Welcome back to Junkfood cinema; nature is lethal, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the McRib. Welcome to the feast of intellectual famine! For our first course, we will be serving skewered schlock seared over a hot flame of merciless ridicule. We will follow this with a round of genuine affection sweetened with just a suçon of my completely indiscriminate, and therefore dubious, taste. For dessert we will be serving an actual food, of the junk variety, paired thematically to the film. Hey, yesterday was Thanksgiving wasn’t it? It’s hard to tell here at JFC because we feast like manic depressive sea cows on a weekly basis. But now that you’ve had ample time to digest, and now that you’ve again worked up an appetite by spending all day hip-checking soccer moms to obtain $3 seasons of Cagney & Lacey on DVD, we horribly humbly submit another feeding frenzy for your destruction consideration. Today’s Reheated Nugget: Deep Blue Sea.

Talk of a sequel to The Long Kiss Goodnight has been openly floating around since at least 2007, and this Summer, Samuel L. Jackson again confirmed that he was up to the task. Jackson claiming to be in development is something that happens twice a day, but I recently spoke with director Renny Harlin for Reject Radio, and he confirmed that he wasn’t just twiddling his thumbs about it. He’s hired a writer to pen the script. “I just came back from Miami where I directed an episode of Burn Notice. I really like that series so I went to go and direct an episode, and the writer of the episode was Ben Watkins who is one of the producers of the show. I’d read quite a bit of his stuff, and he turned out to be a giant fan of [The Long Kiss Goodnight] so we started talking, and we decided we’re going to do it together,” said Harlin. The director also confirmed that the concept for the film hasn’t changed much. It will still focus on Samantha’s (Geena Davis) daughter Caitlin (played by Yvonne Zima) who teams up with Jackson’s character Mitch to seek revenge on the people who take her mother’s life. Of course, Caitlin would be 21 or so (which puts Zima in the running to reprise the character age wise), but it’s unclear as to whether they’ll seek a bigger name or stick with true continuity. Either way, Shane Black will not be involved considering [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]

War zone reporters and the dangerous, adrenaline-fueled lives they lead are not new topics in narrative cinema. They’ve been around as long as there have been movies, but the 80s seemed to be the genre’s heyday with films like The Year Of Living Dangerously, Salvador, and The Killing Fields all providing political commentary and harrowing drama. Recent years have seen far fewer films on the topic even though there appears to be just as many international conflicts in need of documenting. Richard Gere took a stab at it in 2007 with the Bosnia-set film The Hunting Party, but that may just be it for recent non-documentaries focused on journalists under fire. (Well, unless we’re counting Uwe Boll’s Far Cry of course.) The past year has seen a slight uptick though as two new films hit screens with stories about members of the press on the front lines of battles around the world. The first one, The Bang Bang Club, was released earlier this year (and arrived on DVD this week) and focuses on photographers covering the fall of apartheid in South Africa. The second film starts a limited theatrical run on Friday and explores the conflict around Russia’s invasion of neighboring Georgia in 2008, but what starts as an earnest and important look at a real-world travesty quickly fades into a generic series of action scenes and setups. Should we have expected more from a post-millennium Renny Harlin film? Probably not, but it never hurts to dream. (Unless you’re a [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, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, Jason Momoa talks Conan, director Joann Sfar talks Gainsbourg, concept designer Jerad Marantz talks rising Apes and Spidey’s costume, and action icon Renny Harlin discusses his latest film 5 Days of War. Plus, our old friend Scott Weinberg goes up against FSR’s own Gwen Reyes in a Movie News Pop Quiz that leads us to talking about sexy animated characters. Don’t judge. You know you think Ariel is the bee’s knees. Listen Here: Download This Episode

Welcome returns to Junkfood Cinema, the unhealthiest of weekly columns here on FSR and the only one scientifically proven to taste delicious upon consumption and decrease penis visibility once fully digested. When the email went out to all of the FSR contributors looking for guest authors for this here editorial thing I was hesitant to partake. Then, I went to the bathroom and made room, so we’re good. I know I’m no Salisbury, but fuck that meat as I’m the_beef from which his steak is cut.
As a guest I figured the most valuable contribution I could offer to all of you is the opportunity to appreciate a cinematic artery-clogger that Brian himself would dare not ingest enjoyably; something that might show up as an SAT question that reads “_____ is to Adam as shit-dipped peanut butter patty is to Brian.” I checked with Brian and he indeed does not enjoy peanut butter covered in shit, so the association is sound. All that left me with was the responsibility of finding such a film capable of satisfying me whilst rendering Brian sterile.
So, I stared at my extensive trove of dvds for all of .8 milliseconds before I found the answer to my troubles sitting neatly between Adventures in Babysitting and Advise and Consent which not only serves as a convenient method for locating the film alphabetically, but also acts as a metaphorical illustration of where the film should be precisely placed; because when you think about what would go in between Elisabeth Shue and Henry Fonda the first actor that comes to mind is The Dice Man. So, with all kinds of adieu because you’ve probably stopped reading I present to you the Renny Harlin helmed, Andrew “Dice” Clay action/comedy vehicle (get it?) The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.

Every so often, a film emerges from the fray to prove its popularity and warrant a sequel. More and more, franchises are planned out in advance, but when one film turns into a franchise, a cash register sound goes off in the ears of the studio. Even though the kid stays in the picture, sometimes the director does not. Maybe the director is done working with the material. Maybe the producers want a more seasoned hand. Maybe a simple schedule conflict keeps him or her out of the chair for the next round up. But the show must go on, so the producers find another director to fill the slot – a director who ostensibly inherits all the strengths and weaknesses of a franchise birthed by someone else. Cinematic sloppy seconds that could have easily turned into sloppy sequels if it weren’t for a steady, talented director guiding the ship. Here’s a list of the ten best.

Editor’s Note: Toni Salisbury is guest-writing this week on behalf of her husband who is taking one of those breaks that you need after eating 18 hot pockets on a “dare.” Welcome back, Cinema Junkies. Your regular host–the connoisseur of crap, maitre d’ miserable, reviewer of the rotten and lover of lost causes, Brian Salisbury–is taking a brief hiatus to restock his celluloid pantry with the most fattening films he can find. And like a doting father loathes to leave his child with a strange, menacing babysitter for the first time, he asked Mrs. Junkfood to smooth the transition. Which I would do if this column WOULD JUST STOP SCREAMING! THEN I WOULDN’T HAVE TO SHAKE IT! (note: I have never shaken a baby, and neither should you. Ever.) With that in mind, I invite the reader to indulge his (or her) weekly appetite for the ridiculously bad (and bad-for-you) film and food pairing that is Junkfood Cinema. Since nature documentaries are hardly ever anything but vegan-like in mental effect, I chose to review the only film I repeatedly watch that both lowers my IQ and raises my cholesterol at the same time. It is the most pungent of the stinkers, the limpest of the flops, feature-filmiest of B movies–and my personal go-to-in-the-dark-of-night-when-no-one’s-around-and-God-help-you-if-you-catch-me-watching-this-guilty-pleasure movie: Cutthroat Island.

Steve Carell goes golfing, The Slammin’ Salmon heads to theaters, and Lars von Trier is really depressing. So what else is new?

WWE makes no apologies for its knowing stupidity, if only they would realize that they can’t just make bad movies and get away with it…