What are your favorite movies and why?

Oliver Stone’s Nixon.

It may be an eccentric choice. It may be the choice of someone who does not understand film at all. But it’s my favourite movie. Grand Shakespearean tragedy, operatic, intense, cinematic tour-de-force, encompassing the world like a Mahler symphony. And not that this matters anywhere near as much to me, but historically more accurate than you might think.

A surprise, because the biopic is justly maligned as an incoherent and/or formulaic genre; but Stone had great subject matter.

I had little time for Natural Born Killers or The Doors, so falling in love with Nixon surprised me too.

Fun fact: on my first date with my future wife, when we were in the infuriatingly cutesy stage of identifying common interests—

—What’s your favourite city?

—Vienna.

—Me too! What your favourite cake?

—Black Forest.

—Me too!

… and when it came to favourite movie:

—What’s your favourite movie?

—Nixon!

—Me too!

Only by Nixon, Tamar did not mean Oliver Stone’s Nixon. She meant Frost/Nixon (film).

And Frost/Nixon is in many ways the anti-Oliver Stone’s Nixon. It’s intimate, focussed, stagey, and somewhat conventional; a chamber piece.

We’ve watched Frost/Nixon together, and we’ve watched Oliver Stone’s Nixon. (For limited values of “we”.)

I guess we’ll always have Vienna…