I’m new to the blogging game, so this is my first experience of a meme, which is, as I understand it, is kind of “pass-it-on” deal where lots of bloggers perform a simple task and then ask a bunch of others to follow suit. Not sure what the end product is apart from a community of people racking the same part of their brains at the same time, but let’s go with it and see what happens.
The task is to produce an alphabetical list of favourite films, one for each letter of the alphabet, and then pass the meme on to some others. Bob Rehak over at the wonderful Graphic Engine has very kindly infected me and invited me to spread the infection, so here goes. Bob reckons that blogging is like sex, since “when you link to someone, you link to everyone he or she has linked to.” The crucial difference, Bob, is that I can blog during a quiet lunch hour in my office while eating a sandwich.
Some tricky choices here. The Ws didn’t allow space for Werckmeister Harmonies or Jia Zhang-ke’s The World (two of my favourites of the 21st century), as I wanted to acknowledge two films that were important in my own youthful cinephilic development. You’ll notice that I’ve cheated. The column on the left represents the “respectable” list, and the right hand column includes the fun movies that I’ve enjoyed over the years, so there are some top notch double-bills here. That said, my taste rarely ascends to the highbrow, so there isn’t a lot of disparity here. Generally speaking, while the lefties are tasteful, unquestionable works of art, the righties are connected to a particularly fond or vivid memory. This is not a canon. Who needs another canon?
- L’Avventura / An American Werewolf in London
- The Bill Douglas Trilogy / The Big Sleep
- Cafe Lumière / Come Drink With Me
- Days of Heaven / Drunken Master II
- Elephant / Evil Dead II
- Fallen Angels (WKW) / Frankenstein + Bride of Frankenstein (if I may…)
- Goodbye Dragon Inn / Gun Crazy
- Happy Together / Highlander
- I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang / The Invisible Man
- Jour de Fete / Jaws
- Kwaidan / King Kong
- The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp / The Lady Vanishes
- Le Mépris / Monty Python and the Holy Grail
- News from Home
- Onibaba / Once Upon a Time in the West
- The Passion of Joan of Arc / Playtime
- Querelle / Q The Winged Serpent
- Rope / Rushmore
- Satantango / Starship Troopers
- 2001: A Space Odyssey / Totoro
- Unforgiven / Unbreakable
- Vertigo / Le Voyage dans la Lune
- Weekend / The Wages of Fear
- (I haven’t seen enough films beginning with X t o make a proper choice. If pressed, I might have to resort to X-Men 2, Xtro or X-The Unknown. And nobody wants that to happen…)
- Yojimbo / Young and Innocent
- A Zed and Two Noughts / Zelig
It only took a couple of months for me to break my pledge never to fill up a blog with lists. I am so weak…
Now, the following are cordially invited to have a go at the same task: AP at the Movies, Bobby Peru, Christopher Banks and Kirsten.
Spectacular Attractions 