MOVIE QUIZ
This week’s movie quiz is a little different: the theme won’t be revealed until you guess all 10 answers correctly and read them in order.
So, enjoy this seemingly random set of film trivia questions. You might even start to get a clue before you go too far.
1. This 2005 action comedy flop starred Samuel L. Jackson and (recent “Schitt’s Creek” Golden Globe winner) Eugene Levy, who picked up a Razzie nomination as worst supporting actor for his efforts. Name it.
2. What 1988 movie is the only one to ever feature both Walt Disney and Warner Bros. cartoon characters together, and was the most expensive movie of the 1980s?
3. It took five years after 1996’s “Swingers” for Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn to reunite in another movie Favreau wrote. What was the title?
4. Before writer director Luca Guadagnino gained worldwide fame in 2018 for “Call Me by Your Name,” he preceded it with what nearly as critically acclaimed 2015 thriller starring Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson and Matthias Schoenaerts?
5. Judy Garland and Van Johnson starred in this 1949 musical remake of the 1940 Film “The Shop Around the Corner,” both of which later inspired 1988’s “You’ve Got Mail.” Garland debuts the sing “Merry Christmas” in it (five years after she sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in “Meet Me in St. Louis"), but it’s a different song about a different season that gives the film its title. What is it?
6. Unless you’re a true scholar of iconic absurdist Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, you’re unlikely to know the only screenplay he ever wrote was for a 1965 short starring screen legend Buster Keaton, in one of his last roles, as a man trying not to be observed by a giant, all-seeing eye. The movie’s one-word title can mean “a thin skin or covering ” or “a motion picture,” itself. Name it.
7. R&B band Jack Mack and the Heart Attack were performing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta when a pipe bomb exploded, and actual video footage of the band was incorporated by Clint Eastwood into his 2019 docudrama, “Richard Jewell.” But that wasn’t the band’s first brush with movie fame; lead singer Mark Campbell provided the singing voice for Michael J. Fox’s character in what 1985 film?
8. This 2011 film was the second entry in the 21st century genre of “Liam Neeson revenge thrillers” after 2008’s surprise success, “Taken,” and it was the first of four collaborations with director Jamue Collet-serra (“Non-stop,” “Run All Night,” “The Commuter”). Do you know it?
9. What raunchy 2015 holiday comedy following three best friends takes place across four different Decembers: 2001, 2008, 2015 and 2016?
10. Kirk Douglas starred in an unsuccessful 1963 Broadway adaptation of a novel that he hoped to turn into a movie. No studio would touch it, so he gave the rights to his son, Michael Douglas, who produced it in 1975, but Kirk was now too old. The actor he did cast went on to win the Oscar, and the film won a total of five out of nine nominations. What was it?
— C.J. Lais