We’ve been having a good time with the shelves on the Wall O’ Cool lately, devoting space to Steve Martin,  Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Tim Burton (which morphed into a Johnny Depp shelf), Bruce Willis and John Cusack, to name just a handful. It’s always interesting to sort through the various titles we have on hand to try to put one of these shelves together as sometimes there’s only about enough to fill the shelf (like in the case of Tim Burton) and other times there’s way too much to choose from (in the case of Woody Allen).

Today’s featured artist on the Wall O’ Cool falls somewhere in the middle, with several choices to be made without being completely overwhelming. Of course, there are always titles we want to use but are currently out of stock, but that’s a different story. Anyhow, enough of my yakkin’, let’s boogie.

Ladies and gentlemen, Jackie Chan. Martial arts, slapstick comedy and at well over 3000 years old, he does his own stunts! He’s like a cross between Bruce Lee and Harold Lloyd!

First Strike is the fourth installment in Jackie Chan’s Police Story series, in which Jackie is a cop hot on the trail of stolen nukes!

In Mr. Nice Guy, Chan is a well-known TV chef who also happens to be a martial arts expert (weird, right?). He becomes involved with a news reporter who has a video tape of a shady deal involving a local drug lord and now the two of them are on the run.  This is not Iron Chef!

In Rush Hour, Rush Hour 2 and Rush Hour 3, Chan teams up with the ever-annoying Chris Tucker (maybe it’s just me, but as funny as he is, I just can’t take his voice) in this trilogy of buddy cop films. The first is clearly the best of the bunch, but they are all pretty enjoyable for the action and comedy, both of which are served up in heaping helpings.

In The Tuxedo, Chan is a hapless chauffeur for a suave millionaire who has suffered and accident and lays in a hospital bed. Sent to retrieve some items from his bosses home, Chan tries on a special tuxedo that gives him super-spy powers, sending him into a world of intrigue and danger. Go go gadget tuxedo!

The Forbidden Kingdom pairs Jackie Chan and Jet Li for the first time. A young man in Boston, obsessed with kung-fu movies and Chinese culture, discovers an ancient staff in a pawn shop. After local thugs attempt to rob the pawn shop, our young hero finds himself in possession of the staff and mysteriously transported to ancient China where he embarks on a mythical quest to save the Monkey King. Not as ridiculous as it sounds, actually.

Shanghai Knights is the sequel to Shanghai Noon, which we sadly do not currently have in stock. Chan teams up with Owen Wilson in these East-meets-Old-West action comedies. In this sequel, they find themselves in England chasing after the man who murdered Chan’s father. Hilarity and wild martial arts stunts ensue!

Whatever you’re after, whether it’s laughs or martial arts wizardry, Jackie Chan delivers. And so do we! Come check us out.

On their way out onto the shelves today are over twenty Woody Allen titles, six seasons of Wings (four of them brand new and unopened), two seasons of Friends (also brand new and unopened) and one of my all-time favorite films of all time, ever.

Starting with this ginormous pile of Woody, we have way more than one shelf’s worth of stuff here. In fact, it’s almost enough to fill three shelves on the Wall O’ Cool, but after careful deliberation I’ve decided to just put them out chronologically. As with other residents of the Wall O’ Cool, we’ll rotate in new stuff as the other stuff goes home with happy customers. So here’s what we have:

Take The Money And Run: Woody Allen’s first original film as writer/director/star. Here, he plays Virgil Starkwell, a bumbling criminal trying to go straight after falling in love.

Bananas: In his second outing as writer/director/star, Woody is Fielding Mellish, a jilted lover (a common role for Woody in his films) who travels to San Marcos to get over his girlfriend. While there, he’s caught up in a revolution and eventually becomes the rebels’ leader, finally ending up captured by the FBI and put on trial for subversion.

Play It Again Sam: In his first film with Diane Keaton, Woody is Allen, a movie buff who receives romance advice from a recurring hallucination of Humphrey Bogart, while his best friends try to fix him up with a string of women with whom he completely fails to click.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask): Woody Allen takes on the subject of sex with his zany sense of humor and absurdity in this series of hysterical vignettes.

Sleeper: Woody is Miles Monroe, awakened from a 200 cryogenic sleep, finds that in the future “…all women are frigid, all men are impotent and the world is ruled by an evil dictator… A disembodied nose!” Zaniness ensues.

Love And Death: In this historical comedy, Woody is Boris Grushenko who becomes a soldier in the Russian Army during the Napoleonic Wars when his true love Sonja (Diane Keaton) plans to marry a herring merchant. Upon his return, Sonja agrees to marry him and they live in poverty until French troops invade Russia and Sonja hatches a plan to assassinate Napoleon.

Interiors: Once again working with Diane Keaton, this was Woody Allen’s first drama, exploring the dynamics of a family in crisis and proving that Woody Allen wasn’t just a comic actor/director.

Manhattan: Filmed in black and white, Woody is Issac Davis, a 42-year-old Manhattanite who “…has a job he hates, a seventeen-year-old girlfriend he doesn’t love, and a lesbian ex-wife who’s writing a tell-all book about their marriage…and whom he’d like to strangle.” Considered by many to be one of Woody Allen’s most enduring films.

That’s it for Mr. Allen and his induction into the Wall O’ Cool. We also have Stardust Memories, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose Of Cairo, Hannah And Her Sisters, Radio Days, Crimes And Misdemeanors, Alice, Bullets Over Broadway, Small Time Crooks, Melinda and Melinda, Scoop and Match Point. Whew!

Onward… We have two brand new and unopened seasons of Friends: season 1 and season 9. And then we also have the first six seasons of Wings! Seasons 3 through 6 are brand new and unopened, too!

And now we come to a movie that I simply love: Start The Revolution Without Me stars Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland as two pairs of mixed-up-at-birth twins in the early days of the French Revolution. One pair is peasant, and a bit dumb, the other pair part of the aristocracy, and really not much smarter…  Filled with sight gags and witty dialogue, this movie has never failed to entertain me over the many dozens of times I’ve seen it and shared it with friends. Plus, it’s got narration by Orson Welles!

“Paris, France, 1789. Thirty years later, under the reign of Louis XVI, longstanding grievances between aristocrat and peasant were about to boil over. The pot in which these troubles boiled was kindled with the firewood of oppression and injustice and heated by the flames that sucked the air from gasping peasants. Would the pot cool off, would it merely simmer, or would it boil over in the kitchen of France– to stain the floor of history forever?”

A few interesting flicks just traded in:

Marie Antoinette played by the bubbly Kirsten Dunst in this candy colored story of a queen bound to lose her head (as all teenagers do). Soundtrack is awesome, the visuals rock….but if you are looking for serious substance you are out of luck.

Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown about jazz in the 1930’s. Great performance by Sean Penn as Emmet Ray, an eccentric guitarist who loves two very different women, a mute laundress (Samantha Morton) and an eccentric heiress (Uma Thurman).

More unconventional romances – Julie Johnson, starring Lili Taylor and Courtney Love as friends who discover they are much more to each other; Tattoo A Love Story about a straight laced schoolteacher who falls for a tattooed bad boy and loosens up; and The Cooler starring William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alex Baldwin. Macy plays Bernie Lootz, the unluckiest man in Las Vegas who falls for Bello’s character and changes his luck.

Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, a fictional story inspired by the last days of Kurt Cobain. Doomsday “an action packed thrill ride through the beating heart of hell! ” (That is from the back of the box. I just think the cover looks super cool.)

And two kid flicks to round out the selection; The Wild and Wallace and Gromit The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a feature length film from that claymation genius Nick Park.