What is Movie News After Dark? Tonight it’s the column I’m filling in on as Neil Miller journeys to the mystical, frozen land of Chicago. It’s also a list of links to movie or entertainment related things that I either found interesting, noteworthy, or that involved super famous young girls from the Disney channel. Tonight we begin by getting a glimpse at the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. WinterisComing.net has a whole host of pictures from the second season that have reminded me of how much I like the show and reinforced the three reasons why I’m looking forward to new episodes so much: boobs, blood, and Brienne. Hopefully we’ll be getting a lot of each.

It looks like your Valentine’s Day movie-going options might now be limited to The Vow, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Safe House, and maybe Rampart if you and your significant other are feeling particularly punchy, as Fox has reportedly ditched their plan to open McG‘s This Means War on the 14th (next Tuesday). Deadline Springwood reports that the studio “hasn’t seen the pic’s poor tracking pick up at all in recent days,” pushing the studio to move the picture back to a wide release date on Friday the 17th, though there will be some sneak peeks sticking around on the 14th. What’s the issue? Well, oddly enough, Nikki Finke herself doesn’t seem to get it – her exclusive post on the matter includes lines like “I don’t get what the moviegoing public’s problem with this pic is: Chris Pine, Tom Hardy, and Reese Witherspoon are just as cool casting as Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams” and “the film didn’t look dumb (and that’s is half the battle with this genre).” Clearly, Finke’s got a short memory on this one – the film went through a protracted cycle of casting, with names like Sam Worthington, Seth Rogen, and Bradley Cooper all getting bandied about before Hardy and Pine finally signed on for the flick (for some, frankly, pretty strange casting – Pine is set as the smooth operator and Hardy is the good boy), and the film was lensed back in 2010. Does the moviegoing public really care about stuff like that? [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]

I’m not sure how we missed this one, but I can only assume it was intentional. If you do a search of our site for the name ‘McG’ you’ll find mostly negative comments, critiques and flat-out insults including us celebrating the idea of the director being launched into space on a one-way ticket. (Of course, you’ll also find my Transformers 2 review that inexplicably calls for an apology to be given to McG.) But while we’re a month late in featuring this trailer for McG’s newest movie, we’re at least covering it with an open mind and a positive attitude. Because surprisingly, This Means War looks like it could actually be kind of fun. Tom Hardy and Chris Pine play CIA agents at the top of their game. They’re partners and friends who have each others backs and would let nothing come between them. Nothing that is, except a hot blonde. When the two discover that they’re both dating the same woman (Reese Witherspoon) they decide to let her choose the better man. But that doesn’t mean they can’t try to hedge their bets using all the skills and equipment at their disposal. So yes, it’s basically Mad Magazine’s Spy vs Spy with a love story angle thrown in as motivation. Check out the trailer below, and get ready to accept the fact that even with Chelsea Handler co-starring it doesn’t look anywhere near as bad as we all feared.

With my review and claim that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a near-masterpiece, I don’t believe it’s possible to get more hyperbolic about this film. Perhaps my fourth viewing, which will inevitably take place soon, could make that happen. Why such grand enthusiasm for a slow-burn “thriller” that’s splitting plenty of folks? Well, go see for yourself. Thankfully for you lot, director Tomas Alfredson‘s film is expanding into 800 theaters today. To further urge you wise readers to go see the film, Focus Features was kind enough to give us these exclusive behind-the-scenes shots of Alfredson shooting the breeze and working with Gary Oldman and John Hurt on set. They’re black and white, meaning they’re all prestigious and such.

CORRECTION: Collider has spoken with WB, IMAX and Steve’s best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend who heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with a girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night, and they’ve issued a retraction stating that their original story was wrong. (Take that “friend of an IMAX projectionist.”) So depending on where you fell on the whole can/can’t understand Bane fiasco of 2011, rest assured that nothing has changed. He’s still talking through a goddamn mask. Original post: Remember that time that people complained about needing subtitles for Attack the Block Bane’s (Tom Hardy) dialogue in The Dark Knight Rises? I didn’t get it either, but according to a friend of a friend of an IMAX projectionist who wrote into Collider, Warners has sent out new sound reels for the prologue that’s playing before Ghotocol right now. Apparently the dialogue hasn’t been altered at all, as per Christopher Nolan‘s claim that he wouldn’t change it, but the ambient noise has been reduced so that Bane can be heard a bit more clearly. So, there you go. This whole situation seemed a bit ridiculous, but hopefully the compromise is something that Warners, Nolan and the fans can all appreciate. No word yet on whether Rooster Cogburn from the Coens’ True Grit and Bane will do a cross-over sequel.

Tomas Alfredson hasn’t made your typical spy thriller. Not only is that due to the lack of explosions, a fast pace, shootouts, or any other convention the genre tends to call for, but because Alfredson hasn’t really made a “thriller.” Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in actuality, is a dark ensemble love story about lonely spies. The best character who represents everything the film says is Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong). At first, Jim, a towering field operative, is played with a quiet intensity. He’s calculating and observant like the rest of his spy brethren, but once stripped down of his serious spy mode and once revealed at his most vulnerable, Jim’s an emotionally and psychologically tortured guy. The world of espionage is a vicious place, so says the film. At one point, for great reasons I won’t spoil, Jim ends up going from pivotal spy missions to teaching school children in an instant. For one, how emasculating and damaging that must be. The character goes from a life of importance and violence, and then goes off to teach children. The system chewed him up and spat him out like he was nothing.

Despite the fact that the world collectively shat their pants at all of the cool included in the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s third Batman joint, The Dark Knight Rises, there was also a rallying cry that begun to spring up after all the explosions and Batplanes had sunk in. It was the cry of, “Hey, what did Bane say? I couldn’t understand him at all!” Tom Hardy, behind the Bane mask, kind of sounds like the son of Michael Caine and Donald Trump gargling marbles, so everybody is now hoping that the line we got from him was just early footage, or a temporary sound mix, or something that isn’t at all indicative of what it’s really going to be like trying to understand the main villain for the entirety of the film. Unfortunately for those with hopes, THR claims to have sources saying that this is definitely what Bane is going to sound like through the whole movie, and that Christopher Nolan doesn’t have many plans to do anything about it. The first source they cite, who is just said to be “working on the film,” says that he is “scared to death” about “the Bane problem.” This could either be taken as evidence that Bane’s dialogue will be an issue, or evidence that somebody working as an extra wanted a little bit of spotlight from the trades and struck while an online controversy was hot to deliver a quote, I’ll let you decide. But further comments in [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]

Wow. Wow is all there is. With all eyes on Christopher Nolan to find a fitting ending for the massive phenomenon that he’s turned into an even more massive phenomenon, the director and everyone involved seems to have pointed beyond the bleachers and out into the parking lot with this full length trailer for The Dark Knight Rises. It’s got Christian Bale getting existential as Batman, Tom Hardy as Bane looking ominous with a bomb and Anne Hathaway representing the unwashed masses as a masked Selina Kyle. In fact, it’s got enough red meat to make any old fan happy – and to prove that Nolan and company are not shying away from the greatness of their challenge.

Lets be honest with ourselves: The Dark Knight Rises is going to be the movie of 2012, no matter what other studios put together or how many superheroes they throw into one movie. The conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy will be the most highly trafficked, marketed and anticipated film event of the year. There’s no two ways about it. And as it were, any time something new is released from The Dark Knight Rises, that will be the thing of the day. Which makes this big, gorgeous and revealing poster today’s thing. It stars Tom Hardy as Bane, walking away from the broken cowl of our hero. A sign of things to come…

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr hunkers down and braces for award season. He also prepares for an onslaught of celebrity guest stars in New Year’s Eve, which features a poster that looks like a “Friends available to chat” sidebar on Facebook. In order to watch all the movies for the week, Kevin hires the only babysitter available… Jonah Hill. What could possibly go wrong with that? Fortunately this frees him up to see some of the smaller releases, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, W.E. and I Melt with You. And he wraps up the week wondering why everyone needs to talk about him.

Heads up, L.A. rejects. Focus Features has hooked us up with a way to send you to the Los Angeles premiere of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch. And by send, we mean give you tickets. You’ll have to furnish your own local transportation to get you to the event. To boot, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an excellent movie. I can confirm as much first hand, as I caught it a few weeks ago. You’ll get a free, good movie to watch and you may even end up seeing a few famous people, if you’re into that sort of thing. Find out how you can enter to win yourself a pair of tickets after the jump.

Typically, release date information isn’t the most important of news, but when it comes to John Hillcoat’s latest project, a star-packed adaptation of a book ripe for a cinematic telling, all bets are off. Hillcoat lensed The Wettest County in the World, from Matt Bondurant’s fact-based tale of his very own grandfather and two of his granduncles and their moonshine-running exploits in Prohibition-era Virginia, earlier this spring, and rumors once held that we’d see it this December, but that’s just not the case. The Weinstein Company picked the film up back during this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but they won’t have the time or inclination to get it into theaters until April 20, 2012. The film is crammed with a murderer’s row of talent, from the firmly established (Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce) to the up-and-coming (Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, Dane DeHaan, Mia Wasikowska) to the hot properties looking to expand their resumes (Shia LaBeouf , Tom Hardy). Hardy, Clarke, and LaBeouf star as the three bootlegging Bondurant brothers, who attempt to hold their family business together through threats that include the law, other bootleggers, and love. While the book itself is a bit dry, the tale of the Bondurants is inherently cinematic, and under Hillcoat’s watch (and with a script from his The Proposition scribe, the ever-talented Nick Cave), Wettest County should prove to be an accomplished and thrilling slice of Americana. [BoxOfficeMojo, The Playlist]

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy hasn’t been seen by very many people here in my home of the U.S. of A, but it premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a whole lot of acclaim, and it’s already been released in the UK where it has been dominating the box office, so it’s probably time for the rest of the world to start getting geared up for its roll out to other countries over the next couple of months. If you haven’t seen the trailer for the movie yet, it’s a Cold War-Era espionage story based off of a book by John le Carré starring Gary Oldman as a spy named George Smiley. The film is directed by Tomas Alfedson (Let the Right One In), and it’s got a supporting cast that boasts names like Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch, among others. Given all of that pedigree put together in one place, I’m kind of feeling like I don’t even need to see the movie to already be excited for a sequel. And according to a story in The Guardian, one might soon be on its way.

Masculinity has always been the major topic of concern in the work of Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn. Just look at the series he made his name with, the Pusher trilogy, which in three installments provide three very different but equally compelling stories of occasionally brazen, often buffoonish masculinity within various facets of the Copenhagen illegal drug trade. So it is no surprise that the directors latest work (his ‘breakthrough’ years, if you will) are continuously concerned with the turbulent lives of men, culminating this weekend with his most ‘mainstream’ entry, Drive (in purely box-office terms, as Drive in its opening weekend made more than 84x what his previous two films made together, yet the film is still ripe with Refn’s eccentric signature). Refn’s thematic and narrative preoccupation with masculinity has produced three fascinating portraits in as many years. The temporal and social contexts of Bronson, Valhalla Rising, and Drive couldn’t be more disparate, but between them he’s produced an unofficial trilogy of sorts connected not only through his deliberate pacing and striking, almost invasive visual style, but more importantly through their shared concerns as portrayals of three aggressive men who wander their respective environments in solitude.

In the wrong hands, Warrior could have been a disaster. If a few beats in Gavin O’Connor‘s family drama missed the mark even in the slightest, the final result could have been a sports parody. Despite playing in familiar territory, the Miracle and Pride and Glory director didn’t make that parody. Instead, the filmmaker strived to be as honest as possible with the material at hand. In doing so, he’s made an underdog of a film that’s, ironically, about underdogs. Like his previous works, O’Connor explores the meaning of brotherhood, family, and overcoming insurmountable odds. The trick for O’Connor was to make those well-known — drama, not sports — tropes believable. Here’s what co-writer and director Gavin O’Connor had to say about striving for realism, telling personal stories in mass appeal films, and love stories among men:

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr heads into the MMA ring to battle Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, after being trained by a strung-out Nick Nolte who looks like he’s ready to have an aneurysm at any moment. Then he is sent into a bird flu panic when someone coughs on him at the airport. Not wanting to suffer the same fate as Gwenyth Paltrow, he takes a road trip down to the Louisiana bayou where he runs into a hillbilly redneck alligator mutant. But at least he didn’t have to see Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star.

Critics love to bemoan the high concept Hollywood production, those movies with an easily comprehended hook that seems ready-made for the pitch meeting. Their disgust is often justifiable. After all, these are usually safe, creatively bankrupt cliché fests, the scourge of the corporately-run studios. At first glance, Warrior — one-part Cain and Abel, one part Rocky and one part a blatant cash-in on the Mixed Martial Arts phenomenon — appears to be just such a flick. But when it comes to a picture’s most basic purpose — entertaining its audience — an easily definable premise doesn’t necessarily spell doom. When the commonplace is done well, with real feeling and strong characterizations, it can still seem fresh. Director Gavin O’Connor, who achieved that effect with his 1980 Winter Olympics hockey drama Miracle, does it again here. The premise is familiar — estranged blue collar brothers (Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton) hash out their differences against the backdrop of an athletic competition (MMA tournament). The passion imbued in the storytelling and the performances, however, is not.

I’m not usually interested in writing stories about photos. Most of the time, especially when you’re not dealing with a superhero film, there’s not much room for speculation or any sort of interesting commentary. With these behind the scenes pics for Warrior, not much can be said about them. However, I’ll take any chance I can get to discuss Gavin O’Connor‘s family drama, because it’s just that good. To make an easy comparison, it’s this year’s The Fighter. They are different films, but one big fact they both have in common? They’re genuine crowd-pleasers. Warrior never panders to please. It, mostly, features well-earned drama that wins you over. If you need to feel secure about yourself, make sure to checkout how flabby and out of shape Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton look here. God, I feel bad for these guys.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy comes to us thanks to Tomas Alfredson, who is best known to horror freaks as the director of the original Let the Right One In, which is nervy and terrifying and better than just about any other vampire film made, oh, well, pretty much ever. Now it looks as if Alfredson is trying to do for the spy genre what he did for the vampire genre – basically, make it exciting and interesting again. The loverly Rob Hunter showed us the first trailer for the film back in June, and I proceeded to slobber all over it like I’d never seen a piece of movie marketing before. The film features an all-star cast packed with badasses, including Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, John Hurt, and Stephen Graham. It’s essentially as if every single actor you’ve ever wanted to see in a spy flick got together and made that spy flick, but made it much more clever than you would have been able to craft on your own.

No, no, this is not a free contest. It’s even better: an auction for The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. So if you want a Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton signed Warrior poster, you have to bid for it and do some good. If the awesome actors duo signature and that it’s for charity doesn’t convince any of you bums, perhaps the fact that Warrior is excellent might. Having just seen the film last night, I’m still surprised by how effective it is. It’s a great comeback for Gavin O’Connor, who directed the solid Miracle and the big, big misfire Pride and Glory – the movie where Colin Farrell held a steaming iron right next to a baby’s face, then went on to call the baby beautiful after doing so. Yes, this is indeed a big step forward for O’Connor. Warrior is a true crowd-pleaser, and not the dopey kind. Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton are fantastic in it too, so even more reason to buy the poster before the auction closes. Head over to Ebay before the sale closes at about 5 p.m. (ET). Go get a cool signed poster for a lovely film and giveback, it’s a win-win.