The inimitable film critic Antonia Quirke, author of Choking on Marlon Brando, knows more about actors (and also some actresses, too) than anyone else on the planet. Antonia offered us a holiday gift list for the guys out there who are looking to buy a fail-proof DVD (or two).
Gift List
by Antonia Quirke
For her:
REDS - particularly for the moment 10 minutes from the end when Warren Beatty kisses Diane Keaton at the train station after she's walked all the way from New England to Russia to see him in a pair of wooden snow boots and a bobble hat.
KING KONG - note, the 1933 version only. A deeply, deeply romantic film starring (as has been said) the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. Tears and hugs when Kong falls to his death. Plus it's in black and white which makes anyone watching it an intellectual.
MOONSTRUCK - Was there ever an actor more capable of giving the order 'GET IN MY BED' than Nicholas Cage in this film? His Deputy Dog eyes, his hair that looks like it's always wandering off the in the wrong direction, the way he says 'SWEETIE' like you just might be his at any minute. GOD.
ON THE WATERFRONT - when Brando picks up Eve Marie Saint's glove he looks so in love it's as though his face - no, scrap that, I'm being timid, forgive me - he looks like his WHOLE BEING is subject to a kind of doubled gravity. Serious business, love.
PERSUASION - because Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a man in tights. You'll probably have to trawl Amazon for this because I don't think it was released in the States when it came out in 1995, but it is far and away the best Jane Austen adaptation ever, and directed by Roger Michell who went on to direct Enduring Love. The Irish actor Ciaran Hinds plays Captain Wentworth, the sexiest of Austen's heroes by dint of the fact he is a total MENSCH. This man has waited YEARS for the women he loves to get her act together. He's joined the Navy, sailed the high seas, travelled to the East Indies and come back again, fought in wars, made his fortune. 'You pierce my soul,' he writes his girl, the plain and procrastinating Anne Elliot, 'I am half agony, half hope. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.' The final shot, by the way, of Anne and Wentworth, united and happy on a sailing ship at sunset, is literally stolen from the Mel Gibson Mutiny on the Bounty. Buy her this, and she may realise that a boyfriend is for life, not just for Christmas. But in a good way.
For him:
THE EDGE. That's my one nomination. Really. Because every man I have ever shown this film to since it came out in 1997 - boyfriends, brothers, uncles, neighbours, you name it - not only loves it, but complains urgently about not having been introduced to it sooner. Written by David Mamet, it stars Alec Badwin and Anthony Hopkins as two men stranded in the Alaskan wilds being tracked by a killer bear. Yes, a KILLER BEAR. And this bear is a BRILLIANT actor. He's so brilliant - his name is Bart, by the way - that Sean Penn picked him to appear in his latest film Into the Wild (the only good decision that nitwit Penn has made in his entire life, apart from getting Eddie Vedder to write the soundtrack. And for casting good old Hal Holbrook too - who you'll know as Deepthroat in All the President's Men, which isn't that good a film but is still somehow one of my favourites of all time. Holbrook is amazing in All the President's Men. He stinks so much of cigarettes you become passively addicted to him. Even his HAIR looks emphysemic. Oh, ok, alright, get off my back, yes, yes, I take your point, Penn was pretty good in Carlito's Way. And Sweet and Lowdown. And when he was younger. Especially in Taps. Oh, and Fast Times. Christ, he's good in that. But he's still an arse.) Anyway, the point is, if you buy the DVD of THE EDGE there's a little extras bit where you can see Bart relaxing on set ruminatively munching on a salmon, obviously husbanding his fury for another take. A total genius.
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