Some people like to combat the advancing decrepitude of old age with plastic surgery. Me, I enter film quizzes. Ever since in the late 1990s when I formed the ‘Crouch End Film Society’ (membership: 1) and walked away with a ‘Starship Troopers’ faux leather jacket that still doesn’t fit me even after middle-age finally spread, I have been strangely addicted to random questions that test my film knowledge.
I recognise that there is no ‘i’ in team. However, the ‘i’ team might be a viable sequel to that Bradley Cooper-Liam Neeson flick of a few years back (‘I love it when an app comes together’; ‘Hannibal, you’re holding the screen upside down’). Imagine the tagline: ‘outcast from the system, they were left to their own devices – try taking their devices off them’. I’m sure at some point an advertiser might steal that one.
Yes, no ‘i’ in team. But there is an ‘i’ in Team Oliver, the band I put together with Mrs O and the young lad. It’s a bit like Wings without the vegetarianism. I have to say, I’m not a great Team Player, on account of the elderly being segregated on public transport. I tend to hog the quiz paper and I find it hard to hear when someone whispers to me in my bad ear. Still, with the team being one’s family, they put up with me well enough; Mrs O crossing her arms and muttering ‘I don’t know why you brought me here’ and the lad asking for the latest carbonated drink designed to make you pee in a circle. (He gets very territorial; no one must touch his phone.)
Lately, I’ve taken to entering the quiz at my local cinema, the Arthouse, in London’s Crouch End. The quizmaster likes his Disney movies, which puts me at a disadvantage since my lad opted for Dreamworks Animation (he took against ‘Frozen’ on the grounds that his snowman never looked like Olaf). Nevertheless, we managed to secure a couple of wins, though when the quiz started clashing with ‘The Apprentice’ on Wednesday nights, my team opted for a different bearded old man being rude and pointing at people.
The Film Distributors Association, eager for a new way to engage online movie commentators, decided that it was better to pit them against one another in a ‘Hunger Games’ style battle to the death (‘may the odd people be in your favour’). Well, at least until the free bar runs out. So we were assembled in a club in Margaret Street, a short distance from Oxford Circus, and made a first come, first served dash for the leather sofas, which were far less comfortable than one might imagine.
The young quiz master, Tom Craine, was a writing associate of Josh Widdicombe, and appeared on Russell Howard’s Good News, which is a polite way of saying I had never heard of him. (I don’t normally watch TV after the watershed.) He was personable enough and did not resort to Tom Hardy as Bane impressions, which I find an admirable quality in the young.
Teams were restricted to groups of four. Team Oliver was just Mrs O and I, the young lad having gone absent without a text message – or AWOT - but some of the others had eight or nine people in them, and had names like Quiz-lamic State (which I have to admit is quite brilliant, if of poor taste). It was divided into four rounds, the first was one Christmas movies. Which iconic character was played by Alastair Sim in the 1950s, Albert Finney in the 1970s, Michael Caine in the 1990s and me when it was time for a round? Who played Emma Thompson’s brother in ‘Love Actually’? That sort of thing. Actually, I got that one wrong, thinking it was Alan Rickman, having imagined a whole new Richard Curtis incest thing going on (no wonder his characters are always hesitant and apologetic). For the record, the Rickman incest movie is ‘Close My Eyes’. Then we had to take the first letter of each of our twelve answers and spell out a forthcoming blockbuster. (Is ‘Into the Woods’ a blockbuster? I thought it was specialist fare.)
The second round was entitled Christmas present and asked us to consider how many Indiana Jones films featured ‘Get Santa’ star Jim Broadbent. A more testing question might be: how many Mike Leigh films featured Jim Broadbent, but the crowd were young and more likely to think that Tuppence Middleton was a discount store rather than one of Britain’s up and coming talents. Still, at least we didn’t have to spell Quvenzhané Wallis, which I’m getting the hang of in time for ‘Annie’.
The third round looked back at the year through quotations. I am afraid that I quite forgot that ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ featured a character called Zero, so got zero for Zero. One quote mentioned ‘fire burns, water cleanses’ – I wish the young lad had been here to hear that.
The final round dealt with the films of 2015, a quick fire ‘name the movie from the badly pixellated still’ then a series of questions in which we had to name the original release date of ‘Mad Max’ in the UK – as if that was somehow different from its Australian release date.
Having haemorrhaged six points, we doubted that Team Oliver would be in the Top Three. But we came third, so I went up and collected a bag of film trinkets that included stuff aimed at young children (a Cloudy lunchbox) and their alcoholic parents (a ‘300’ bottle opener). The goodie bags were not really aimed at teams of nine (one sticker each?), so there is no advantage in numbers.
With thanks to the generous hospitality of the Film Distributors Association
