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.

The sun is out and the streets are eerily quiet today. Is there a holiday I wasn’t informed about today?

Got a couple of new trades in today that you may be interested in: The classic spaghetti western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, an incredibly young Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate which, I am embarrassed to admit, I’ve never seen. We also have the oft-requested Ichi The Killer and a Dario Argento horror classic Cat O’Nine Tails (which sounds way cooler in Itallian: Il Gatto A Nove Code), starring the impossibly young James Franciscus and Karl Malden as a reporter and a blind crossword puzzle writer hot on the trail of a murderous madman!  And, as I was typing this up we got in a copy of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, and a brand new unopened Cheats, a high-school comedy about, well, a group of near-professional cheaters starring, among others, Jewel Staite (Firefly) and Mary Tyler Moore. I am actually shaking my head as I type this.

Anyhow, while you’re out and about enjoying this amazing weather, why not wander into the store. And bring us cupcakes while you’re at it.