The Alphabet Meme - Double the Fun

I must enjoy these list things more than I'm willing to admit, for it's been rather enjoyable to put together an entry in this meme, which originated at Blog Cabins (thanks to Thom for the tag). There are rules (see below), but I've broken the very first one by deciding to frame this as a series of 26 double-bills: some logical, some incongruous, some wilfully perverse, all of which I'd pay to see.

Angst essen Seele auf (1974, West Germany, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)/The Apartment (1960, US, Billy Wilder) - Acute social commentaries in very different clothing.
Baara (1978, Mali, Souleymane Cissé)/Back to the Future (1985, US, Robert Zemeckis) - Malian social realism to finely-wrought Hollywood escapism: a pretty good primer on cinema's range of possibilities.

Chinatown (1974, US, Roman Polanski)/Le Corbeau (1943, France, Henri-Georges Clouzot) - A pair of jaded worldviews.

The Dead (1987, UK/Ireland/US, John Huston)/Destry Rides Again (1939, US, George Marshall) - A film that defines 'elegiac' in more than one sense, and the funniest western of them all.

L'Eau froide (1994, France, Olivier Assayas)/El Espiritú de la colmena (1973, Spain, Victor Erice) - The most wonderful party scene committed to film, and one of the most haunting films of the 1970s (Spirit of the Beehive).

Footlight Parade (1933, US, Lloyd Bacon)/Flirting (1990, Australia, John Duigan) - Busby Berkeley! Jimmy Cagney! Joan Blondell! And the most sweetly romantic of coming-of-age films.

The Godfather (1972, US, Francis Ford Coppola)/Goodfellas (1990, US, Martin Scorsese) - Enough mob action to go ungently into the night.

Horse Feathers (1932, US, Norman Z. McLeod)/His Girl Friday (1940, US, Howard Hawks) - The gamut of classic American film comedy, from the anarchic style of the Marx Brothers to the high polish of Hawks.

The Invisible Man (1933, US, James Whale)/Inside Man (2006, US, Spike Lee) - I'm really quite pleased with my cleverness here; neither film is the director's best, but this is a delicious combo.

Jaws (1975, US, Steven Spielberg)/Journal d'un curé de campagne (1950, France, Robert Bresson) - Now that I think about it, you'd really have to flip these around: there's no way I'd be able to handle Bresson after Brody and Bruce.
The Killing (1956, US, Stanley Kubrick)/Key Largo (1948, US, John Huston) - A tense, claustrophobic combo.

The Lady Vanishes (1938, UK, Alfred Hitchcock)/The Lady Eve (1941, US, Preston Sturges) - There's not a lady in sight, when you think about it.
Le Mépris (1963, France, Jean-Luc Godard)/Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, UK, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam) - I'm not sure whether Godard or the Monty Python troupe would take greater offence at this pairing.
La Nuit américaine (1973, France, François Truffaut)/Notting Hill (1999, UK, Roger Michell) - A pair about the ways in which we love movies and their stars; the second is pure fluff, but very well done fluff.

Out of the Past (1947, US, Jacques Tourneur)/Out of Sight (1998, US, Steven Soderbergh) - Straight-up noir, and noir with a chaser of humorous romance.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964, France, Jacques Demy)/Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2002, US, Gore Verbinski) - Oh come on, you know this would be a fun evening!
Quai des brûmes (1938, France, Marcel Carné)/The Quiet Earth (1985, New Zealand, Geoff Murphy) - Both, in their different ways, about the depths of loneliness.
La Règle du jeu (1939, France, Jean Renoir)/The Red Shoes (1948, UK, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) - Out-and-out perfection, in two very different registers: stunning black and white and delirious colour.

Shaun of the Dead (2004, UK, Edgar Wright)/Singin' in the Rain (1952, US, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly) - This was awfully hard to resist: two utterly different films made with skill and humour, and both in their ways absolutely in love with the movies that inspired them.
Twelve Angry Men (1957, US, Sidney Lumet)/Todo sobre mi madre (1999, Spain, Pedro Almodóvar) - One's sober, the other's sobre; Lumet to Almodóvar, another pair that gives a sense of cinema's possibilities.
Utu (1983, New Zealand, Geoff Murphy)/Ugetsu Monogatari (1953, Japan, Kenji Mizoguchi) - Mizoguchi is about the last director you'd associate with a quadruple-barreled shotgun, as wielded by Utu's Bruno Lawrence; this is an especially unsubtle/subtle pairing.

Vertigo (1958, US, Alfred Hitchcock)/Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1953, France, Jacques Tati) - After Hitch's icy take on obsession, you'd need a laugh, wouldn't you?

Walkabout (1970, Australia, Nicolas Roeg)/Winchester 73 (1950, US, Anthony Mann) - Two great films about the brooding power of landscape (among other things).

Xala (1974, Senegal, Ousmane Sembène)/X-Men (2000, US, Bryan Singer) - A marriage of convenience given the lack of suitable X candidates: Xala's a forceful critique of colonial and post-colonial Senegal, X-Men's an intelligent superhero flick that takes itself less seriously than those Batman movies.
Les Yeux sans visage (1959, France, Georges Franju)/Y tu mamá también (2001, Mexico, Alfonso Cuarón) - French body horror avant la lettre offset by one of the most enjoyably picaresque road movies of recent years.
Zappa (1983, Denmark, Bille August)/Zan Boko (1988, Burkina Faso, Gaston Kaboré) - I didn't have as many Z options as I'd like, but these are fine films: Danish coming of age (the first of a pair of movies by Bille August), and an extremely incisive examination of the confrontation between tradition and modernity in Burkina Faso.
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. Movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgment 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.

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

Re Rule 6: if you think this looks like fun, you are tagged.