Just hitting the shelf today!
Rendition starring Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Alan Arkin and Meryl Streep in this thrilling CIA cover up story.
Two action flicks; The Line (Andy Garcia and Ray Liotta) and Felon (Stephen Dorff and Val Kilmer) dealing with Mexican cartels and the brutal life inside a state prison respectively.
From the writer of American Psycho and Less Than Zero we have The Informers; a story of greed, sex, drugs, and power in 1980’s Los Angeles. Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, and Winona Ryder.
French Kiss, starring Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline as an unlikely couple getting into mischief in France.
Two foreign (and I think hilarious looking) flicks as well!
Star Wreck, a Finnish parody of both Star Trek and Babylon 5 made with love by some major fans.
And while this last one is not technically a comedy, the concept just kills me and the guy who traded it in said it was more funny than serious. Eighteen Methods of Capture, Chinese training video that teaches you how to control someone by “capturing” one part of the body. I don’t know why this one intrigues me….there is no accounting for taste! 
Hope you stop on by today and peruse our Wall O’ Cool to see what’s goin’ on today!
I borrowed that “unconventional hero” bit from his IMDb bio, but I think it’s pretty fitting. John Cusack isn’t your ordinary celebrity, choosing instead to do good work and stay out of the public view. I like that about him, and there’s a ton of movies I like a lot that he just happens to be in. My wife says I have a man-crush on Robert Redford, but that’s just because she hasn’t figured out I’m in love with John Cusack. Sorry about that, Bob.
Continuing our tradition of filling up a shelf on the wall with one actor’s movies, I bring you the John Cusack collection:
John is rancher Myrl Redding taking on the wealthy and ruthless Henry Ballard in The Jack Bull, an HBO movie and one of the few John Cusack films I’ve yet to see.
In Pushing Tin, John is Nick Falzone, the best and most-liked air traffic controller on Long Island. He was, anyway, until leather jacket-wearing Russell Bell (expertly played by Billy Bob Thornton) shows up on his Harley and the ultimate rivalry escalates into a war of one-upmanship.
Once upon a time, young John was a teen heartthrob and probably never more so than as Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything. I’m sure we all remember the boom-box scene. Shot in the Seattle area, it features cameos by director Cameron Crowe and wife Nancy Wilson (both of whom used to rent at a video store where I worked years ago) and Stone Gossard.
John can get serious, too. Maybe even a little too serious such as his role of Max Rothman, a Jewish art dealer looking for his Next Big Thing when he discovers a bitter and artistically frustrated young artist named Adolph Hitler in post-WWI Germany. The young artist is torn between his faltering art career and his increasing interest in politics. Max is a fascinating portrait of the Hitler nobody knew.
I think John, along with costars Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, could have just read the phone book and I’d love Runaway Jury just as much as I do. Seriously one of my favorite movies ever. John is Nick Easter, a seemingly unwilling prospective juror in a lawsuit against a large gun company. Hackman is a jury consultant (do they really have those?) whose job is to get as much dirt on the jurors as possible so he can swing the trial in his client’s (the gun company) favor. But there’s something else going on here, isn’t there?
In The Ice Harvest, John is Charlie Arglist, a lawyer for a mob boss in Wichita, Kansas. It’s an icy Christmas Eve. He and his partner Vic (another excellent performance from Billy Bob Thornton) have just ripped off their boss for a cool $2 million, and all they need to do is play it cool for a few hours and just get through the night without incident and they can make their escape. But when nobody trusts anybody, can anybody win this game? Featuring a hilarious performance by Oliver Platt, this is one of my favorite Christmas movies.
I don’t know why people didn’t like Martian Child more than they did, but whatever. I like it more than enough to make up for those who didn’t. Seriously, what’s not to like? John is David Gordon, a successful science fiction writer whose wife died some years before. Against his sister’s advice (played by his real sister Joan) he decides to adopt a young boy who is convinced he’s a Martian. Like K-Pax, it’s not always entirely clear that the boy isn’t a Martian, which is where a lot of the charm of this movie comes from, for me anyhow.
Finally, we have the best action movie/action movie parody (depending on how closely you want to look) ever to grace the big (or small) screen. Con Air is packed with star power: Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, Colm Meany, Steve Buscemi and Ving Rhames, in addition to our John as Vince Larkin, the U.S. Marshall overseeing the transport of a vile bunch of convicts to a new super-max facility. If you had a guy named Cyrus The Virus and a bunch of rapists and serial killers, you’d want to put them all on the same plane, right? Well, you would if also on the flight was recently-paroled Nic Cage, a former U. S. Ranger who accidentally killed a guy in a bar fight. Big, dumb and tons of fun. I. Love. This. Movie.
I didn’t forget about The Grifters, High Fidelity, Better Off Dead, Grosse Pointe Blank, Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, War, Inc., Identity, America’s Sweethearts or any of the other awesome that is John Cusack. We just didn’t have all of them in stock, so it didn’t feel right to tease you.
Jessica mentioned yesterday that we have a shelf on our wall dedicated to comical and talented Steve Martin (with one of my favorite con artist movies Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). What she didn’t tell you was that we also have a shelf–a shrine, perhaps–of Bruce Willis titles as well. We do love our themed displays here at Moviecycle.
First up is possibly my favorite Bruce Willis movie of all time: Hudson Hawk. Hawk is a highly skilled cat-burglar who finds himself in the middle of a scheme to steal several famous DaVinci pieces in an attempt to turn iron into gold. Over-the-top performances and cartoon antics abound. And singing!
Next, we’ve got three out of four of the Die Hard series: Die Hard, Die Hard With A Vengeance and Live Free Or Die Hard. In my not entirely humble opinion, the Die Hard series is the finest action franchise ever created (and I hear rumors of a fifth installment!).
Speaking of fifth, Bruce takes his wise-cracking tough-guy cop act to the future in The Fifth Element, where he becomes embroiled in a frantic race to save humanity. “Leeloo Dallas mul-ti-pass.”
In The Last Man Standing, Bruce is John Smith, gun-for-hire on the run from whatever the last thing he was into, when he comes across a town ravaged by two warring gangs, one Irish, one Italian. He takes the opportunity to work them against each other for profit and shoots the town to bits in the process in this remake of A Fistful Of Dollars, which was a remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Good times.
In The Whole Nine Yards, Bruce is Jimmy “The Tulip” Teduski, mob hitman-turned-informant trying to lay low in a suburban neighborhood, until his next-door neighbor (Matthew Perry in a not-too annoying role, really) is convinced to turn Jimmy in to his former boss. Double- and triple-crosses ensue (and a sequel that was pretty fun, too). Plus Kevin Pollak and Amanda Peet!
Bruce returns as a hitman–this time called Mr. Goodkat–in the darkly hilarious and severely under-appreciated Lucky # Slevin. Also starring Josh Hartnett, Stanley Tucci, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley and the ever adorable Lucy Liu.
So that’s our Bruce Willis shrine. As an added bonus, I notice that Bandits is also on another shelf on the new trades wall. Co-starring Billy Bob Thornton and Cate Blanchet, this loosely-fact-based crime spree movie is also a joy to watch.