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.

Greetings dear readers and happy Mother’s Day. I’m here in “the office” today so Jessica can have her day (I have been comped with a lovely bacon/spinach/feta quiche, so I’m not complaining at all). In honor of Mother’s Day, here’s a Take Five on the theme of Movie Mothers.

Ralpie’s Mother in A Christmas Story is probably the worrying, gently nurturing mom we all had, or wish we had. When she tells Ralphie’s brother Randy not to play with his food and that starving people would love to have it, you know she’s just thinking of her son’s welfare. And the same is true when she breaks Ralphie’s heart and denies his request for an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle by saying “No, you’ll shoot your eye out.” Never mind that she turns out to be pretty much right about that.

Dan O’Banion wrote Dark Star in 1974. It’s a sci-fi/comedy cult favorite about a ship in the far reaches of space whose crew has unwittingly brought a deadly alien aboard the ship that proceeds to run amok and kill most of the crew. In 1979, he did it again, but Alien was quite a bit less funny. In both movies, however, the computer that runs the ship is called Mother. She’s a lot nicer in Dark Star than she is in this scene from Alien:

Ripley: Mother! I’ve turned the cooling unit back on. Mother!
Mother: The ship will automatically destruct in T minus five minutes.
Ripley: You… BITCH!

Jay And Silent Bob’s Mothers may not have been the best, but I like to think they shaped their sons into… yeah, that’s a load. The opening scene in Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back is just really funny to me, though I’m gonna have to do some editing for language (big surprise there). For the record, no babies were harmed in the filming of this scene:

Silent Bob’s Mother: Bobby Boy, stay here while mommy picks up the free cheese, ‘kay? Here, this will keep the sun out of your eyes. [she puts a baseball cap on his head backwards]
Silent Bob’s Mother: You be good, now. [she walks into the store, then Jay and his Mom arrive]
Jay’s Mother: Alright, don’t you f***in’ move you little sh*t machine. Your Momma’s going to try to score.  [she starts to walk into the store]
Passerby: What the hell? ‘Scuse me. Who’s watching these babies?
Jay’s Mother: Uh… the fat one’s watchin’ the little one?
Passerby: Oh yeah, nice parenting. Leave ‘em out here like that and see what happens.
Jay’s Mother: YO, F*** YOU YOU F***ING SQUARE!
Passerby: Oh yeah, keep on truckin’!
Jay’s Mother: [to baby Jay] Did ya hear that f***in’ guy tellin’ me how to f***n’ raise ya? What a motherf***er, man! Who the f*** does that f***in’ guy think he is? What’s the worst f***in’ thing that can f***in’ happen to ya just standing outside a f***in’ store, right? F***! [Jay's mother walks into the record store, leaving baby Jay and baby Silent Bob in their strollers]
Baby Jay: F***… f***… f***… f***…

My wife loves-LOVES-Adam Baldwin. I think he’s pretty swell, too, and I really enjoy him in Firefly (and Serenity), Chuck and in the last few episodes of Angel. What I didn’t remember, because I haven’t seen it in a million years, is that Adam Baldwin is also the lean, mean, killing machine known as Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket. I’m thinking I need to revisit this classic war/anti-war movie. This quote from Animal Mother sums him up pretty well: “What do I think about the U.S. involvement in the war? We should win it.”

And finally, my favorite Mother of them all: Dan Aykroyd as the paranoid conspiracy buff Darren “Mother” Roskow in Sneakers. One of my all-time favoritest movies ever, Sneakers is all about a super-secret code-breaking machine and the people who are out to get it. Switcheroos, con-games, sneaky spy stuff, comedy… it’s all here. And the cast! Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, David Strathairn, River Phoenix, Mary McDonnell, Donal Logue, James Earl Jones, Ben Kingsley and, of course, Dan Aykroyd.  “We got bupkis! We turn ourselves in now, they’ll give us twenty years in the electric chair!”

There you have it, a Take Five look at Movie Mothers. What? Oh, you were expecting something a little more traditional? Yeah… no.

Happy Mother’s Day all you moms and wives out there!

Whoo boy!

Prozac Nation, Requiem For A Dream, Boogie Nights, Boondock Saints, Goodfellas (2 disc special edition), Full Metal Jacket, The Silence Of The Lambs (2 disc collector’s edition), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life, a couple double features: Footloose/Flashdance and Signs/The Village, Lawrence Of Arabia, Anne Of Green Gables, The Philadelphia Story, Singin’ In The Rain (2 disc special edition), seasons 1 and 2 of Heroes, the Brit-com Peep Show and a whole lot more.