With Hank Stuever
Sunday, May 27, 2007

Cindy Pearlman, a syndicated entertainment journalist, has for some time been asking celebrities she interviews what their favorite movie is and why. (Hey, it beats talking about hair or the magic of childbirth.) Those responses added up to an intriguing anthology published earlier this year, You Gotta See This, in which celebs tell us what films still inspire them -- and many pick movies where the filmmaking and acting is better than anything they've yet to do.

Reese Witherspoon says hers is 1961's "Splendor in the Grass" and adds, "I just hope that Hollywood never, ever decides to remake it." Both Heath Ledger and Johnny Depp chose 1939's "The Wizard of Oz." Ledger: "It was the only film my parents allowed me to see as a kid." Depp: "I wanted to have a tornado sweep me up and take me away from the life I was living as a teenager."

Kate Hudson picked "Casablanca" (1942), as did Kurt Russell, longtime companion of Hudson's mother, Goldie Hawn. Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman and Tea Leoni all picked "Terms of Endearment" (1983). Aniston notes: "You can turn it on and catch it at any point, and it just makes me burst into tears. It's almost Pavlovian for me."

It turns out the question -- a softball if ever there was one -- is not as innocuous as it seems. Jodie Foster, Pearlman writes, refused to answer, because "It's like asking which arm I like better, or which child I like best." Pretension is a pitfall when an actor veers toward the obscure, a la Viggo Mortenson, who chose "La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc," from 1928. Rapper and sometime actor 50 Cent actually shooed his 300-pound bodyguards away at a red carpet situation to give his response: "Don't be disrespectin' this girl doin' the askin' because I wanna answer this one. It's important to me." (His answer? "Friday," the 1995 comedy/hood/hardship drama starring Ice Cube and Chris Tucker.) "I could sit down and watch it right now," Fiddy says.

I was surprised so many actors were willing to choose movies that are relatively recent, made in the 1980s or '90s by actors and directors still very much in play. I would have expected every actress to choose a universally safe answer, say, the 1961 classic "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (as Catherine Zeta-Jones did), for fear of excluding her contemporaries. When the tape recorder is on, stars are notoriously squishy critics -- everything is wonderful. I'm waiting for the book that asks them to name the worst movie of all time, and whether or not they starred in it.

E-mail: celebrity@washpost.com.