My Movie Alphabet

Here's something fairly inconsequential for you.

This is a meme I saw on Rol's blog late last year. Rol heard about it here, but I believe it originated from here. In any case, the idea is to select a favourite film to represent each letter of the alphabet. As I have lots of favourite films and a fairly temperamental set of taste buds, I've included runners-up in my list. This was to overcome the judgement-call paralysis that hampered my previous attempt.

If I didn't do it this way I wouldn't have made it past the first consonant.


Annie Hall (Runners up: An American Werewolf in London, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension)

The Big Lebowski (Runners up: Batman Begins, Blazing Saddles and Brazil)

Citizen Kane (Runners up: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Chinatown and Casino)

Dirty Harry (Runners up: Dawn of the Dead, Duck Soup and Down by Law)

Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (Runners up: El Topo, Escape From New York and The Empire Strikes Back)

F For Fake (Runners up: Fight Club, Fitzcarraldo and Fistful of Dollars)

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (Runner up: Ghostbusters, Get Carter and The Great Dictator)

Holy Mountain (Runner up: High Fidelity)

It's a Wonderful Life

Jaws (Runner up: Jackie Brown)

Kiss Me Deadly (Runners up: King Kong [1933] and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang)

Love and Death (Runner up: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and L'Âge d'Or)

Manhattan (Runners up: Momento, The Magnificent Ambersons and Monty Python's Life of Brian)

North By North West (Runners up: Night of the Hunter and Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!)

The Outlaw Josey Wales (Runner up: Once Upon a Time in the West)

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Runners up: Point Blank, The Producers and Paris, Texas)

Quadrophenia (Runner up: Q - The Winged Serpent)

Raiders of the Lost Ark (Runners up: Repoman, Rear Window and Reservoir Dogs)

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (Runners up: Spider-Man 2, Santa Sangre and The Searchers)

This is Spinal Tap (Runner up: Touch of Evil, The Thing and The Third Man)

The Usual Suspects (Runners up: Un Chien Andalou and Unforgiven)

Vertigo (Runner up: Videodrome)

Withnail & I (Runners up: W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism, When Harry Met Sally and Wings of Desire)

X-Men 2

Young Frankenstein

Zelig (Runners up: Zero Effect, Zoolander and Zodiac)

Film Meme

Here's a movie meme from Avitable, via the ever-dependable Rol:

Entertainment Weekly came up with a list of the top 100 movies of the last 25 years. I thought I'd start a meme, much like that one going around where you highlight the books that you've read or tried to read.

The ones in bold are ones I've watched.

The ones in bold and italics are ones I've enjoyed and have watched (or plan to watch) more than once.

If it's not in bold but has a pair of bold stars after the title then it's a film I plan to see soon.

If it's in bold and there's a ?!? after the title then it's a film that belongs to that deeply personal and highly subjective genre, film merde (French for "cinematic shitefest).

I don't make things easy for myself.

1. Pulp Fiction (1994)
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03)
3. Titanic (1997) ?!?
4. Blue Velvet (1986)
5. Toy Story (1995)
6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
7. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
8. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
9. Die Hard (1988)
10. Moulin Rouge (2001)
11. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
12. The Matrix (1999)
13. GoodFellas (1990)
14. Crumb (1995) **
15. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
16. Boogie Nights (1997)
17. Jerry Maguire (1996)
18. Do the Right Thing (1989)
19. Casino Royale (2006)
20. The Lion King (1994)
21. Schindler's List (1993)
22. Rushmore (1998)
23. Memento (2001)
24. A Room With a View (1986)
25. Shrek (2001)
26. Hoop Dreams (1994)
27. Aliens (1986)
28. Wings of Desire (1988)
29. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
30. When Harry Met Sally... (1989)
31. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
32. Fight Club (1999)
33. The Breakfast Club (1985)
34. Fargo (1996)
35. The Incredibles (2004)
36. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
37. Pretty Woman (1990) ?!?
38. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
39. The Sixth Sense (1999)
40. Speed (1994)
41. Dazed and Confused (1993) - how can you never have seen this?? It's great, I have it on the shelf.
42. Clueless (1995)
43. Gladiator (2000)
44. The Player (1992)
45. Rain Man (1988) ?!?
46. Children of Men (2006)
47. Men in Black (1997)
48. Scarface (1983)
49. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
50. The Piano (1993) ?!?
51. There Will Be Blood (2007) **
52. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988)
53. The Truman Show (1998)
54. Fatal Attraction (1987)
55. Risky Business (1983)
56. The Lives of Others (2006)
57. There’s Something About Mary (1998)
58. Ghostbusters (1984)
59. L.A. Confidential (1997)
60. Scream (1996)
61. Beverly Hills Cop (1984) ?!?
62. sex, lies and videotape (1989)
63. Big (1988)
64. No Country For Old Men (2007)
65. Dirty Dancing (1987)
66. Natural Born Killers (1994)
67. Donnie Brasco (1997)
68. Witness (1985)
69. All About My Mother (1999)
70. Broadcast News (1987)
71. Unforgiven (1992)
72. Thelma & Louise (1991)
73. Office Space (1999)
74. Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
75. Out of Africa (1985)
76. The Departed (2006)
77. Sid and Nancy (1986)
78. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
79. Waiting for Guffman (1996) **
80. Michael Clayton (2007) **
81. Moonstruck (1987)
82. Lost in Translation (2003)
83. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987)
84. Sideways (2004)
85. The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005) **
86. Y Tu Mamá También (2002)
87. Swingers (1996)
88. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
89. Breaking the Waves (1996)
90. Napoleon Dynamite (2004) ?!?
91. Back to the Future (1985)
92. Menace II Society (1993)
93. Ed Wood (1994)
94. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
95. In the Mood for Love (2001)
96. Far From Heaven (2002)
97. Glory (1989)
98. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
99. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
100. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999)

My first impression was mild surprise and a strange sense of gratification at seeing guilty pleasure flicks like The Naked Gun, Evil Dead 2 and South Park: Bigger, Louder and Uncut make it on the list. I half expected Tremors, Bubba Ho-Tep and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai to turn up, too.

That soon gave way to a sense of bafflement, however. It wasn't so much the inclusion of films that annoy the Hell out of me. I dislike Titanic, despise Pretty Woman and detest Dirty Dancing, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be on the list. I'm not a complete megalomaniac, after all. Only an incomplete megalomaniac.

No, what really perplexed me was the inclusion of films that were good over films that were great. As Rol said: "Natural Born Killers over True Romance and Reservoir Dogs? Boogie Nights instead of Magnolia?" There's other examples, too. Sid & Nancy instead of Repoman? The Departed over Casino? Donnie Brasco in place of The Usual Suspects? Frankly, some of the choices have baffled the blue bejesus out of me.

And as for the whereabouts of The Big Lebowski and Withnail & I? Don't get me started...

Books, etc

I don't normally do these things, but here's a book meme I nabbed from Rol.

The rules are simple: highlight in bold the books you've read, bold-and-italicize the books you'd like to read again and put a line through the books you started-but-never-managed-to-finish.

Whatever's left are books you haven't read.

Here goes:

* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel
* Anna Karenina
* Crime and Punishment
* Catch-22
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion
* Life of Pi : a novel
* The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote
* Moby Dick
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre
* The Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
* War and Peace
* Vanity Fair
* The Time Traveler’s Wife
* The Iliad
* Emma
* The Blind Assassin
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations
* American Gods
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
* Atlas Shrugged
* Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
* Memoirs of a Geisha
* Middlesex
* Quicksilver
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
* The Canterbury Tales
* The Historian : a novel
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Love in the Time of Cholera
* Brave New world
* The Fountainhead
* Foucault’s Pendulum
* Middlemarch
* Frankenstein
* The Count of Monte Cristo
* Dracula
* A Clockwork Orange
* Anansi Boys
* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray
* Mansfield Park
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* To the Lighthouse
* Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist
* Gulliver’s Travels
* Les Misérables
* The Corrections
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury
* Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
* The God of Small Things
* A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
* Cryptonomicon
* Neverwhere
* A Confederacy of Dunces
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel
* Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
* Cloud Atlas
* The Confusion
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey
* The Catcher in the Rye
* On the Road
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame
* Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island
* David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers

Looking at it, I can't help but feel an initial twang of intellectual insecurity. Surely I should have read more than that? There's certainly plenty of books in the list I'd like to read at some point. For one thing, I'd like to read more Dickens: I read Bleak House in my early 20s and Oliver Twist when I was about 11. As I approach the closing overs of my third decade I'd like to read some more.

Then I look at the list again and don't feel so bad.

As Rol said:

The only thing that disturbs me about whoever put this list together is that it features THREE books by Neil Bloody Gaiman, yet nothing by Douglas Coupland, Haruki Marukami, Jack London, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Chuck Palahniuk, Iain Banks, or any number of other writers I might name.

Personally, I don't have a problem with Neil Gaiman - he's an immensely talented and charismatic fella. But the inclusion of three of his novels (American Gods, Anansi Boys and Neverwhere) is probably a bit much. A certain James Augustine Aloysius Joyce also has three books on the list. Does that mean that the author of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had no greater an impact on literature than the author of Sandman, Violent Cases and Secret Origins Special #1?

I also thought it odd that both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were on the list. I learnt about Ayn Rand and Objectivism via Rorschach from Watchmen and Steve Ditko comics, so I can't help but feel that two Ayn Rand novels are two too many. If you're an Ayn Rand fan, though, try not to judge me too harshly. I know what you guys are like.

Like Rol, though, I can't help but notice what's been left out of the list. As well as the authors he mentions, if the list also included - say - some Phil K Dick and some Robert Anton Wilson then there'd be a lot more bold type up there.

Probably some italics, too.