How to make a dry gin martini, Reid-style: Remove Tanqueray bottle and cocktail glass from freezer. Pour. Add plump olives.

Hey, I'm into movies, not mixology. And while my technique might make the gurus at this weekend's Art of the Cocktail shudder, the Victoria Film Festival fundraiser is as good an excuse as any to reflect on how intertwined those worlds can be.

What better than Hollywood's favourite cocktail, as an aperitif? The one Sean Connery's James Bond wanted "shaken, not stirred" in Goldfinger (1964). Pity his was a vodka martini -- two words that shouldn't be anywhere near each other.

The word itself snaps with sophistication, yet has comic potential, as evidenced in a line introduced in the breezy 1937 Mae West comedy Every Day's a Holiday: "You should get out of those clothes and into a dry martini."

Indeed, cocktails have played a starring role in movies for decades -- even before Humphrey Bogart's café owner Rick Blaine lamented in Casablanca (1942): "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

Liquor has ignited verbal fireworks (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and Prohibition-era gangster flicks (The Public Enemy), added effervescence to screwball comedies (The Thin Man) and coaxed yuks in movies about lovable lushes (Arthur), obsessive wine snobs (Sideways) and teenagers hoping they'll get lucky with a little help from liquid courage (Superbad).

For better or worse, booze has been so pervasive on screen it could fill a book. Call it Lights! Camera! Cocktails!

A reflection on the role alcohol has played on screen then and now is a sobering reminder of how times have changed.

Imbibing cocktails was seen as glamorous in black-and-white films of the 1930s such as The Thin Man, the Dashiel Hammett mystery caper in which sleuthing detectives Nick Charles and his socialite wife Nora drank and solved crimes. We even learned a thing or two from Nick (William Powell) on the importance of rhythm in shaking up a variety of cocktails.

"Now, a Manhattan, you always shake to foxtrot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini to waltz time," he instructed.

In retrospect, the sight of Dudley Moore slurring his words as the wealthy, perpetually pickled Englishman in Arthur doesn't seem nearly as funny -- pathetic is more like it -- as it did in 1981. It's part of Hollywood's tendency to glorify drinking, play drunkenness for laughs or reinforce extreme stereotypes by portraying alcoholics as whisky-soaked, self-pitying losers.

While hangovers were scarce in dozens of retro flicks that glamorized drinking in the wake of Prohibition, gaiety inevitably gave way to darker-themed films about the downside of alcohol dependency. Who can forget the heartbreak of Days of Wine and Roses (1962), in which Jack Lemmon's hard-drinking PR man Joe Clay orders a Brandy Alexander for his non-drinking secretary (Lee Remick) -- unwittingly setting the stage for a marriage jeopardized by mutual alcoholism?

Then there was Howard Da Silva's unforgettable response, as Nat the bartender, when Ray Milland's struggling alcoholic writer begs him for one more drink in The Lost Weekend. "Yeah, one. One's too many and a hundred's not enough."

As depressing as such portraits are, they at least acknowledge the negative consequences of overindulgence.

Among the darker films, Nicolas Cage's shattering performance as a screenwriter drinking himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) remains a standout. So does Mickey Rourke's grimy, wrenching performance as hard-drinking poet Charles Bukowski's alter-ego in Barfly (1987), a harrowing insider's glimpse of the lives of skid-row hooch hounds.

Favourite alcohol-themed films include those that made old-fashioned elixirs trendy again, notably the Coen Brothers cult classic The Big Lebowski (1998), in which Jeff Bridges' character The Dude, a hopelessly inept slacker mistaken for a millionaire, drinks several White Russians, or "Caucasians," as he calls the vodka, cream and Kahlua classic.

The passage of time has also inspired some witty responses to classic cocktail scenarios. In Casino Royale, for instance, Daniel Craig delivers his own spin on Bond's exactitude with alcohol: When asked if he prefers his martini shaken or stirred, Craig deadpans: "Do I look like I give a damn?"

One movie we really could have done without was Cocktail (1988), the ridiculous, Razzies-award winning dud starring Tom Cruise as a sexy, bottle-juggling bartender.

More recent noteworthy cocktail moments include Carrie Bradshaw's continuing passion for Cosmopolitans in the film version of Sex and the City; the fondness displayed by Robert Downey Jr.'s grizzled reporter for Aqua Velvas in David Fincher's thriller Zodiac; the raunchy comedy The Hangover, which hilariously chronicles the potentially nightmarish price of tying one on; and a scene in Sorority Row in which a liquor-loving sorority girl gruesomely learns her habit can be deadly.

Withnail and I has been saved for last, since the 1986 British cult hit even managed to spawn a "drinking game." It challenges participants to consume the same type and quantity of drinks consumed by Richard E. Grant's character during the course of the film, including nine glasses of red wine, copious amounts of sherry, whisky, ale and cider and -- gasp! -- a shot of lighter fluid.

Seriously, folks, don't try this one at home. Enjoy those cocktails responsibly, and leave the car at home.