just want your extra time

A kiss is not just a kiss at the movies. It's Valentine's Day tomorrow and I couldn't stop thinking about my favorite screen kisses. I guess my criteria is not far off from what I want in real life: tender, passionate, and surprising. For many of us our first kiss was a movie kiss. I think mine was Vicki Vale and Batman in Tim Burton's "Batman", cheesy I know, but I'll never forget it. Kisses in movies seem more epic, urgent, and most of all, fantastical. We wish we could all be caught in the rain with some impossibly attractive counterpart in which we will say and do the right thing and the music will swell as our lips meet to a resoundingly perfect exclamation of amorous desire. But such is life and it's almost as good as the movies.

Here are my three favorite screen kisses:

"The Thomas Crown Affair"
dir., Norman Jewison
1968
Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway at the apex of their late '60s sexy cool. A naughty chess game ends with a dizzying passionate embrace. The moment their lips hesitate in close-up (6:34) before they initiate the kiss is undeniably hot.


(4:36-7:09)
"Notorious"
dir., Alfred Hitchcock
1946
A true master of style and blocking, a kiss seems to last forever between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. The slow, almost whisper of kisses ignite the scene and give further proof that Hitchcock is also the master of sly sexiness. (see also Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in "Marnie" and Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in "To Catch a Thief")


(5:00-6:22)
"2046"
dir., Wong Kar Wai
2005
(please forgive the fan vid nature of this video)
What a crush of a kiss. The kiss itself looks painful, but the sight of a single tear tumbling down Gong Li's cheek beside the smeared lipstick is what sticks with you (or at least me).