Just as the day has transitioned (from beautiful, warm and sunny to crazy wet and dreary), so has our second to the top left shelf on the Wall o’ Oool. Did I say Wall o’ Oool? I totally meant Wall o’ Cool. While we’re at clearing things up, I should also mention that the title of this post has absolutely nothing to do with Mission Impossible, or the impossibility of transitions (transitions are quite possible, actually), but Tom Cruise will be making an appearance. Are you as confused as I am? Great! Let me tell you about our Stanley Speilberg shelf!

So we have a bunch of Kubrick films arriving in the store.. Great, right? Well not really, because some of our customers decided to buy them! Hey, those are ours, stop it! So now we’re stuck with only 4 Kub-flicks (you like what I did there??)… Certainly worthy of our Wall o’ Cool, but roughly 4/8ths of what’s necessary to take up an entire shelf on the wall. Don’t worry though, we figured out something super… sort of cool.

So we start off with a classic rubric from the Kubrick, who made a killing with The Killing. Kubrick’s eleventh film (in reverse chronological order, naturally), deals with character Johnny Clay, who gets out of Alcatraz only to dream up a crazy race track heist. Not only would I not recommend planning crimes directly after being released from the craziest prison on an island in the United States, but this is a movie, so it’s probably safe to assume that things don’t go as smoothly as Clay hopes.

To the right of The Killing, we have a similar story, The Lolita, only this time, instead of an ex-con, we’re dealing with a college professor, and instead of a bank heist, Professor Humbert Humbert is interested in… a 14 year old!? Okay, that’s enough…

Next up is The Shining, where Jack Nicholson goes crazy and tries to kill his family. Come on, don’t tell me you aren’t familiar with the plot of The Shining!

Finally, we have The Full Metal Jacket, which tackles the Vietnam war and it’s effects on a group of Marines who go from boot camp to battle. Seriously, I don’t even know a funny joke I could crack about this movie. You will love this movie long time.

Now here’s where stuff get’s tricky. We’re out of Kubrick films! Or are we? You know that movie The AI: Artificial Intelligence? I bet you didn’t know that Stanley Kubrick developed the movie before giving it to Steven Spielberg, did you? Oh, you did? Well then good for you… Transition accomplished!

Keepin’ it strictly Sci-Fi, Spielberg returns with The Minority Report, which may or may not have been made when Tom Cruise was considered normal, I don’t really remember. This takes place in the handy dandy future, where crimes can be solved before they’re committed. You ever read that book The Demolished Man? Why would you? We’ve got Minority Report instead! The movie has everything–action, future stuff, yoga, and even Paul Thomas Anderson as a background actor. Pretty good stuff!

Keepin’ it strictly Sci-Fi, we now travel back in time to 1977, with Bergie’s first Sci-Fi flick, The Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where Richard Dreyfuss creates his own “dry fuss” (nailed it!) after having his own close encounter with his own third kind… aliens! This film is a must-see for any sci-fi fan. And by sci-fi fan, I mean anyone who wouldn’t change the name of a TV station to SyFy… Why!?

Now that we have the sci-fi out of our systems, we end with Spielberg’s hard-hitting historical drama, The Amistad. This movie is definitely too serious to make jokes about, so I will just end on saying it’s a very moving true story of an 1800s slave ship heading towards America from Cuba, where a revolt for freedom leads to a courtroom case. A movie like this will definitely make up for Something Something Shhh Jones 4.

New trades on the shelves: Almost Famous, Superbad, Envy, Boiler Room, 3000 Miles To Graceland (wherein Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell and Christian Slater pull off a Las Vegas casino heist in full-on Elvis drag! C’mon, how cool is that?), a Mark Wahlberg trifecta with Three Kings, Four Brothers and The Shooter (too bad Marky Mark wasn’t in some “five” movie or other, yeah?), Chicago, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Amistad, just to name a handful.

Happy Friday everyone!