"I want to be a pop idol..." Movie trivia quizzes

So I just tried the Empire online Oscar quote quiz. Mostly cool. I got pretty cross at the repeat quotes though - surely there are enough famous Oscar winners to not have to repeat the same film several times. And after painstakingly working out which Star Wars quote came from each of the three films, I was peeved to discover you only had to type Star Wars in each.

Still, I managed to get 50/105, which qualified me as a henchman. My mum managed to get three more on top of that, and with my dad's help we squidged it up to 60.

I've also gotta recommend http://www.cool-movie-trivia.com/ Why? Because I got full marks on their lord of the rings trivia quiz, and 9/10 on movie swords (well how was I meant to know this damn sword had three blades?! Is that even possible? How would you wield that?). Unfortunately, I simply haven't seen enough movies to try any of the rest. The style of the questions is nice. Though this Two Towers question made me cross:

"What snack do Frodo and Sam eat when they are heading to Mordor at the start of the movie? Jerky, leaves, bread or after eights?" Excuuuse meeee. They're eating LEMBAS!

On the personality quiz front, I gained a very respectable score in this month's Empire. The question was: are you more movie geek (Star Wars!!!) or movie buff (Claude Chabrol!!!!). It was a multiple choice thing, and I'm happy to say I scored right in the middle - not too obsessive, not too pretentious. At least... not too obsessive about Star Wars and Tarantino movies...wait a tick...anyway. It seemed about right. More alarmingly, I was 100% aware why each of the 4 options was amusing. For example, one question ran something like "You're favourite joke starts:" and the options were "How many Browncoats does it take to change a lightbulb", "Kurosawa walks into a bar..." and "Three tomatos are walking down the road..."


Situation last week

me: why don't we watch The Cat Returns.
my sister: don't want to see that.
me: why not.
my sister: it's boring.
me: *steams* howdoyouknowyouhaven'tseenit
my sister: I just don't like it.

Few things annoy me more. If she'd asked what it was about and said that, in her measured opinion, it didn't sound like her sort of thing, that would have been ok. But blatant judging on the strength of a title or less...I know a lot of people who do this, and boy it makes me cross. Especially as I like to think I'm quite a good judge of, if not good movies, then movies people will like, and I endevour not to make people see things they probably won't enjoy.

Though it was partially my fault too, I suppose...I deliberately witheld the information it was a Hayao Myazaki film, to get that precice response out of her. Because I was having a bad evening. When I did tell her, she cooed "OOOOOh, I really like his films!"

Which is what I'd basically told her to begin with.

At this point I left the room and watched the parent-unfriendly Velvet Goldmine upstairs.


I don't really know what I was expecting - I knew it was vaguely based on David Bowie and Iggy Pop, I knew it contained tons of Picture of Dorian Gray quoting and I'd heard about the Ewan McGregor/Christian Bale sex scene.

Now I like Oscar Wilde. A lot. I like him as a writer and a person, and get very very posessive when people run him down, or do anything that is mildly disrespectful or out of line. So it was with a little trepidation I sat down to this one. I needn't have worried. They take something of a liberty with his life history, but it met with my approval. Let's state that a different way. I think this may be, along with Run, Lola, Run, one of the best opening five minutes of a movie ever.

The plot ambles along, leaping between characters and time frames with the enthusiasm of a bad speaker telling a story: "OK, well there was this guy at a Maxwell Demon concert - only later he became a journalist trying to investigate something - and Maxwell Demon had been a big hit for a few years, ever since he'd met a decent manager. OOh, I forgot to mention Jack - he's one of Max's friends, who doesn't really do anything - when he was a child..." It's a bit like how my mother sometimes recounts anecdotes - "We were driving down this road, no not that one - the one where there was the crash last year, the day it snowed and we went to the beach? Anyway..."

In real life, I'm affectionately amused when me mum does it, and mega annoyed by anybody else. Movie wise, however, it's fantastic. It keeps everything rumbling at a lolloping pace - sometimes you're reminicing with a character, or viewing music videos, or tv shows, or you end up in not-actually flashback - which is when you just randomly view the past (apparently, it's technically not a flashback unless a character sits down and thinks about the past - or so QT says. Apparently, what he does is just "presenting information in a different order". Which is right, when you think it.)

This alone is enough to hold anyone's attention - throw in some great music, great atmosphere, great costumes and Ewan McGregor naked and you've got a good movie. Though the sex scene I'd heard so much about...wasn't. Blink and you miss it.

It's a lot of fun, and comes highly recommended to anyone who's ok with a bit of moral laxity - there are scenes of moderate decadance which, to put it bluntly, might offend people (I won't be showing it to my Christian buddies any time soon...)


And finally, a thought in favour of remaking movies: we don't have any problem with it in the theatre. I say we, I'm not counting myself as part of the theatre set, I'm all movies through and through. But it's a thought - Hamlet gets redone again and again and again, with different combinations of actors, different sets and emphasis'. What's wrong with remaking movies? I suppose it's because you usually do it to get lots of money trading off an established brand, and is proof of how creativity has been stifled in the industry...after all, you don't see many films remade for artistic love alone. King Kong and Dambusters...our version of Fellowship of the Ring, I suppose. What was my original point again? I don't know. Just an interesting thought.