Chris Cagle at Category D tagged me for the Alphabet Meme. Here are the rules:
1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.*
2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.
3. Thanks to some clarification by The Siren, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release.
4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."
5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.
6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.
I have rejected Cagle's new guideline that with foreign titles one should "rely on the original title if in Roman alphabet, the translated title otherwise." This rule had me making even more tough choices than I wished, so I threw it out. I've cheated, in fact, by using foreign titles or translations whenever it helped with difficult letters, tough choices, etc. My guilt is nil.
And to make the choosing even less painful, I have created two lists: One satisfies the theme of this website, the other lists more general favorites. Of course, MANY of my favorite films -- a ridiculous number of them beginning with the letters "M", "T", and "G" -- are left off of both lists. And if a film got listed on one list, I tried to list a different film on the second list.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder) Black Ice (Brakhage) City Lights (Chaplin) Dance Party USA (Katz) Edvard Munch (Watkins) Frownland (Bronstein) The Gleaners and I (Varda) The Hours and Times (Munch) Isle of Flowers (Furtado) Jo Jo at the Gate of Lions (Sjogren) Killer of Sheep (Burnett) Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Jost) Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren) Night of the Living Dead (Romero) O Dreamland (Anderson) Pather Panchali (Ray) Les Quatre Cents Coups (Truffaut) Rome, Open City (Rossellini) Shadows (Cassavetes) Thirteen (Williams) The Unchanging Sea (Griffith) Les Vampires (Feuillade) The Whole Shootin' Match (Pennell) Xala (Sembene) Zorns Lemma (Frampton)
Harrill's list:
The Awful Truth Best Years of Our Lives, The Chinatown Diary of a Country Priest Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind The Fly (Cronenberg) Grand Illusion The Hours and Times Isle of Flowers Jacquot Killer of Sheep Love Affair The Mortal Storm Night of the Living Dead Ordet The Parallax View Les Quatre cents coups Ruggles of Red Gap Starship Troopers Tender Mercies Unforgiven Vivre Sa Vie Woman Under the Influence Xanadu Yi yi Zero for Conduct
Finally, I want to hear from David Lowery, AJ Schnack, Darren Hughes, Alison Willmore, and Karina Longworth.