…”Do I feel lucky?”

We do, that’s a fact. We’ve got so many Clint Eastwood films here in the store we’ve  given the man his own shelf on the Wall O’ Cool.  Whether he’s The Man With No Name or he’s the .44-Magnum-toting, authority-bucking Harry Callahan, you gotta love Clint.

Dirty Harry is one of my all-time favorite films. Loosely inspired by the Zodiac Killer who terrorized San Francisco in the late ’60s and into the ’70s, this film introduced us to the the ultimate take-no-crap cop: Harry Callahan. The only thing Harry hates more than criminals is, well, everyone else. You definitely do not want to get on the wrong side of Harry’s code of honor.

And then there’s the followup, Magnum Force, in which Harry goes after a rogue group of vigilante cops who are taking the law into their own hands and picking off the bad guys that slip through the system’s cracks. Of course, Harry hates rogue vigilante cops maybe even more than criminals and, well, everyone else. Plus, this is the film that contains one of my favorite quotes ever: “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

One thing I was surprised to discover was just how many Clint Eastwood films he’s directed as well. The Outlaw Josey Wales is just one of those. Josey Wales is essentially The Man With No Name (from his old Spaghetti Western days), only this time around he has a name. After his avenging his family’s murder, Josey Wales is on run as a pack of killers hunts him down. Along the way he picks up a rag-tag group of hangers-on (including long-time girlfriend Sondra Locke, who ended up costarring with him several more times in the ’70s and ’80s) that he feels compelled to protect.

Clint didn’t do another western for 9 years after Josey Wales, not until 1986’s Pale Rider (again directed by himself). As a man known only as “Preacher”, he  goes up against an evil mining boss bent on driving the local independent miners out of the area. The boss hires some killers who work for whomever pays, and he pays in gold. On the other hand, Preacher pays in lead.

Up next we’ve got a couple of political thrillers featuring Clint on both sides of the law. In Absolute Power, he plays a career thief named Luther Whitney who witnesses a murder which could spell scandal for the President of the United States and finds himself in a game of cat-and-mouse with local cops and the Secret Service. Also stars Gene Hackman and Ed Harris and is once again directed by Mr. Eastwood.

Speaking of the Secret Service, In The Line Of Fire has our man playing veteran agent Frank Horrigan who has the unfortunate distinction of having been unable to protect JFK on that fateful day in November 1963. Now, many years later, that failure still haunts him as he’s drawn into a plot to kill the current President. The would-be assassin, a former-CIA agent played with creepy brilliance by John Malkovich, taunts him by phone and teases him with clues, giving Horrigan the chance at redemption he so desperately craves.

In True Crime, Clint is Steve Everett, a boozing, skirt-chasing reporter whose job is on the line when he’s assigned to interview a death row inmate in the hours before his scheduled execution. After just a little research, Everett is convinced that an innocent man is about to die and it becomes a race against time. Of course, when you’re a drunk, a bad dad and you’ve slept with the wife of your boss, who’s gonna listen to you? Costars Denis Leary and James Woods.

And to round things out we have Million Dollar Baby, another film directed by Clint, in which he plays trainer Frankie Dunn who is quick to growl “I don’t train girls!” Of course, when the girl is Hilary Swank and won’t quit showing up at the gym, what’s a cranky old guy to do but take her in? Costarring Morgan Freeman as the gym caretaker and non-cranky old guy. Clint Eastwood also composed music for this one. Is there anything he can’t do?

So that wraps up the Clint Eastwood shrine on our Wall O’ Cool. There were some also-rans that didn’t make the cut, like The Bridges Of Madison County, Blood Work, Flags Of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima and Space Cowboys, not to mention titles we’re out of right now, like Gran Torino, Unforgiven, High Plains Drifter…. the list really truly goes on and on. Come on in and check it out. We might just make your day.

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.