There is one thing that becomes quite clear, quite quickly when Lay The Favorite begins: not everyone should do voice over work. Rebecca Hall (who plays Beth Raymer) sadly falls into that category and her baby voice stays with her throughout the entire film. Lay The Favorite tells Beth’s story as she tries to figure out her purpose in life at a job that will be stimulating and make her good money (don’t we all, Beth). The best place to pursue such a dream? Las Vegas, of course! Beth packs up her life (and dog Otis) and heads West with stars in her eyes. Ready and willing to do anything, Beth quickly makes friends with Holly (Laura Prepon) who turns her on to a job with Dink Heimowtiz (Bruce Willis) who runs a legal (at least in Vegas) gambling company (Dink Inc.) that bets on anything and everything, but mainly sporting events. Dink’s world is exactly the type of excitement and stimulation Beth was hoping for and despite her baby talk, daddy issues (no matter what she says) and constant hair chewing, Dink takes a shine to her and agrees to bring her on.

Since we all have a million dollars, our minds are almost always tuned to the day dream of what kind of movie we’d make with all that loose cash just lying around (since banks do nothing but lose things). Would it be a romantic horror film? Would it be a silent action film? Would we blow of all of it on lighting and forget the other elements of production design? Probably. Fortunately, we’ve all had a few filmmakers tread before us in using their million bucks with efficiency and artistry. In a world where Michael Bay needs 200 suitcases full of $1m, these directors made it happen with only one of those suitcases (or no suitcases at all), and they created a lasting legacy despite their lack of foldin’ money. If they can do it, why not us? Here are 8 great films made for under a million dollars that we can all learn from. (And if you enter our contest sponsored by Doritos, you might actually win that $1m you need for all those lights.)

Neighborhood Watch has had a pretty dicey past, but under the eye of director Akiva Schaffer it seems to now be coming together nicely. The film has a new script penned by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg ready to go, and a bunch of casting maybes have become casting confirmations. Ben Stiller is set to star as a city guy who moves out to the suburbs and gets roped into joining a nutty neighborhood watch program. Big time comedic talents Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill have signed on to fill out the watch. Rachel Getting Married actress Rosemarie DeWitt has been tapped to play the Stiller character’s wife. And now another big name is in negotiations to hop on boar as well. Almost Famous actor Billy Crudup is the latest addition, and according to Heat Vision, he’s negotiating to play the character of a creepy and weird neighbor who catches the watch’s attention. Seeing as past synopsis of the film’s plot have pointed to the fact that Stiller and his new buddies find themselves stumbling into an alien plot to overthrow the planet, I think it’s probably a good bet that we’ve just found ourselves our first alien. Seems like a good choice to me. Crudup is just too handsome. It’s… suspicious.

Typecasting is death in Hollywood. If you keep doing the same kinds of roles over and over A) you’ll go insane and B) people will get sick of your shit. But the sad paradox of Hollywood is that once you’ve established yourself as one kind of actor, you’re basically stuck that way because that’s all people will send you scripts for, turning the whole thing into a spiral of bullshit. It’s extremely difficult to break out of, and it’s ended numerous careers. (Some for the better.) Some actors get fed up with it, and then you get the roles where those actors try to break out of their type (often unsuccessfully) and as time goes by they end up looking like movies from some creepy alternate dimension or something. But what’s also weird is going back through an actor’s early filmography and finding insane gems where they’re going totally against their later-established type. For some more famous examples, just look at Keanu Reeves in the Bill & Ted movies or Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Neither of those guys would even put their cigarette out on those scripts now, and that’s what makes seeing them in those roles hilarious. So now, in a far from comprehensive list, we’re going to look at some of the weirdest roles that actors have done outside of their typical repertoire.

Things seem to finally be coming together quite nicely for the long troubled comedy Neighborhood Watch. After a period of uncertainty where it was having trouble getting financed, it now has two big name comedic actors signed on to star in Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn. Sure, they may not be the freshest faces in Hollywood, and they might have been even bigger names a few years ago, but they’ve got a couple of in-the-now screenwriters, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, to take a pass at and freshen up the long gestating script they’re working with. Plus, they’ve got an up and coming voice in The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer to direct. After failing as a Will Ferrell vehicle, Neighborhood Watch might be set up to be the most relevant things that Stiller and Vaughn have done in a while. One sign that a film is really going full steam ahead in its production is when it starts filling out its supporting cast, and this one seems to be doing that right now. In the last day or so there have been several stories popping up about new faces being added. The first rumor, and the one that’s most likely, is that according to Heat Vision, Rachel Getting Married actress Rosemarie DeWitt is close to signing on as Stiller’s wife. If you remember the synopsis of this one, Stiller plays a city boy who is forced to move out to the boring suburbs, and DeWitt’s character would be the reason [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 entertainment news column that doesn’t usually participate in such overt misogyny. However, in a week that has inundated us with more Michael Bayhem than the world was built to handle, it would like to take out its man card, flop it down on the table like a wet fish and display it to the world. Yes, this is about to get sexual. And no, it will not last long. That’s just how any good late-nite movie news linkdump rolls. It’s a slow news night. Allow me to illustrate right off the bat: Tonight’s lead story is about Brooklyn Decker, model-turned-actress and all-around attractive human being who has been cast in What to Expect When You’re Expecting alongside Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Lopez. Chris Rock will also star. The only thing about this story that I find interesting is the image above, which has less to do with a movie based on a pregnancy self-help book and more to do with reasons why anyone would want to make Brooklyn Decker pregnant in the first place. I think we all still win.

Hot off the heels of playing body swapping best friends with Ryan Reynolds in The Change-Up, Jason Bateman is gearing up to star in a best friends whose kids bone each other comedy with Vince Vaughn called The Insane Laws. Which I guess is some sort of play on the word in-laws. The story of the film is that Bateman and Vaughn’s characters are best friends whose lives have followed the exact path all the way up to their kids getting into and attending the same college. Sounds like a pretty ideal situation for best friends, right? Being there together, sharing everything, every step of the way. Well not once Bateman’s son gets a hold of Vaughn’s daughter and a pregnancy happens. That puts the lifelong friendship in what is sure (not sure?) to be hilarious upheaval.

What would you do if you found out your best friend’s wife was cheating on him? I’ll tell you what I’d do… I’d get myself a drink. Then I’d sit my best friend down, pour him a drink and show him The Dilemma. If he doesn’t figure it out by then, tough beans. A dilemma like this might not be as fun as a night on the town with Vince Vaughn and Kevin James, but you can get a taste of it with the film of the same name.

Modern romance and the movies are arguably dependant on one another, as movies have a long history of affirming the idea(l) of the perfect relationship. Hollywood movies in particular have developed a mastery at the formula of bringing imperfect individuals together into perfect couplehood and framing marriage as the closure of all previous conflicts and difficulties. Many romance movies, thus, teach us what romance and couplehood are or, perhaps more dauntingly, what it should be. That romantic films are a staple in the box offices of commercial movie theaters to reparatory screenings or are marathon’d on television every Valentine’s Day is evidence of our ritual association of considering real-life romances in fictional terms. It is rare that movies, especially Hollywood, seem to do the opposite: reflect the distinction between ideal romance and the ostensible “reality” of relationships in all their complexity, grittiness, slow development, necessary problems, and (most of all) subtlety. Perhaps the most evident turns cinema makes in this direction is in the break-up movie, that rare narrative that situates itself as a disruption from the normal mode of portraying couplehood through representing its antithesis, the dissolution of a couple. The most recent example is Blue Valentine, the great Cassavetes-style, character-driven psychodrama about a couple who continue making the wrong turns and can’t make it work despite, or because, of themselves. Breakup movies from the light – (500) Days of Summer – to the heavy – Blue Valentine – often self-consciously (either by testament from the filmmaker like 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]

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr dresses up in a trench coat and hat, wears a mask and runs around the streets of his fair city with his strong and agile Asian manservant. The plan: When arrested, tell the police he is trying to emulate the crime-fighting career of the Green Hornet. If he can get away with that, he plans on tracking down two doughy but funny guys who are having sexual relations with super-hot Hollywood type ladies and try to steal their girlfriends away. Or, he just might sit on the couch and watch movies after telling you what he thinks of The Green Hornet and The Dilemma.

Once upon a time Vince Vaughn and his motormouth soliloquies could steal the show in any bromance, romantic comedy or 70s TV remake. The man could talk about nothing but being a motor boating son of gun and it would provide a much need laugh to a half-baked comedic plot. In The Dilemma, he officially ran out of gas and is running on empty with not even vapors to help him out. Vaughn stars here as Ronny Valentine, who is the dynamic in the duo with automobile partner Nick Brannen played by fellow jelly bellied comic, Kevin James. As Ronny and Nick are about to make a lifetime deal with Dodge-Chrysler Motors, Ronny sees Nick’s wife Geneva (Wynona Ryder) knocking boots with young hipster Zip (Channing Tatum). This not only puts Ronny in a bind to either tell Nick  or lose the lifetime deal, but alienates him from his heart-of-gold girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly). What follows is a series of dead-end soliloquies and stalker antics by Vaughn with intermittent and awkward sermons about gambling addiction followed by a return to the bromantic “dilemma” at hand.

It’s that time of the year again: that brief span of time in between Christmas and New Year’s when journalists, critics, and cultural commentators scramble to define an arbitrary block of time even before that block is over with. To speculate on what 2010 will be remembered for is purely that: speculation. But the lists, summaries, and editorials reflecting on the events, accomplishments, failures, and occurrences of 2010 no doubt shape future debate over what January 1-December 31, 2010 will be remembered for personally, nostalgically, and historically. How we refer to the present frames how it is represented in the future, even when contradictions arise over what events should be valued from a given year. In an effort to begin that framing process, what I offer here is not a critical list of great films, but one that points out dominant cultural conversations, shared trends, and intersecting topics (both implicit and explicit) that have occurred either between the films themselves or between films and other notable aspects of American social life in 2010. As this column attempts to establish week in and week out, movies never exist in a vacuum, but instead operate in active conversation with one another. Thus, a movie’s cultural context should never be ignored. So, without further adieu, here is my overview of the Top 10 topics, trends, and events of the year that have nothing to do with the 3D debate.

Before he falls down comically for the MMA film he’s making, Kevin James is going to have to fall down the good old fashioned way. In The Dilemma, the film adaptation of the song “Silence is Golden,” James stars alongside Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Connelly, and Winona Rider for the story of a man who sees his best friend’s wife cheating and has to figure out what to do. Do you say something or stay silent?

There were a lot of bad movies released during the past decade. That’s not anything that distinguishes the aughts from any other decade before it, but then most of these movies were bad in the usual, torturous ways.

It’s no surprise that Couples Retreat was… not good. And we now know (thanks to this week’s Reject Report) that it won the weekend box office with $35 mil. So, what gives?

Kevin Carr takes a look at this week’s movie releases, including Couple’s Retreat, Paranormal Activity and Toy Story & Toy Story 2 in 3D Double Feature.

Neil crawls into the Magical Studio in the Sky in spite of the fact that he’s suffering from the Fantastic Flu, though Kevin suspects this is just an excuse for having not seen any of the movies this week. Still, the Fat Guys go on a Couple’s Retreat and experience some Paranormal Activity.

From the long list of names on the posters and trailers, you’d think that this comedy would rise above the usual average drivel, but you’d be wrong.

Columbus Rejects! Get a chance to see Couple’s Retreat before it opens… for free!

We get our first viewing of the poster and the trailer within.