Recent releases just arriving in the store include Lymelife, O’Horten and Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant. We also have brand new copies of The Twilight Saga: New Moon in the 2-disc special edition package.

Cool new trades keep coming in this week, like this three-fer of hyperviolence: Romper Stomper, the 2-disc super-amazing special edition of Fight Club and A Clockwork Orange. More musical goodies with The Commitments, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols and This Is Spinal Tap.

How about all six seasons of The Sopranos? Would that do it for ya?

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.

Unless you’re Julius Caesar, of course. In that case it’d be more like “Hey, watch your back there, dude!”

We’ve got a whole lot of really cool stuff going up on the shelves today, some of it unopened and brand new (old titles, new copies)! Titles like A Beautiful Mind, The Clearing, Cradle 2 The Grave, Michael Clayton, The Craft, A Mighty Heart, Zodiac, Titan A. E., Uncle Buck, Trading Places and a ton more. Lots of not-new stuff going out too, like The Ninth Gate, Great Expectations, The James Bond Collection Volume 1 (seven titles: Dr. No; Goldfinger; The Man With The Golden Gun; The Spy Who Loved Me; License To Kill; Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies), The Trip To Bountiful, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and lots lots more!

Over the weekend I watched a few movies and realized at the end of it that they were all docudramas, movies based on real people and events. Not a huge surprise, as it’s one of my favorite genres.  I watched Bonnie And Clyde, Amelia and Monster. The only one I hadn’t seen before was Amelia, starring Hilary Swank as Amelia Erhart, one of the world’s favorite missing persons. It’s a fascinating story and I thought the movie was well done, without attempting to explain or speculate about her disappearance. See it if you get the chance.

We’ve got a shelf on the Wall O’Cool right now dedicated to stories about real people and events:

Breach tells the story of Robert Hanssen, played to creepy perfection by Chris Cooper, who sold secrets to the Russians during his 25-year tenure with the FBI.

In Erin Brockovich, Julia Roberts plays the woman who helped bring down a power company accused of polluting a small town’s water supply.

Party Monster stars Macauley Culkin and Seth Green in very different roles for both of them, as flamboyant “club kids” Michael Alig and James St. James respectively. In the late 80s and early 90s, they hosted insane parties in clubs around New York City, did lots of drugs and ultimately killed one of their roommates.

Frost/Nixon is a fascinating look at the drama around and behind the scenes of David Frost’s post-Watergate interviews with Richard Nixon.

W. is another political biopic that’s fascinating to watch, no matter what your politics are. Chronicling the rise and downward slide of George W. Bush, it’s well worth your time.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is fantastic as Truman Capote in Capote. In 1959, two small-time criminals kill an entire family during a break-in. After their arrest, Truman Capote plans to write a New Yorker article about the crime, but ultimately decides to write the book In Cold Blood instead (a book I read when I was 12 or so and which fueled a life-long interest in true crime novels and movies). It’s interesting to see this movie alongside the film version of the book if you get the chance.

Shattered Glass tells the amazing story of journalist Stephen Glass, a writer for the prestigious The New Republic in the mid-90s.  By the end of his time there, it was found that 27 of the 41 articles he’d written for them were partially or completely fabricated. Hayden Christensen is whiny and annoying throughout most of the movie, but this is offset by the story and the rest of the cast, including Chloe Sevigny, Peter Sarsgaard, Hank Azaria, Steve Zahn, Rosario Dawson and the adorable Melanie Lynskey.

Bringing up the rear (pun slightly intended) of this collection is The Notorious Bettie Page, the story the number one pin-up girl of the 1950s. Told in flashback style as Bettie waits to testify before a Senate sub-committee investigating the effects of pornographic material on American adolescents and juveniles, it’s equal parts sexy, sad and funny.

Plenty of stuff to see here, folks. And if you get this coupon, it’s all 20% off for a couple more days!