What's the best sex scene in film history? The worst hairdo? The most
convincing cross-dresser? The Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh, DBC
Pierre and others make their choice

Saturday October 13, 2007
The Guardian


Five films we'd like to see remade
Ethan and Joel Coen

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967)

This has already been remade as a comedy - some sort of intentional
travesty of Stanley Kramer's film. A pity. This is one movie that
would benefit from the Gus Van Sant treatment: a shot-by-shot remake
that would reinforce the stiffness of the original and further petrify
its already passé social commentary. The result would have the lofty
irrelevance of high art.

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Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

We have not seen the original but suspect it could be interestingly
remade with Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher.

Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man (1991)

Nothing wrong with the underrated original, but since this Don
Johnson/Mickey Rourke star-pairing took place in the near future, it
could be remade now (about the time when the first was speculatively
set) with the same cast and the same short-term futurism: an exercise
in kicking a can down the road. Further remakes with the same cast at
15-year intervals would constitute a mind-bending variation on the
7-Up series.

Out 1: Spectre (1972)

Jacque Rivette's original was four hours long. Come on.

The Godfather Part III (1990)

Be clear, this would not be Godfather IV but a remake of III which,
let's not kid ourselves, was not so hot. If the remake were
successful, one could waltz back through the other two, making for a
hell of a lot of Godfathers. Arriving at Godfather I or, as it was
myopically called at the time, The Godfather, it is simply not
possible to imagine anyone but Chris Walken playing the Sterling
Hayden part. Indeed, if the director were feeling his artistic oats,
Chris Walken could play all the parts.

One great film
Steven Soderbergh

Let me just say that I'm sick of people digging up obscure
masterpieces designed to make me feel like a philistine; or, worse,
arguing that an acknowledged masterpiece isn't, in fact, a masterpiece
at all, but the beneficiary of some collective cultural hypnosis. I'm
going in the opposite direction: I'm going to call attention to a
classic that, in my opinion, is even better than we all think it is:

Chinatown (1974)

If you really analyse a great film, it can teach you how to make a
film, and Chinatown may be the best blueprint of all. It has: a
compelling and/or entertaining subject, explored through a well
constructed narrative (Robert Towne's screenplay brilliantly
fictionalises the true story of Los Angeles' battle for a water
supply)1; a great cast, doing career-defining work (Jack Nicholson and
Faye Dunaway both look and act better than they've ever looked or
acted)2; an appropriately distinctive visual scheme (the sets,
costumes and photography are painfully evocative, and Roman Polanski
never puts the camera in the wrong place)3; and, most crucially, smart
editing and scoring (the macro-editing has just the right press and
release, the micro-editing is seamless except when it's not supposed
to be; and Jerry Goldsmith's melancholy score - a last-minute addition
- wraps the whole film in an intoxicating perfume of dread)4.

Of course, it also follows that bad films contain the reverse DNA,
showing you what not to do. But, in general, I like to watch good
films, because bad films make me sad. Actually, Chinatown makes me
sad, too, mostly because it reminds me that I began watching and
making films at a time when the movies really were just as great as
they seemed to be. Oh well. At least I wasn't imagining things5.

1 This is a good moment to comment on the cottage industry that has
sprung up around How To ... screenwriting manuals. I think of this
because Towne's script is often cited as a great template (which it
is) but, invariably, with no understanding or acknowledgment of the
role film editing has in shaping a finished work. So any discussion
that omits this issue shows a palpable lack of experience in the
actual making of films on the part of the scriptwriting teacher/author.

2 I'm not kidding, Nicholson and Dunaway are fucking spectacular in
this. His smile and her cheekbones? Come on.

3 Like I say, there's everything you need to know to direct a movie
here. There's a huge difference between being economical and being
cheap, and Polanski shows you the difference over and over again. You
might not have noticed that he basically shoots the whole film with
one lens; and check out the multiple-destination camera moves, which
are invariably hidden within the actors' moves. Plus, there's nobody
better at knowing when to pull the camera off the dolly and go hand-held.

4 This is a good moment to say that, currently, I think editing on a
micro-level has never been better, and editing on a macro-level has
never been worse. I leave it to you to decide why this is.

5 Oh no. I've officially become a bitter, nostalgic fuck. How did this
happen?

Five films to avoid on medication
DBC Pierre

This is cinema to beware of. The list is an advisory service, and
should be consulted prior to deploying unfamiliar motion pictures. I
do not say to you that these are films to avoid - indeed, some are
unspeakably beautiful. I do, however, try to impart a sense of why
each motion picture, in its own way, should not be watched within
reach of any stabbing blade, or under the influence of heavy drugs.

Even Dwarfs Started Small (1971)

Even on cannabis, or lightly depressed, Werner Herzog's second work,
in which a collection of German dwarfs and midgets run amok at an
asylum in Spain to very strange music, can unhinge you. And the last
minute of action proves Werner is actually aiming at this, which does
nothing for your paranoia.

Fierce Creatures (1997)

View this and recall that the force behind it, John Cleese, was once
widely hailed as a genius. This work is an invoice for the cost of a
man's sanity; watching the sums add up on screen is a devastating
business, and will for ever wreck your faith in any right to the
pursuit of happiness.

On Golden Pond (1981)

If you didn't sleep through this coral-filter of a yarn about famous
old Americans playing old Americans getting too old beside a lake, you
are in danger of severe dismay; not from the work's inherent stupor,
but the certainty that you'll never actually remember how the action
went, or if, indeed, there was any, and hence enter an anxiety loop
about your own declining cognitive powers. Avoid sedatives.

Mondo Cane (1962)

Legendary Italian documentary that scours the globe for the most
distasteful customs and occurrences, then runs overwrought violin
music to them, with narration by an American who has clearly spent 20
years on lithium in Sicily. As you watch, you can't help but feel this
is what they showed to Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange in order
to straighten him up. Severe advisory against acid use - I mean it.

Day Of Wrath (1943)

A work that starts bleakly, then plunges downhill. The opening scene
is all you need to feel a weight of mud bulldozed on to your grave.
And director Carl Dreyer's undoubted brilliance is deployed through a
muffled, monochrome fog, making the thing even more nightmarish. When
your cries for help are over, line up your razor and pills to this one.

Five films with great sex - or at least interesting sensuality
Mike Figgis

Sex is very difficult to translate into cinema. It's not enough just
to film it, because that deals only with the surface of sex (and
that's why porno is so abysmal). So I've put together a list of the
films that I find to have had some small measure of success. They seem
to fall into one of two categories. One is where the actors seem to
mean it - as in, they look at each other and have feelings for each
other, be they tender, violent, even detached. The second is where the
director manipulates the film in the edit, to create an erotic ambience.

Mulholland Drive (2001) & Blue Velvet (1986)

David Lynch is very sexual and not at all shy in how he does it. The
scene in which Naomi Watts masturbates but we can hear that she is dry
(and that it is painful) is both erotic and tragic - and that is what
is so interesting about Lynch's vision. Also, the scene in Blue Velvet
where Kyle MacLachlan watches as Dennis Hopper abuses Isabella
Rossellini is amazing - by putting Kyle in there as the watcher, Lynch
allows us, the audience, to watch with him. I'd say Lynch is the most
adult of the film-makers on this list.

The Misfits (1961)

John Huston is not famous for his depictions of sexuality, and it's
rumoured that he had little patience with Marilyn Monroe in this, her
last completed picture. But there is a scene that is deeply erotic.
Monroe is playing a bat-and-ball game in a bar. As she hits the ball
in time, her arse moves provocatively, and a cowboy can't resist
spanking her - Monty Cliff then punches him out, but for a moment
there is sexual anarchy.

The Tide, from Immoral Tales (1974)

This is a short film about a sexual encounter between teenage cousins
on a seaside holiday in France. It is witty and ironic and sexy. Like
many a good film-maker, Walerian Borowczyk realises that ironic
dialogue is the key to cinematic eroticism. It's somehow necessary to
use this device to take us out of the perversity of being present in
the intimate act of two persons: we perhaps need a level of
theatricality in order to feel comfortable. Interesting sociological
moment when the girl is naked: her huge bush dates the film more than
would any flared trouser-leg.

In The Realm Of The Senses (1976)

Nagisa Oshima's film created quite a stir when it came out. I saw it
at a festival in France and was shocked. But I was also entirely
affected by it, and I can't recall having such an experience since. In
porn, the actors don't relate, they don't look at each other and they
make silly noises while they're doing the business. In the Oshima
film, the intimacy of the two actors is amazing and entirely
believable. There's nothing chirpy or jokey about the film, either:
sex = passion = death.

Weekend (1967)

Has the best sex scene in film history for my money. There is no sex,
just a very bourgeois woman describing a threesome in the most offhand
manner - a kind of Godardian comedy sketch based perhaps on Georges
Bataille's infamous novel The Story Of The Eye. What's interesting is
that despite the shallowness of the couple, the text is still sexy -
or maybe this says something more about me than about the film ...

Five embarrassingly sentimental film scores to make the spine tingle
Mavis Cheek

Brief Encounter (1945)

I do not like Rachmaninov. I do not care for his sentimental surges. I
can say, with pride, that I do not have one bit of Rachmaninov in the
house. Except on my video of Brief Encounter, wherein David Lean takes
every opportunity to use Rachmaninov's horrible Concerto No 2 to
dreadful effect. He plays it when poor Laura flees from the
possibility of illicit sex in a borrowed flat; he plays it at the end
when Laura and Alec wait for Alec's train to come and take him away to
Africa, never to be seen again - and in comes Dolly, crashing about
with her silly English vowels, to talk away their precious last few
minutes and swamp it with violins. And, yes, there's the train pulling
out, with Alec on it, and Laura suddenly leaping out of the station
buffet with Rachmaninov hot on her heels - to watch the love of her
life from the platform as he slowly rattles away ...

King Of Kings (1961)

Imagine a row of cinema seats occupied by a dozen prepubescent girls
who are on a school trip to see the new film about Jesus. This is a
real Jesus, who walks and talks and eats. Even more amazingly, this
Jesus is played by an actor you have seen playing only cowboys up
until then: Jeffrey Hunter. The girls yawn a bit in the first scenes -
after all, they know the story. And then, lo! A man appears and looks
down on John the Baptist with the bluest eyes in the whole world. And
we girls are deeply moved and deeply confused. It is all the fault of
Miklós Rózsa. His score is synonymous with love and Jesus and such odd
feelings - certainly not religious - that stir in our private places
as we watch those blue eyes and listen to those shocking chords.
Jeannette Reynolds is the only one of us rich enough to buy the LP of
the music, so we spend most afternoons after school round at her place
playing it and crying a bit and just imagining Jesus and Jeffrey,
Jeffrey and Jesus, and thinking, Master, we are yours.

Elvira Madigan (1967)

After seeing this movie where the doomed lovers hold hands and run
through a field of corn - Elvira wearing a pale, diaphanous gown, her
be-ribboned hair flowing free in the breeze - the 60s were never the
same again. Gone was the healthy cynicism of my political youth,
replaced by a seditious romanticism. This was less the fault of
director Widerberg than of his choice of the slow movement from
Mozart's most sublime piano concerto, No 21, which he juxtaposed with
the slo-mo lovers. So powerful was the image and its effect on the
nation's young women that we all went around for weeks attempting to
look and feel like Elvira - with ruffled hems and lace-up boots. The
Mozart concerto sold out in all the shops and became known ever after
as Elvira Madigan.

Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves (1991)

How unfortunate to see this just when I was deeply in love and
therefore longing to inspire in the man in my life the same emotions
as in the theme song. And how much more unfortunate that Bryan Adams
should write such a grindingly sentimental success - Everything I Do
(I Do It For You) topped the charts for 16 weeks. At the end of the
film, rather than a stampede for the door, most of the audience stood
and listened to this stunning piece of schmaltz as once, long ago,
they stood for the National Anthem.

Henry V (1944)

The Crispin's Day speech explodes into William Walton's score as a
very orgasm of heroism ("We few, we happy few, we band of
brothers..."). In other words, lest the combined talents of
Shakespeare and Olivier have failed to arouse you, here's Walton to
make your heart fair burst to be English (and sod the French).

Five great films that defy genre
David Hare

Genre has almost destroyed cinema. The audience is bored. It can
predict the exhausted UCLA film-school formulae - acts, arcs and
personal journeys - from the moment that they start cranking. It's
angry and insulted by being offered so much Jung-for-Beginners,
courtesy of Joseph Campbell. All great work is now outside genre.

A Murmur Of The Heart (1971)

All Louis Malle's work (OK, all of it except Black Moon) is worth
revisiting: Vanya On 42nd Street is definitive. You might call this
one his "incest picture", but that tag would tell you nothing about
the film itself - an account of adolescent sexuality that is warm and
authentic in equal parts. Plus, a sex scene that is actually sexy.

A Man Escaped (1956)

A French Resistance activist dreams of escaping a Nazi prison. You
might argue that this one does follow a formula: after all, it's an
escape picture. But who would recognise the formula in Robert
Bresson's unique manifestation, with Mozart, of all people, providing
the backing track?

Room At The Top (1959)

Young men are always on the make, but this film defies genre with
ostensible miscasting. At first you can't understand what the three
principals - Laurence Harvey, Donald Wolfit and Simone Signoret - are
doing in the same film: a Lithuanian, a ham Shakespearean and a
Frenchwoman in what is meant to be British social realism. But their
presence slowly gives this film an alien drive, an otherness that
transcends more conventional British cinema.

Tokyo Story (1953)

The simplest plot: some ageing parents want to visit their grown-up
children in Tokyo. There aren't really any villains, and there most
certainly aren't any heroes. The villain is age and the passage of
time, the inevitability of decline. A masterpiece.

Summer Interlude (1951)

A talented young ballet dancer (Maj-Britt Nilsson) looks back to a
relationship she had years earlier on an island she visits in a break
from rehearsal. Yes, Ingmar Bergman will go on to do "greater" things,
but there's a poetic simplicity about this film that is unequalled.
Youth is caught in the frame - the very essence of youth, and the
beauty of its transience. This is heartbreaking stuff, the purest
expression of cinema as the fleeting medium.

Five of the baddest hair days on film
Andrew O'Hagan

I know the best book ever written and it's called Crowning Glory:
Reflections Of Hollywood's Favourite Confidant, by Sydney Guilaroff,
the king of the movie hairdo. And Guilaroff didn't just do hair, he
created hairstyles, pleasing and primping everyone from Jean Harlow to
Faye Dunaway. But , sadly, Guilaroff sometimes took a holiday.

Moe Howard in Disorder In The Court (1936)

Moe was the chief knucklehead in The Three Stooges, and all the
children I knew lived in dread of ending up with his terrible bowl-job
of a haircut. History records that he invented the style for himself
to escape his mother's sissy-making way with curlers, but there can be
no excuses.

Warren Beatty in Shampoo (1975)

A film that, inexplicably in retrospect, confirmed Beatty's status as
the hottest guy on the planet. He appears - not inappropriately - to
have a beaver glued on to his head, along with the mightiest sideburns
this side of Nashville. A combination of the layered look and the
flick, it was meant to drive the ladies crazy, which it did, so long
as they yearned for a man who looked like a leather-bound version of
Farrah Fawcett.

Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born (1976)

The perm to end all perms. Like 200 poodles with heads full of
curl-activator had been microwaved on high for 10 minutes, until their
corporeal bodies disintegrated and all that was left was tight, tight
coils - some brown, some ginger, some spookily golden. Unspeakable
hair, really, possibly the worst ever. The film's poster, in which
Kris Kristofferson runs his hairy hands through Streisand's
impenetrable thatch, can induce nausea at five million paces.

Tom Cruise in Born On The Fourth Of July (1989)

Cruise played Ron Kovic, who was paralysed in the Vietnam war and
became a political activist. Pre-paralysis, the hair was the usual
fine military crop. Post, it was off-the-scale hideous.

Bette Davis in The Private Lives Of Elizabeth And Essex (1939)

Davis shaved her hairline back by a couple of inches for period
authenticity, causing her huge, alien-style forehead - framed by
ginger tendrils - to glisten palely and distractingly throughout
Curtiz's period drama.

Five great drag acts
Ryan Gilbey

On one level, watching a drag act in a movie recalls the
unselfconscious freedoms of childhood and the dressing-up box. But if
playfulness and liberty are the predominant factors in our enjoyment
of drag, there is also, I think, a slightly unsavoury element similar
to seeing our faces distorted in warped funhouse mirrors. Several of
the actors on the list below are there for that reason.

Iggy Pop in Dead Man (1995)

If you think there's nothing shocking left for Iggy Pop to do on God's
earth, you haven't seen him in a frilly frock and bonnet. He plays
Sally, a trapper who reads from the Bible to his campfire compadres in
Jarmusch's trippy western.

Bugs Bunny in What's Opera, Doc? (1957)

Between 1939 and 1996, the wiseacre wabbit crosses the gender divide
more than 40 times. In The Wabbit Who Came to Supper (1942), he shaves
his pits and appears in lingerie. In Napoleon Bunny-Part (1956), he's
a fetching Josephine. But he is on top form in the excellent What's
Opera, Doc?, donning helmet and swishing blond pigtails as a
coquettish Brünnhilde in this Wagner pastiche.

Sylvester Stallone in Nighthawks (1981)

This fun thriller is book-ended by scenes of Stallone dragging up to
fight crime. In the first instance his disguise snares muggers preying
on vulnerable women. More spectacularly, the film subverts the
standard woman-in-peril scene at the end by having psychopathic Rutger
Hauer creep up on what he, and we, think is Lindsay Wagner in a
dressing gown doing the washing-up, only for the supposed damsel in
distress to spin round at the last second, revealing an armed Stallone
in blond wig and full beard.

Roman Polanski in The Tenant (1976)

As Trelkovsky, the mousey little nobody who begins turning into the
woman who lived in his Paris apartment before him, Polanski is frail
and contrite - until the process of possession extends to his
wardrobe. He goes out to buy a wig, a horrible, raggedy, brown number,
and he can't even wait until he gets home to try it on. Back at his
flat, he caresses and coos over the heels he's bought, and parades in
front of the mirror in a black floral dress, rubbing his (nonexistent)
breasts. You couldn't say he's attractive, exactly, but something
about his cheerful belief in his own prettiness is rather winning.

Johnny Depp in Before Night Falls (2000)

Depp has never been more alluring than as the jailbird transvestite
Bon-Bon. You don't see his face at first. But there are plenty of
other delights to take in: the vanilla wig that bounces with every
step, the dusky feather boa, the garter belt hoisted up his thigh, all
nicely offset by the inky black armpits. He gets two unforgettable
close-ups - one of his face, with his lipstick mouth locked in a
lemon-sucking pout, his blond hair clashing with his black lashes and
stubble. Then there's the tight shot of his behind. That arse has
Tardis-like dimensions, perfectly compact on the outside but roomy
enough within to smuggle the hero's manuscript out of the slammer.

© Individual writers, 2007