Favorite Films A-Z

Last week, Fletch over at Blog Cabins created a meme that has been spreading through the movie-loving blogosphere like an Angelina Jolie-Jennifer Aniston catfight rumor. I’ve been tagged to participate at least twice, by The Film Doctor and He Shot Cyrus. So, here we go …

The meme: List your favorite films alphabetically – picking one film for each letter of the alphabet. Simple, right? Until you start making decisions. To make it less maddening, some bloggers have tried to reduce the pool of available films, like Larry Aydlette at Welcome to L.A., who selected from noirs, thrillers and detective movies only.

Me? I approached it with a desert-island-list mentality. In other words, I wanted the films to be watchable more than classic (you know what I mean), and I wanted the collection of 26 films to cover the genres as much as possible. Thus, the movies had to be from my DVD collection, because otherwise they aren’t favorites.

Here’s how it played out:

All The President’s Men
Bull Durham
Chinatown
Die Hard
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Field Of Dreams
The Great Escape
Heat
Indian Summer
JFK
To Kill A Mockingbird
Lawrence Of Arabia
The Magnificent Seven
The New World
On The Waterfront
Parenthood
Quiz Show
Rear Window
Star Wars
The Thin Red Line
Unbreakable
Vertigo
When We Were Kings
X (no entry)
Y (no entry)
Zodiac

I’m pleased with my list. It includes some of my all-time favorites (All The President’s Men, The Great Escape, On The Waterfront, Star Wars), two Hitchcocks (Rear Window and Vertigo), two Malicks (The New World and The Thin Red Line), a sports movie (Bull Durham), a Western (The Magnificent Seven), a noir (Chinatown), a super-hero movie (Unbreakable), a documentary (When We Were Kings), an epic (Lawrence Of Arabia), an action classic (Die Hard), a love story (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind), a Steve Martin comedy with heart (Parenthood) and a mostly-unknown-movie-I-never-grow-tired-of-that-happens-to-include-Diane-Lane (Indian Summer). It’s a good list. I could stay quite happy on my desert island with that collection.

Painful omissions? Letter M was the hardest because it pitted my favorite Western with my favorite King of Cool (The Magnificent Seven) against The Muppet Movie, an overwhelming childhood favorite. Leaving out Kermit & Co feels wrong, but I decided I could live without The Muppet Movie so long as I had episodes of TV’s The Muppet Show, and the meme doesn’t exclude that. So that’s how I got around that one. Beyond that, it was most difficult to leave out those ‘little movies’ that aren’t all that great but that never fail to deliver. We all have ‘em. Beautiful Girls, Diner and Elf are three of mine. And while picking The Great Escape for G was a no-brainer, it was a punch to the gut to see The Godfather, The Graduate and Groundhog Day fall by the wayside.

Now, as part of the meme process, I’m supposed to tag at least five people to participate and keep this thing going. Instead, I’d like to encourage anyone and everyone to take part.

If you’re a blogger, fill out your list and link back to Blog Cabins. Cooler readers, leave your lists in the comments section below, as a link or as text.

Do it! Now! Especially you “lurkers” (regular readers but infrequent commenters) like Brew, T-mouse and others. You know who you are. Join in!