What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly collection of movie and television news that throws caution to the wind, but never ever pees into the wind. That’s just not smart, friends. We begin this evening and this week with artist Kinjamin’s depiction of the Community cast as the characters from Street Fighter. It was found via Twitter, as posted by the show’s executive producer Dan Harmon. Needless to say, it’s inspired. So inspired, perhaps, that it makes us hope that Harmon is writing this one down. How about a Street Fighter episode in season four? Hey NBC, how about a season four?

In our first show of the 2012 season, we set off the filmmaking fireworks by finding out why Innkeepers director Ti West doesn’t believe in spooks, and by talking to indie icon Ed Burns about the twitter revolution, his $9,000 budget, and his new must-see movie Newlyweds. Plus, Neil Miller stops by to dangle the hope and potential of 2012′s most anticipated movies over our noses. Will he say the movie you’re thinking of and validate his opinion to you, or will he neglect it, making everything he says in the future suspect? Be prepared to find out a metric ton about movies and their makers, because it’s our third season, and we’re only getting started. Download This Episode

Can an indie filmmaker upset the apple cart twice in a career? Evidence seems to point to Edward Burns doing just that, quietly dominating a niche audience without the aid of big budgets (or any budgets really) and without the hollow aid of buy-the-bank advertising campaigns. His first bow on the scene was in 1995 with Sundance favorite The Brothers McMullen, and now he’s capitalizing on the same social networking tool that protestors are using to overthrow dictators: Twitter. At a time when Hollywood is struggling, post-movie star, to figure out what works, Burns is exercising a formula that involves tiny bottom lines and an audience that already trusts and reveres his work. It’s almost certain that few filmmakers will be able to rise to prominence through Twitter, but since Burns is a known entity dedicated to finding his fans and engaging with him, he’s been able to make back money with ease and tell the stories he wants to tell. His latest is Newlyweds, a slice of life written/directed/produced and starring Burns as one-half of a newly married couple whose lives (much like an apple cart) are upset by a half-sister coming on the scene. As the thorough Christina Warrren over at Mashable explains, Burns shot the flick for $9k and raised massive awareness for it and for his process using the little blue bird of tweeting. He also found talent through it. Her full article deserves a read, and in a time where mature adult situations are nearly [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]

Comic-Con is around the corner, and while our dance card is filling up, we’ve carved out some time to hang out with veteran film critic, author, and film historian Leonard Maltin. Unlike two years ago when we ended up hanging out by the San Diego docks with Tom Jane and the Raw crew at 3am, we’ll be keeping it a little tamer this year at the Movies On Demand lounge inside the Hard Rock Hotel on Saturday, July 23rd from 3-5pm. So what does our drinking in the afternoon have to do with you winning $500? Great question. Speaking of questions, we need them for our conversation, and we want to give you the chance to win that half-thousand-dollar gift card just for sending us yours. Here’s how to enter:

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a movie news column that wonders: “does your daddy know that it sneaks into your room every night?” In a slightly less creepy description, it’s a column that, as of tonight, is of two minds: one that thinks about movie news and is seemingly on vacation, and another that is all about television. Like The Adventures of Pete and Pete. No, seriously. Tonight’s top story is an imperfect first look at Colin Farrell in the Len Wiseman directed reboot of Total Recall. Some sites are dedicating primo space to such an image, so I thought I’d throw it up there because it’s a decent sized fish on a day where news has been flowing into our nets plentifully. In other non-fishing references, the Total Recall character looks a lot like plain old Colin Farrell. Nothing to see here, I suppose.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a nightly movie news round-up that finds the darndest things. Like Sacha Baron Cohen’s beard, creepy Musketeer posters, Mark Wahlberg, Simon Pegg, Paul Walker and a way to make your tweets into epic cinematic adventures. You need this and you know it. We begin tonight with Sacha Baron Cohen looking crazytown as The Dictator, his latest mockumentary prank film. Only this time, it’s got a more concise narrative. Cohen will play the dual roles of a ruthless dictator who heads to the U.S. for a meeting at the United Nations and finds that his number two has replaced him with an unsuspecting sheepherder lookalike. The big guy has sort of a Cosmo Kramer meets Mr. T vibe going on, with all the frills of the late Saddam Hussein. That feeling deep in your loins is unbridled excitement. That’s a good thing.

Haven’t seen enough Kim Kardashian on your TV and in your news over the last 12 months? Well then do I have some good news for you. Kardashian had a number of comments to make about a prospective new career while red carpeting around at the SAG awards. She started her threats by telling E! cameras, “I love acting”, which seems like it could have been harmless enough chitchat if she hadn’t also claimed, “There are a few offers on the table, but I definitely want to make the right decision for the right part.” And what could that “right part” be? Well, genre fans, get ready to weep.

What is Movie News After Dark? This is a question that I am almost never asked, but I will answer it for you anyway. Movie News After Dark is FSR’s newest late-night secretion, a column dedicated to all of the news stories that slip past our daytime editorial staff and make it into my curiously chubby RSS ‘flagged’ box. It will (but is not guaranteed to) include relevant movie news, links to insightful commentary and other film-related shenanigans. I may also throw in a link to something TV-related here or there. It will also serve as my place of record for being both charming and sharp-witted, but most likely I will be neither of the two. I write this stuff late at night, what do you expect?

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]

The Social Network is nothing new, but that’s kind of the point. Its structure creates a story of uniquely American ingenuity, individualism, and capital that we’ve seen often, one that follows beat-for-beat the formula of young, ambitious, humble beginnings to meteoric rise toward contested success to the people that really mattered being inevitably pushed out of the way. It is in The Social Network’s belonging to that subgenre which draws apt comparison to films like Citizen Kane, Sweet Smell of Success, or There Will Be Blood – not qualitative comparisons, mind you (the very title of Citizen Kane has become an inescapable and meaningless form of hyperbole in that regard), but comparable in terms of basic narrative structure and genre play. Such narratives are perhaps more common in films depicting less legitimate business practices – gangster films – which also catalog the rise in stature but fall in character of an outcast who uses the system for their own advantage. From starry-eyed associations with questionable made men (Timberlake’s Sean Parker and the debaucheries of success associated with him) to the inevitable “hit” on one’s kin in the best interest of the business (Zuckerberg and Parker firing Eduardo Saverin), The Social Network is something of a Goodfellas for geeks. Why is it that the first major studio film about the phenomenon of social networking feels like such a familiar movie? Why does it resort to well-honed, expertly crafted but familiar cinematic territory instead of pioneering unexplored terrain analogous to the phenomenon [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]

At The Movies is dead. Kevin Smith wants film criticism to be done via Twitter. Where do you stand?

(Hint: It has to do with loving movies and not bullshit).

Seeing as it is a slow news day, I thought I would share something cool. A good friend of mine sent me a link to the chronicling of the zombie apocalypse. Don’t think that’s true? You’d be wrong.

The star of The Messenger talks about losing loved ones, his X3 disagreements with Brett Ratner, and the film he turned down five times.

Think about all the movie opinions that get spouted about Twitter. Now imagine that there was a Rotten Tomatoes-esque app that aggregated said opinions. Cool, right?

Paramount Pictures has started up a pretty cool new website in support of the release of Up in the Air, Jason Reitman’s spectacular film about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a man who lives his life on the road.

Warning: These pictures are not suitable for anyone with OH MY GOD OUTTA THE WAY I’LL BE RIGHT BACK.

We sat down with Up in the Air director Jason Reitman for an unorthodox interview which involved not talking about the film at all. Yes, I should probably be fired.

Everyone is on Twitter these days. Jason Reitman, Rian Johnson, Kevin Smith, entire movies. And now, Milla Jovovich has joined the party from the set of Resident Evil: Afterlife.

On the 16th anniversary of the first public screening of Clerks, we get personal with the man, the myth, the lunchbox as he rips his heart off his sleeve and slams it down on the table.