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.

I’ve mentioned before I have a weak spot for movies about con artists and heists and the like, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of my favorite writer/directors is David Mamet. For some, his dialogue-driven style is cumbersome, but I really love the way his characters seem to be both very real and very stylized all at the same time. And I love that he comes back to the “who’s being conned here, anyhow” well again and again. It works for me, anyhow. That, and I love that he frequently works with people like Joe Mantegna and Ricky Jay.

The following list is in no way meant to represent the best of Mamet’s work, nor a “top 8 list” of my own personal favorites. The thing is, a lot of what I wanted to choose wasn’t in stock, and since I was putting stuff on the Wall O’ Cool, I went with what we actually have right now. So this isn’t a dis to great movies like Glengarry Glen Ross, The Spanish Prisoner, Heist, State And Main, The Untouchables, Homicide or The Winslow Boy, it’s just what we happen to have in stock at the time.

One of my new favorite actors (well, recent) is Chiwetel Ejiofor (you may remember him as “The Operative” in Serenity). In Redbelt, he’s a jiu-jitsu master who has chosen to lead an honorable life rather than become involved in the prize-fighting circuit. A chance meeting with a lawyer and an off-duty cop throws him into a tangled web that forces him to do the thing he’s worked so hard to avoid. Joe Mantegna and Ricky Jay appear as fight promoters and Tim Allen is kind of hilarious as a very Chuck Norris-like action star. (written and directed by Mamet)

A lot of people didn’t really like the third (or fourth if you count correctly) installment in the Hannibal Lecter series, Hannibal, based on the book by Thomas Harris. I did, though. I felt like it stuck closely enough to the story in the book and that Julianne Moore did a pretty good job of taking over Jodi Foster’s role of Clarice Starling. Having read the book, I knew what to expect from the Lecter/Starling relationship and I really loved Gary Oldman’s villainous Mason Verger. yeesh, I get the willies just thinking about it. (screenplay by Mamet, though it was rewritten by Steve Zaillian)

Mamet’s talky-mind-games style of dialogue really shines in The Edge. After their plane crashes in the wilderness on the way to a remote photo shoot, Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin find themselves in a struggle for survival, not just against nature (and bears!) but also fear, suspicion and treachery. Good stuff here. (written by Mamet)

After a tarot reader tells him “You’re not where you belong”, Edmond (William H. Macy in a fantastic performance) leaves his wife and embarks on a dark and terrifying descent into his own personal hell. Telling you more would be a disservice. This is a hard movie to watch, but for fans of Mamet and Macy, well worth the effort.  (screenplay by Mamet, based on his play)

This one came as a bit of a surprise to me as I wasn’t aware that Mamet was involved. Ronin stars Robert DeNiro and Jean Reno as mercenary assassins, available to the highest bidder for whatever post-Cold War task the powers-that-be desire. Now, they’ve been called to France to steal a mysterious briefcase that not only are world-leaders after, but underworld-leaders, too. The Ronin must trust each other if any of them hope to get out of this alive.  (screenplay by Mamet)

Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange heat up the screen in The Postman Always Rings Twice, a steamy thriller about a drifter who finds work in a diner and falls for the owner’s wife. Deciding he’ll do anything to get her, he becomes entwined in a plot to murder the young woman’s much older husband. Bad, Jack. Bad. (screenplay by Mamet)

Filled with international intrigue and double-crosses, Spartan features Val Kilmer as a super-secret agent sent on a mission to recover the apparently kidnapped daughter of a US official from a white slavery ring. Of course, since this is a political thriller and it’s written by Mamet, is anything what it seems to be? (written by Mamet)

Finally, we come to my first exposure to Mamet’s work, and maybe my third favorite Mamet flick after Glengarry Glen Ross and Heist. I’m talking about House Of Games. Set in Seattle and starring Joe Mantegna, Ricky Jay (of course) and featuring an incredibly wooden performance from Lindsay Crouse (which I can completely overlook because the dialogue and the story are so freaking amazing), it’s the story of a psychiatrist who attempts to help a patient get out of a gambling debt, only to be reeled in to the devious world of the con man. Ultimately, she finds herself locked in a high-stakes game of with Joe and his crew. I. Love. This. Movie. (written and directed by Mamet)

We also have the first season of the highly-rated black-ops show The Unit, which was created by and is written by Mr. Mamet.

So there you go, loads of cool stuff to choose from here!

That’s right, the beloved director of such films as Ran, Sanjuro, Yojimbo, Dreams, The Hidden Fortress, Rashomon and The Seven Samurai would be one hundred years old today if he were still alive. We don’t actually have any of those titles, so I will instead distract you with this dazzling display of cinematic treasures we’ve just uncovered.

Monty Python fan? We’ve got you covered with all 14 zany crazy volumes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus! Also, Monty Python And The Holy Grail, The Meaning Of Life and Terry Gilliam’s mind-bending Brazil. And speaking of mind-bending and Terry Gilliam, how’sabout the Criterion Collection version of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Yup, we got that.

Music fans may be interested in Tenacious D: The Complete Masterworks, The Clash: West Way To The World, The Essential Clash or maybe Pink Floyd: The Dark Side Of The Moon, a 2003 release that takes an in-depth look into the creation of one of rock’s timeless recordings.

Maybe you want to get your 80s on: The Breakfast Club, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Fletch and the sequel Fletch Lives, Animal House and one of my all-time favorites: The Blues Brothers.

But wait, there’s more! Rob Zombie’s House Of 1000 Corpses, the two-disc super special edition version of Se7en, Army Of Darkness, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, The Andromeda Strain (a movie that terrified me when I saw it as a youngster) First Spaceship On Venus/Voyage To The Prehistoric Planet (double feature) and the mother of all crappy movies: Plan 9 From Outer Space (includes The Ed Wood Story with Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Ed Wood’s wife Dolores Fuller and even Vampira herself!).

Want more? Good! Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall smolder in Key Largo, Charlton Heston does what he does best in Ben Hur, Jack Nicholson chews it up in Five Easy Pieces and Chinatown, Paul Newman broods in Hud and The Hustler and Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif star in the sweeping epic Lawrence Of Arabia in a two-disc super-special limited edition.

Not finished just yet, but I’m getting there: Fan-favorites Die Hard, The Road Warrior and Fight Club, plus The Last Of The Mohicans and the classics The Conversation (later remade as Enemy Of The State) and High Noon starring Gary Cooper. A couple anime’ titles: Amon Saga and Appleseed, a tongue-in-cheek look back at “educational” films of yore in Social Engineering 201 (which touches on classic 16 mm films shown to schoolchildren from the 1940s to the 1970s like It Must Be The Neighbors and What To Do On A Date), and finally, a blaxploitation triple feature: Bad Azz Muthaz featuring Black Punisher (Jim Brown), Tattoo Connection (Jim Kelly) and Kid Vengeance (Fred Williamson). Ohhh yeah.

There’s a lot more than that, but my typin’ fingers hurt, so come on in and take a look at the Wall O’ Cool and see what strikes your fancy.