Hey everyone… we’re finally getting a new buddy cop movie! Kind of. The genre was an industry unto itself throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s, but somewhere along the line Hollywood stopped producing them. Or they at least stopped producing good ones. (I’m looking at you Cop Out.) The drought may be ending this summer though as we’re getting two high profile buddy cop flicks. First up is the Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy comedy The Heat on June 28th, and then in early August things kick in to high gear with 2 Guns. The Baltasar Kormákur-directed film stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg as good guys playing bad guys who don’t know that the other is actually a good guy too. Crazy! An assignment goes awry, and the two are forced to work together to bring down the real bad guy. Explosions and insults ensue. Check out the first trailer for 2 Guns below, but be warned… it’s the entire movie in three minutes.

There has already been a tremendous amount of back and forth when it comes to finding a director who will stick with the Denzel Washington-starring The Equalizer adaptation, as both Nicolas Winding Refn (who seemed like a particularly inspired pick) and Rupert Wyatt have backed out on the project, even with a highly bankable star like Washington locked to lead. Now Deadline Hollywood reports that Olympus Has Fallen and Training Day director Antoine Fuqua is in “early talks” to helm the film, which would re-team him with his Training Day star (and Oscar winner) Washington. The outlet reports that the pair have wanted to work together since their success and that The Equalizer is viewed as a proper project for the two to reteam on. Deadline also reports on some of the changes made to the film from the original TV series, sharing that it has been “tailored to Washington’s skills. He’ll play a solitary, monastic figure who hates injustice and devotes himself to helping people who are being victimized.” If The Equalizer can actually hold on to a director, it will likely start filming in Boston later this spring.

Briefly: Despite reportedly being in talks with Sony to helm their long-gestating The Equalizer feature, director Rupert Wyatt will not take on the project, which still has Denzel Washington set to star. Deadline Hollywood reports that scheduling conflicts have kept Wyatt from the project, though the outlet also vows that the studio “will lock in a helmer shortly.” Stay tuned.

The Equalizer was originally one of those cheesy action shows from the ’80s: think MacGyver or The A-Team. It starred Edward Woodward as an ex-CIA operative who had quit the company and was living out his retirement as a sort of pro bono operative for hire who would find people in need of help by posting a classified ad in the paper that read, “Got a problem? Odds against you? Call the Equalizer. 212-555-4200.” Seeing as this show is a fairly cheesy thing from the ’80s that very few people actually remember, of course Hollywood wants to bring it back as a big screen adaptation. The only problem is, Sony has been working to put the project together, and they’ve been having some trouble finding a director. According to a new report from Heat Vision, Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn was originally attached to helm the film, but he eventually dropped off of the project after butting heads with its attached star, Denzel Washington. Apparently getting an acting nomination for Flight must have Washington riding high, because you’d think the guy would realize that his career has been less than stellar lately and maybe allowing a hot director like Refn to come on board one of his projects and do his thing would be a smart move. All of this spilt milk might not matter though, because the new news is that, after going through a short list of directors over the past few weeks, Sony has decided that they

It’s an honor to just be nominated, right? You hear that politely said every year, even though you know it’s total hogwash for the four silver medallist of Oscar season. In reality, it’s not just an honor to be nominated; it’s quite easily a shot of go-go juice to an actor’s career. However, when the field of Best Actor nominees is populated almost entirely with people who have won before, it becomes an academic exercise. Best Actor is a category reserved (mostly) for seasoned actors who have been around the block a few times. There are occasional dark horses who come on strong, but the first-time nominees and those breaking out of genre roles usually show up in the Best Supporting Actor category. Yet every year, there seems to be one or two races in the Big Six that appear to be a lock. This year, we see that run in the Best Actor category, even though all of the nominees did fine work. It’s a popularity contest, to be sure, but it’s also an oft-accurate gauge of the best performance out there. (Because, let’s face it, if it were just a popularity category, where the hell is George Clooney this year?) Read on for the nominations and my predicted winner in red…

Looks like fans of 1980′s crime television series The Equalizer, Denzel Washington, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn are going to have to recalibrate their expectations, as the helmer has just dropped out of the Washington-starring feature adaptation of the show. Collider exclusively reports that “the deal fell apart at the last minute due to unknown reasons,” though it seems fair to suspect that scheduling could be an issue – Sony still wants to shoot the film in May, and Refn will surely be busy promoting his Only God Forgives around that time (the film opens on May 23) and gearing up for both his Logan’s Run remake and Button Man adaptation. Washington signed up for the part way back in July, with Refn coming on board just last month. Washington remains attached to the project, and Sony is reportedly looking for a new helmer to get the project in front of cameras this spring. Like the show, the film will focus on Robert McCall (Washington), a retired intelligence agent who dabbles in private eye work, with a special flair for “equalizing” the odds for clients who come to him with complicated problems. The film features a script by Richard Wenk, who is currently working on that Grayskull script and most recently penned The Expendables 2. Wenk also, amusingly enough, co-produced The Girl Next Door and directed one episode of the Sweet Valley High television show back in the ’90s. Suddenly, we’re insanely excited about his Equalizer.

Flight has without a doubt the best opening scene of any film in Robert Zemeckis‘ career. Granted, that’s due more to the glorious and fully nude form of Nadine Velazquez walking around a motel room while audiences pretend to be watching Denzel Washington than it is to the director’s myriad skills. Eye candy aside though the scene makes a bold and immediate statement that this is not your niece’s typical candy-ass, motion-captured Zemeckis fluff. Instead, this is going to be a return to form for a talented director rediscovering the dramas, moral complexities and adult themes possible with live-action filmmaking. If only someone had shared the plan with the film’s writer. Whip Whitaker (Washington) wakes after an all-nighter with a naked stewardess beside him, finishes off a beer and a line of coke, gets dressed and heads to work. He’s an airline pilot, and his morning flight is full and ready for takeoff. A possible mechanical failure causes a loss of control shortly after they leave the tarmac, but Whitaker’s quick thinking leads to an extraordinary maneuver and a controlled crash landing that results in minimum casualties. He’s immediately hailed as a hero, but when a routine investigation threatens to reveal the condition he was in while flying and send him to jail for life he discovers this is one impending crash he may not be able to control.

For anyone who has been clamoring for Robert Zemeckis‘s return to live-action, Flight should appease those fans of the director who haven’t embraced his recent motion-capture adventures. This isn’t exactly a triumphant comeback, but with Flight he mostly knows what buttons to push in order to please. It’s a true testament to Denzel Washington‘s performance that the blunt drama doesn’t fall on its face. Washington has major obstacles to overcome in making the character of Whip Whitaker as empathetic as he is. From frame one, Zemeckis and screenwriter John Gatins unflatteringly show us who this guy is: a bad father, an alcoholic, a coke addict. There is nothing to admire about him, not even his surface level charms, which are best showcased in scenes between Washington and John Goodman.

Adapting “classic” TV shows into big screen features is a risky venture that more often than not results in disappointment. But this year’s critical and box-office hit redo of 21 Jump Street shows that it can work if the right people are involved (as opposed to say, the folks behind Dark Shadows). The Equalizer was a cool CBS show from the ’80s about an ex-secret agent who now used his very particular set of skills to help those in need. Unless they’re illiterate. Because the only way to reach him is by answering the want ad he places in NYC newspapers. Edward Woodward played the title character, Robert McCall, and for four seasons he took out the trash with style, grace, and a stainless steel Walther PPK pistol. Per Deadline Wherever (via Cinema Blend), Denzel Washington has officially signed on for the big screen adaptation of the series. The hope is this will be the beginning of a new franchise, the first for Washington (unless you count Deja Vu and the upcoming sequel Deja Vu Again). The details from the series will be altered, but the gist of the story, an ex-agent who uses his deadly skills to protect strangers, remains the same. Production is slated to begin next April.

A long, long, loooong time ago, director Robert Zemeckis made live-action films – and good ones, too! Stuff like Back to the Future and Back to the Future Part II and Romancing the Stone and Contact and a whole mess of others (you can even count Who Framed Roger Rabbit, if you want), but he jettisoned that entire portion of his career to pursue performance capture technology. Which is why we have films like The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol – the motion capture stuff of your Uncanny Valley nightmares. But Zemeckis has finally returned to live-action films (rejoice, those of you who hate motion capture as much as I do) with the Denzel Washington-starring Flight. With shades of the real-life “Miracle on the Hudson” story, the mystery thriller sees Washington starring as Whip Whitaker, “a seasoned airline pilot who miraculously crash-lands his plane after a mid-air catastrophe, saving nearly every soul on board. After the crash, Whip is hailed as a hero, but as more is learned, more questions than answers arise as to who or what was really at fault, and what really happened on that plane?” This first trailer won’t tell you the answer to that, but it might make you want to find out for yourself.

Back in February, Safe House became the second movie of the year to crack $100 million. (The first, sadly enough, was The Vow, but who really wants to think about that?) With this film, Denzel Washington continued his successful box office streak, and Ryan Reynolds found a bit of redemption after last summer’s lesser-grossing Green Lantern. With Safe House on Blu-ray and DVD this week, it’s time to enjoy this film again or check it out for the first time. While you do so, have a couple drinks and remind yourself that your life is far less interesting than a CIA agent’s, but it’s likely a lot less dangerous.

Hot off the announcement that Adam McKay and crew are finally going to make Anchorman 2 comes word that the director has another project in the works, this one a strange choice for a filmmaker mostly known for absurdist comedies starring Will Ferrell. Deadline Coconut Grove is reporting that, after McKay finishes up shooting on the next Anchorman film, he’s negotiating to begin work on a remake of the 1974 Sydney Poitier film Uptown Saturday Night. For those of us whose memories don’t go all the way back to 1974, Uptown Saturday Night was a comedy that Poitier starred in himself, alongside Bill Cosby, that saw the two of them playing in over-their-head everymen faced with the task of hunting down some shady criminal types. On a whim, the duo go to a seedy nightclub where their wallets are promptly robbed by some thug types. Problem is, one of the wallets contains a winning lottery ticket, so the freaked-out friends have to do whatever it takes to get their property back.

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr dresses up in his Jedi robes and grabs his lightsaber, heading to the theater to see the 3D re-release of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. While there, he faces a sea of estrogen as ladies of all type swarm into the multiplex to see Channing Tatum’s abs multiflex. After using his lightsaber to break through the wall of pre-Valentine’s Day ladies, he faces more obstacles with twentysomething dudes heading out to see Safe House and obnoxious families to see Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. Fortunately for Kevin, he is able to dispatch everyone with his Rock-inspired “pec pop of love.” It was an early Valentine’s Day massacre.

If Hollywood has taught us anything about the CIA it’s that those bastards really can’t be trusted. The exception to the rule is that the lower the character is on the agency’s totem pole the more honorable and good they’ll most likely be. They’re naive idealists who have yet to be molded by the big, bad world into heartless, morally bankrupt pricks motivated by warped patriotism and self interest. Which brings us to Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), a low level agent stationed at the same, boring post for the last twelve months. He’s a “housekeeper” at a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa, and every day he waits for a coded call alerting him to the imminent arrival of an incoming “guest.” The call finally comes when Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) mysteriously turns himself into the local US embassy after a decade on the run as an ex-agent turned traitor and killer. He’s moved to the safe house and immediately interrogated via water-boarding and harsh language. But when the inaccurately named safe house is attacked by a gaggle of heavily armed men Weston finds himself tasked with his guest’s safety and on the run from killers both foreign and domestic. The result is a film that offers no surprises in its story or character arcs but still manages to thrill with some stellar action sequences and two talented and charismatic leads. (That’s right. Two.)

On the eve of the Berlinale, Swedish director Daniel Espinosa joins us to talk about waterboarding Denzel Washington and the mind games of Safe House. Plus, we look forward to a few films to catch in Berlin, and it’s Matt Singer versus Alison Willmore in a Filmspotting: SVU showdown of Movie News Quizzing. Download This Episode

Back in May, the illustrious Matt Patches put together a list so honest, so compelling, so original, that I had absolutely no choice but to copy it almost totally wholesale to craft my own version. Patches’s list was comprised of eight films his previous girlfriends had forced him to watch that made him who he is today (the list was, of course, titled “8 Movies My Past Girlfriends Forced Me to Watch That Made Me Who I Am Today” because we here at FSR are nothing if we are not succinct). The list, while interesting on a purely cinematic basis, also said something surprisingly deep about the nature of relationships themselves – mainly when it comes to the all-important element of compromise. Patches, a gentleman and a scholar, found some compelling honesty in his consistently sweet tales of cinematic (and romantic) discovery. My list starts off with a film that made me realize my first boyfriend was possibly also interested in other men. That’s just the sort of list this is. Here are seven movies that seven different suitors all “forced” me to watch at different points in my (admittedly still young) cinematic life. More than any individual lesson each film taught me, together the list forms one giant reminder of what I love best about going to the movies – endless possibility. Take a peek at my list after the break, and then feel free to pipe in with any films that someone made you watch that ultimately changed your

Argentinean director Juan José Campanella’s 2009 release The Secret in Their Eyes was a well-liked movie. It even won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Despite all of its accomplishments though, it had two fatal flaws at its center: it wasn’t in English and it didn’t have any big Hollywood stars. What were they thinking? Luckily those wrongs are now set to be righted, as Breach director Billy Ray is putting together an English-language remake for all of us to properly enjoy. That’s one of the big flaws taken care of, but what about the other? Twitch is reporting that Ray will be taking care of that problem as well, as the production has sent an offer to Denzel Washington to star. If he accepts, he will be taking over the role of a former legal counselor who sets out to write a book about a brutal murder/death/kill rape that happened earlier in his career and never got resolved. After that some hard-boiled detective stuff takes place. There are girls, mysterious guys in photos, and the matter of drunken partners to deal with. No word yet on who is going to play the girls or the drunken partner in this remake, but if Denzel accepts his offer I would imagine a mad dash to get cast alongside him will start taking place. Finally, The Secret in Their Eyes will get its chance at being a perfect film.

Man, sometimes these things just write themselves! Paramount Pictures has just sent over what will be Friday’s last gasp casting announcement before we all go home for the weekend and watch Unstoppable or The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 or something similar on a loop because, duh, that’s what weekends are for. And if that’s how you’re spending your weekends, have I got a treat for you! Denzel Washington is set to star in another film about mass transportation! Can we just get that Speed reboot going now, just to round out his resume? Washington will star in Robert Zemeckis’ Flight for Paramount, proving that no one knows how to steer things like Denzel. Written by John Gatins (who most recently penned Real Steel – man, this guy loves technology!), the film will star Washington as “a commercial airline pilot who pulls off a heroic feat of flying in a damaged plane, saving 98 lives on a flight carrying 106 people. While the world begs to embrace him as a true American Hero, the everyman struggles with this label as he is forced to hold up to the scrutiny of an investigation that brings into question his behavior the night before the doomed flight.” So it’s basically the story of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger with a hefty dose of self-reflection and probably a bunch of awkward Today Show appearances and likely a big secret reveal round the hour and fiften minute mark? Eh, I could be on board for this one (see what

Like sappy movies? Well then, have I got some news for you. Imagine a movie produced by Will Smith, written and directed by The Blind Side’s John Lee Hancock, and starring the one and only Denzel Washington. Can you comprehend the sheer force of drama that would be created from the perfect storm colliding of all these inspirational storytellers? You might not have to, because it might be happening; and in a film that suddenly makes my stupid storm metaphor seem to be in bad taste. Oh well, let’s venture on.

The upcoming Daniel Espinosa-directed thriller Safe House continues to fill out its cast. The film is said to be about a CIA safe house where criminals are detained, a young agent who acts as house sitter to the institution, and his attempts at moving a high profile criminal to another location once the house is under attack by a villainous organization. Denzel Washington was the first on board, playing the criminal who needs to get moved, and Ryan Reynolds signed up soon afterwards to play the young CIA agent. Now the rest of the cast is starting to come together as a start date looms. According to Deadline Kurpinova, Vera Farmiga has joined the cast, playing the CIA operative who supervises Reynolds’s character.  This choice was probably a no-brainer for the film’s casting agents as Farmiga has become something of a go-to whenever you need a slightly older, yet still attractive woman to play some sort of authority figure. Whether it be a doctor, or a successful businesswoman, or what have you, throw Farmiga in some business clothes and you’re good to go. Most recently she was seen in Source Code playing, you guessed it, a government agent. Say what you will about type casting, but Farmiga is a solid actress and playing these sorts of character roles is a great way to build a robust filmography and work with a lot of other great people. Plus, you have to appreciate the lady, because every time she gets cast in