Werner Herzog doing a reading of a filthy children’s book. Yes, that’s happening. Stay tuned. Who should step in and direct The Expendables 2 if Sly Stallone isn’t up for the job? How about Con Air director Simon West? Ruminate on that a bit, dear friends.

What is Movie News After Dark? Well, it ain’t afraid of no ghosts. That’s for sure. Tonight’s top story is that Paramount Pictures (via Yahoo) has released a gallery of new images from Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The above image shows Optimus Prime kneeling before his mentor, Sentinel Prime (to be voiced by Leonard Nimoy). The entire gallery can be found at /Film. Just know that most of the other images focus on the humans, and that’s boring.

Special effects master Shannon Shea continues his trip down memory lane in an attempt to find relevance in the 21st century world of movie-making… There was something I had known since I had seen Star Wars: I was going to leave the state of Louisiana to go to college. My older brother, who was a fellow film-nerd/fan/geek/whatever, had graduated in 1977 and gone to the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and was pretty much just miserable. True, there was a lot of drinking to do, but aside from his joining a band (he was much more into music than I was), he didn’t share his taste for genre pop culture with many of the other students. And, as a historical note, the drinking age in Louisiana at this time was 18 so being drunk on a college campus in Louisiana was as required as “Introduction to English Literature,” and the grades were easier. Needless to say that by the time I was a High School Senior, he had dropped out and worked for a salvage company. We both attended an all-male, Catholic High School in Marrero, Louisiana: Archbishop Shaw High School. It boasted being a “college prep” school, however, unless you were training to be an engineer, or a geologist, or some vocation that would keep you in a local oil field, Shaw had little to offer in those days. It did have football, which was a major focus for both the faculty and students. Not being from what [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]

Why Watch? Because some student films lead to iconic careers. We posted the trailer for the feature-length THX 1183 a few days ago, and it seemed only natural that we’d post up the student short film that led to its creation. As far as student films go, George Lucas defies all expectations. It’s strange sci-fi blended with experimentalism and a healthy dose of what seems like somehow anachronistic futurism. Looking back on this story trying to predict our dark future carries with it the kind of nostalgia that bubbles up when watching something like War Games. How quaint those computers, how little that generation might have realized where we’d be in a few decades. And yet THX 1183 4EB is timeless, even in its technology. See if you can spot all the style influences (because there are dozens). And for those wondering, the “EB” stands for “Earth Born.” More importantly, see if you can connect the student that made this short to the man who made Star Wars. The early alien seeds are there. What does it cost? Just 15 minutes of your time. Check out Electronic Labyrinth THX 1183 4EB for yourself:

Every week, Landon Palmer and Cole Abaius log on to their favorite chat client of 1996 as TheManFromWaco andTeenWlf2 in order to discuss some topical topic of interest. This week, the pair questions what separates the wheat from the shit when it comes to reboots, prequels and movies capitalizing on name recognition in order to get ahead in the marketing game. What makes a prequel great? How can a reboot really succeed?