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by John Nolan

The war on movies 2: Answers

September 16, 2011 in Movies, Quizzes

Following on from yesterday’s The war on movies, here’s the sequel – now with added answers.

Lost on the cutting room floor from the original post was the news that we actually won the quiz! Whilst we were an amazing eight points clear of second place, there was a bit of confusion surrounding third prize.

The quizmaster announced that they had a result but a play-off was in the works.  Two teams were in “joint third” and they needed to play off.  They did and, a slight controversy over the original name of Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope aside *, one of these teams defeated the other.  Well done, here’s third prize.

Except, this play-off was immediately followed up by another play-off, this time featuring the two teams who were tied in “joint second”. The team that lost this one were a bit confused afterwards.  Shouldn’t they be getting third prize, they no doubt wondered.  To be fair to the organisers, this was resolved quite quickly and they were given some Star Wars merchandise – in honour of the ‘second-and-a-half’ place they’d just finished in…

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by John Nolan

The war on movies

September 14, 2011 in Movies, Quizzes

After a Summer hiatus, the Kelly’s movie quiz returned on Sunday night. Yeah, I know, Sunday night.  Not since Where in the World ended have I associated that particular evening with quizzing.

The night wasn’t the only change – the quiz is now being sponsored by HMV.  This week, in honour of the fact that you can now buy all the Star Wars films on Blu-Ray, the quiz was called ‘Movie Wars’ and featured a lot of (although thankfully not entirely) questions about George Lucas’s cash cow creation.

It was quite an enjoyable quiz.  Its eight rounds included a picture round (on the big screen – no paper here) and two audio rounds.  One of these audio rounds was most entertaining.  It featured 10 samples of dialogue from famous movies. Nothing too novel there, you say, but these were all linked by the fact that they were almost entirely made up of expletives. Yes, I know, it’s a bit childish but it certainly made me laugh!

The Star Wars connection was kept light for the most part. For example, the picture round featured 10 stills of actors, who have appeared in Star Wars movies, in some other film – and that’s what you had to identify.  There was also a round where a Star Wars actor was named, along with two others, and you had to say in which film all three of them appeared.  You can sample some questions after the ‘Continue…’

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by John Nolan

Back to the front: answers

June 20, 2011 in Movies, Quizzes

Here endeth the post created last Thursday, Back to the front.  My apologies for the delay in posting the answers.  I feel as if I am in the plot of a Richard Curtis movie as, within the last two months, I have been at four weddings.  Well, the fourth of those took place last weekend and it knocked me out of my ol’ routine.  Heck, even my little Friday podcast was only uploaded this morning.

I mentioned last week that this month’s Kelly’s movie quiz was won by ‘Things to do in John Denver when you’re dead’. And well done to them.  They almost pulled off a clean sweep of the available prizes but were beaten to the top spot in the ‘Best Team Name’ competition, as voted for by audience applause, by the (hopefully) inaccurately named ‘Three Men and a Massive Slut’.  Mind you, the team was made up of a 3:1 male-female ratio…

The poster included in the previous post was from the 1978 film, The Wild Geese.  It was the only one of the ‘Photoshopped Posters’ round that eluded us.  I must check it out sometime, it has quite the cast.

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by John Nolan

Back to the front

June 16, 2011 in Movies, Quizzes

One of the beauties of table quizzing is that it’s rare you feel you are the cause of your team’s defeat.  However, on Monday last, that unfortunate “honour” landed on my shoulders.

We have become the ‘playoff’ team as, apart from the first movie quiz three months ago, we’ve always been involved in a tie-breaker for some position or another.  Three months ago we won the opening quiz but, since then, it’s been a playoff for third, a playoff for second and, this month, a playoff for third once more.

Mike is our star man when it comes to movies and it had been only right that he was our nominee for those previous playoffs.  However, on Monday night, perhaps lacking the motivation to compete for a slab of beer (which we found difficult to give away, when we won it a few months back), he deferred.  Consensus was that I should be the man to approach the stage…

There I met Luke, the other team’s representative.  He looked about as up for this as I did – and I don’t even drink beer.  “OK,” Dave the quizmaster told us, “we’re going to play another piece of music.  The winner is the person who identifies it first.”

On came the music. After about 10 seconds I looked at my opponent.  He shrugged his shoulders, indicating that I wasn’t the only one who HADN’T A CLUE what it was. “Alright,” says Dave, “let’s try another one.”

After another 10 seconds, myself and Luke had become impromptu comrades in this crucible of embarrassment.  This second tune was (apparently) much easier as people in the crowd were now hurling invective in our general direction.  Invective which said ‘Ah come on. This one’s EASY…”  Still, Luke and I just stood there.

David on the mic was getting a bit impatient. “I’m going to run out of questions soon!” he told us.

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by John Nolan

When we were young: answers

May 12, 2011 in Movies, Quizzes

Like a Bat into Hell I’m back with the answers to yesterday’s many, many questions in their many, many posts.

This article will be the one post to rule them all.  In other words it will contain all the answers in one, handy location.

If you’ll cast your eyes to the right, you will see the poster for the movie from which the tie-breaker audio clip came.  That’s right, it’s The Blues Brothers. It was sort of a must-see movie for our generation and, combining that with the fact they chose probably the film’s most famous line, I wasn’t exactly chewing my fingernails worrying that Mike wasn’t going to win that tie-breaker. ;-)

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by John Nolan

When we were young: the audio round

May 11, 2011 in Movies, Quizzes

We’re into Bonus Time this afternoon as I did find a spare half hour to recreate the Movie theme tunes round from last Monday night’s Movie Quiz in Kelly’s Bar.

Of course, there were 10 tracks on the night but Soundcloud‘s snazzy anti-piracy thingy has once again stopped two of them from uploading. Cos I’m really ripping somebody off by playing the opening 30 seconds of their song…

Movie themes:

I’ll post the answers to these, along with the answers to this morning’s post, sometime tomorrow.

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by John Nolan

When we were young

May 11, 2011 in Movies, Quizzes

Kelly’s Bar in Galway hosted its third Movie Quiz on Monday night.  We may have won the first quiz, two months back, but we felt as if we were well off the pace last time out, when we eventually won a playoff to finish third.  Could we up our game this week?

Well, yes (slightly).  We ended up in another playoff – this time for second place.  Mikey once again strode forth as our champion in this joust. Once again, I don’t think I’m doing him down to say it was quite an easy playoff.  Following on from identifying the whistled melody from The Bridge On The River Kwai, which he got in about 0.5 of a second last month, this time were told it would be a snippet of dialogue from a movie.  The bar held its breath (collectively). The audio file struck up and we heard:

“It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes…”

And that was as far as it got before Mike put his hand in the air. Perhaps it’s because I’m the age I am but isn’t that a bit of a gimme?* Then again, I guess it wasn’t for Mike’s opponent in the playoff.

Congrats to the winners ‘Tango versus Cash: This time it’s personal’. That’s two months in a row they’ve won now. They were two points ahead of us at half-time and finished with the same margin of victory.  Well done there.

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by John Nolan

The Bloodening: answers

April 6, 2011 in Movies, Quizzes

Here are the answers to the questions in yesterday’s discretely titled Move Quiz II: The Bloodening.

First off, check out the accompanying picture (click for a larger version).  It’s the poster I mentioned yesterday.  As in, during a round in which posters were doctored to remove all text, this is the only one our team couldn’t identify.  To be honest, even after it was revealed, I still couldn’t say I’d ever heard of this film!

If you’d like to give this quiz a go, you still can.  At the end of the night, the MC announced that there will be at least one more Movie Quiz before the summer comes. Keep an eye on this site, I’ll post it into the calendar as soon as I hear about it.

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