Answers to Trivia Challenge #1

May 13, 2010

Answers to Trivia Challenge #1

Now, the answers to Trivia Challenge #1:

1. The connection I was looking for is Joseph Conrad. Apocalypse Now was based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Coppola’s wife made a documentary on the making of the film, titled Hearts of Darkness). Amitabh’s character in Kala Paththar was indeed based on the protagonist in Conrad’s Lord Jim (watch the flashback sequence where he is a naval officer). And the spaceship in Alien was named Nostromo, after a Conrad novel. In the script, another spaceship was named Narcissus (after another Conrad novel, The Nigger of Narcissus). Ridley Scott appears to have been a Conrad fan — his debut was based on The Duellists.

2. The connection is the phrase For whom the bell tolls, originally by John Donne (pic 1) from his work that begins famously with No man is an island</i>, borrowed by Hemingway for the title of his novel. The third pic is a still from the movie version of the Hemingway novel.

3. The reason is Good Will Hunting, which was set in MIT. When it won a bunch of Oscars, they lit up the building to celebrate.

4. Ah, the one question people didn’t get! What people did was put the stamp on envelopes and sent it to junk addresses so that they would get it back with the words Return to Sender stamped on it. Which, in case you don’t know your Elvis, is the title of one of his hits.

5. Modern Times was supposed to be a critique of the mechanized world we live in. Therefore, all sounds in the film are mechanical. Even human voices are not heard directly, but over a device such as the radio/loudspeaker.

Good show, Shafeek and PV! Srikanth, I’ve seen it referred to as a poem in some places, but I’ll take your word for it being an essay 🙂

I will do one on Hindi films soon. Hope you folks enjoyed this one. Let me know if it was too tough/easy/boring.

Ramsu

Dead trees, Hindi movies, Hollywood, Kweej, Music

2 responses to “Answers to Trivia Challenge #1”

Tri-Via-Junk-Key

May 20, 2010

Ramsu,

I’m pleasantly intrigued by the fact that the way some of us process trivia is leagues removed from the way some others do.

You, for instance, are (or were) an avid quizzer and, in all likelihood, *consciously* attuned to filing away itty bitty info about movies, books, etc. in neat little mental cabinets (and by this I mean that there’s some “method” to the madness); hence it’s relatively easy, I suspect, come time to marry memory and motive, metaphorically speaking.

Versus someone like me that does love quiz shows and such, but is much more a passive dreamer-participant as compared to your active puzzle-solving type (I’d call me the happy hybrid!). Someone who gets a little too carried away “concocting” her own connections to bother with “retrieving” the right answer the quizmaster’s looking for.

That’s not to say that my types will not occasionally stumble upon the right answer (thanks to that “filing” process I talk about above, memory-willing), but more often than not, we’re too busy tinkering with the tangential connections that titlillate our trivia cortex to pay conscious attention to the “challenge” on hand.

Case in point, it came on Jeopardy recently that F. Scott Fitzgerald originally toyed with titles like “On the Road to West Egg” and “The High-Bouncing Lover” before Max Perkins had him go with The Great Gatsby. And off I took down this path of … “ah, The Jazz Age — didn’t he coin that term? And before “jazz” landed on the music lexicon in the ’20s, wasn’t it a sporting term, specifically baseball, where it meant “pep” or “energy”, hence that old phrase that we still fondly turn, ‘all that jazz’?” … thanks to which I missed the next coupla questions, see what I’m sayin’? I must be sent to a “concentration” camp! 😀

Reply
1. TVJK
  
  May 20, 2010
  
  p.s: Having ranted about the challenge, here are my ramblings on the answers:
  
  1. You got your finger firmly on my “JC love” pulse, amigo! And please say that was a typo and you meant “The Dualists” – coz lately, I can’t seem to stand the idea of anyone fighting with anyone other than their own assinine alter egos. Slay those inner demons, I say. And this teacher making a lesson plan for school kids studying The Great Gatsby — you’ve got to love how he randomly loops in Hotel California — seems to agree! (And why am I blathering about The GG for the nth time today? I don’t effing know.)
  
  2. Typo again. You did mean “the belle”… (I kinda like your typos anyway. Remember how you said somewhere that you thought Malaysia Vasudevan has the sort of voice that really “firts” the song to a T? Loved that you leave the meaning open to interpretation as either “fit” or “flirt”. See? Typos are good things, at least in my book.)
  
  3. I love that movie. Period.
  
  4. “Return to Sender” is such a beautiful song/sentiment — never heard it before.
  
  5. Ah how Alphavilleesque, I’d remark, if I didn’t know that MT came before.
  
  Reply

24 frames per second