As seen on Ramblin’ with Roger!

1. Movie you love with a passion.

Dark City. Like two other favourites (Donnie Darko and Synecdoche, NY) it is concerned with memory, identity and loss, and speaks to me on a level so powerful and visceral that I have difficulty explaining it in words. As I said on Twitter this week after re-watching it on Blu-Ray, “The desire of John Murdock to find Shell Beach strikes me as a metaphor for an almost indescribable universal hole we all have in our souls.”

2. Movie you vow to never watch.

Twilight or any of its sequels.

3. Movie that literally left you speechless.

Eraserhead. 

4. Movie you always recommend.

The Station Agent.

5. Actor/actress you always watch, no matter how crappy the movie.

Gene Hackman.

6. Actor/actress you don’t get the appeal for.

Ryan Reynolds.

7. Actor/actress, living or dead, you’d love to meet.

Neil Patrick Harris seems like he’d be fun to spend a few hours with.

8. Sexiest actor/actress you’ve seen. (Picture required!)

Morena Baccarin. Loved her on Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity, and she positively glows on Homeland.

9. Dream cast.

Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, George Clooney, Michelle Williams. 

10. Favorite actor pairing.

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Yes, I’m going there.

11. Favorite movie setting.

Eastern Europe. So elegantly decayed.

12. Favorite decade for movies.

That’s a tough one, but like Roger, I have to say I saw a lot of great new movies in the 1990s.

13. Chick flick or action movie?

I’ll take a well-made film in any genre, but I have never seen a well-made chick flick, so I am going with action movie. Not that there are many good ones of that description, either.

14. Hero, villain or anti-hero?

I assume anti-hero means “complicated loner who means well but doesn’t always make the right choices,” and that resonates with me, so, yeah.

15. Black and white or colour?

I agree with Roger Ebert that black and white is the superior choice, because it focuses the eye on what is truly important and frees the viewer from distraction. I think that’s what he thinks, anyway. Is there any more beautiful film than the gorgeous, black and white The Third Man? Probably not. So I have no prejudice at all against black and white, and many of my favourite movies (Citizen Kane, Casablanca and many more) are B&W. That said, in the right hands, colour can be every bit as enchanting and immersive. Think of the colours in Dark City or Synecdoche, NY or Blue Velvet. So it isn’t as much a question of colour or black and white as it is of director and cinematographer, for my money.