I wasn’t tagged by SamuraiFrog to participate in the Alphabet Movie Meme, but you know me and memes…

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. Return of the Jedi belongs under “R,” not “S” as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with “S.” Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under “R,” not “I” as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Conversely, all films in the Lord of the Rings series belong under “L” and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under “C,” as that’s what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

 

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.

 

[Update: Doh! I forgot to link back to Blog Cabins as requested. If any of my taggees happen to amble by, I hope you’ll see this and modify your posts accordingly… Sorry, BC!]

 

6. If you’re selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

Okay, for the sake of this little exercise I am going to do my best to choose titles you may not expect from me, given my usual obsessions on this blog. Which means, no Star Wars and no Indiana Jones-related titles. I will, in fact, try to avoid the Lucas-Spielberg ouevre. Just for the sake of variety, of course…

• American Beauty
• The Big Easy
• The Cat’s Meow (a nifty and virtually unseen period film by Peter Bogdanovich about William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and Charlie Chaplin)
• Dragonslayer
• Excalibur
• The Fabulous Baker Boys
• Gunga Din
• Hopscotch
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• The Jewel of the Nile
• King Solomon’s Mines
• Lawrence of Arabia
• Mother Lode
• Nate and Hayes (A miserably bad movie, but the first thing that came to mind for the letter “N”)
• The Outsiders
• The Pit and the Pendulum (I just watched this one for Halloween, so it’s fresh on the mind…)
• Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (No, really! Here’s the IMDB entry…)
• Rebel Without a Cause
• Sneakers
• Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swan
• The Untouchables
• Vertigo
• Witness
• X-Men (obvious, I know)
• Young Sherlock Holmes (I’m brushing the edges of that Spielberg territory I said I wouldn’t violate, but YSH, despite its Spielbergian tone — he produced it — was directed by Barry Levinson)
• Zardoz

And now I’m supposed to tag five people… if you get tagged and you don’t want to play along, no hard feelings, okay? I’m just doing as I’m told here. And the lucky taggees are:

Brian
Ilya
Kisintin
Karen
Puffbird

Have fun, kids! And anyone else who wants to play with this one, feel free… it is suprisingly strenuous to come up with movies corresponding to certain letters… Q, for instance… S and R, no problem, thousands of titles work, but Q? Arg…