Like a star

Los Angeles, Feb. 8 (Reuters): There’s the flicking kiss, the ice-cream kiss, the vacuum kiss, the Hollywood kiss and another 50 or so smoochy variations.

Who said a kiss was just a kiss?

For everyone who has ever wanted to pucker up like a movie star, French kiss like Johnny Depp, or simply add variety to their love life, help is at hand. “In our culture, movies are a major way of transmitting romantic ideas and a lot of people get their romantic notions about kissing from love scenes in movies,” said William Cane, author of Kiss Like a Star. “More kisses are being invented all the time. People kept asking me, can you put some pictures in so I can see how to do it? That is why movies are so good.”

Cane uses close-up sequences from movies ranging from Casablanca to Top Gun and Dirty Dancing to illustrate in detail the techniques of more than 60 kisses.

Some, like the passionate, sweep-her-back embrace between Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind are already famous.

One of the newer varieties — the “ice-cream kiss” from The Notebook in which Canadian actress Rachel McAdams pushes an ice-cream cone into the face of co-star Ryan Gosling and then kisses it off — won a 2005 MTV best kiss award.