Why are the Brits such movie geeks?
Let’s say you have a few hours to kill somewhere, like at an airport, or in the dentist’s office, or waiting for your car to get lubed, or sitting in Immigration to find out whether you will be deported to the US or not. There are worse ways to kill time than leafing through the Third Empire Magazine Movie Miscellany. It’s a slim collection, but packed with (mostly useless) information about the movies we love and sometimes only rarely think about.
The Brits are particularly devoted to film trivia, they go balls-out, and I think it may have to do with settling for a lot of video (and later, DVD) copies of movies over the decades. A lot of movies don’t make it to British cinemas and, like Quentin Tarentino’s film “apprenticeship” working in a video rental store, this has made a whole generation of Brits into Zen masters of flickaphelia, capable of reciting entire Gandalf and Jerry Maguire speeches after a few pints. Like secondhand smoke, they’ve (semi)-passively absorbed the history of modern filmmaking, filing away tidbits of useless information to trot out at parties, or to quarrel over bitterly with mates in pubs. (Examples of this syndrome can be found in Simon Pegg’s homages to zombie and cop flicks, respectively, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz).
The home video’s the key here, not the widescreen edition, which costs too much to watch over and over again obsessively, and, more importantly, you can’t rewind or freeze frame.
Really, how else could the editors of Empire humanly compile the “Number of times Jack and Rose say each other’s names in Titanic”? (Jack says “Rose” 50 times; the clearly much needier Rose says “Jack” 80 times.) You need that remote control to write a book like this.
But try not to be hooked as you plow through the entries (“The social cliques of Mean Girls,” “Actors who were cut out of The Thin Red Line,” “Actors whose nationalities we get wrong”) and find that, lo and behold, your number’s being called at the LTO or the line at the bank has finally evaporated.
There’s an obsessive attention to certain trilogies in the Empire Movie Miscellany — Star Wars, naturally, which is spoken of in the meticulous and serious tones that you’d expect from sci-fi convention denizens; but also Lord of the Rings (Gandalf gets special attention), The Godfather series, The Matrix (the whole Matrix Reloaded speech is printed verbatim — and it still doesn’t make any sense!) and even the lesser trilogies (Scream, Porky’s, The Mummy, Beverly Hills Cop, and hey, who knew From Dusk ‘Til Dawn spawned two sequels? Only the straight-to-video crowd).
And speaking of threes, can you quickly conjure up the name of the third movie that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan starred in together, aside from Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail? It’s in here.
If you want to know about which actors and actresses are vegans, they’re listed here (sure, Alicia Silverstone, Gwyneth Paltrow and Daryl Hannah, but Woody Harrelson? Must be the herbs…); as are those “Actresses who have legally ‘divorced’ their parents” (Drew Barrymore, Alicia Silverstone [again], Michelle Williams, Juliette Lewis, Jaime Pressly); and those with twins (Ralph Fiennes; Vin Diesel; Ashton Kutcher; Justin Timberlake; Kiefer Sutherland; Parker Posey; Linda Hamilton; Elvis Presley [twin died at birth]).
Sex and booze are another preoccupation for Empire readers, presumably, and a thousand drinking games alone could be launched from trivia about what cocktails movie characters drink; a detailed wine list pf what wasconsumed in the film Sideways is included; and “Real sex taking place in non-porn movies” is catalogued (stuff like In the Realm of the Senses, Irreversible, Baise Moi, The Piano Teacher, Centre of the World and Brown Bunny).
Speaking of sex, Star Wars has an entire listing on “sexual double entendres” contained in the films, and it turns out the prequels had way more action going on than we thought. (Sample: “Wedge! Pull out! You’re not doing any good back there!” from The Empire Strikes Back.)
There are even helpful diagrams in Empire Movie Miscellany— outline drawings comparing the various designs of light sabers in the Star Wars movies (you go, geeks!), a map of L.B. Jeffries’ view of the courtyard in Rear Window, a comparative size chart of Godzilla (180 feet), the Stay-Puft giant marshmallow man from Ghostbusters (140 feet), the 50-foot woman from Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, King Kong, Jaws and Chewbacca (a humble 7.3 feet) and an “injury chart” of all Jackie Chan’s bones broken while filming his movies..
And it just wouldn’t be fun without a list of the crazy names movies go by when shown outside the English-speaking world. For instance, Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane went by the name of Satan Female Soldier in China (maybe it was the one-armed pushups?); Boogie Nights was retitled His Powerful Device Makes Him Famous, also in China; The Horse Whisperer became The Man Who Murmured into the Ears of Horses in France (bet it sounds much better in French); Airplane was rechristened The Unbelievable Trip in a Wacky Plane in Germany (and damn it, I like that title better!); Tom Cruise’s Risky Business became Just Send Him to University Unqualified, once again in China; and Groundhog Day was known to Swedish audiences as Monday the Whole Week.
So far, so good. All the above falls under the category of “factual information” and would allow this book’s inclusion in the “Reference” section of any upstanding book store. But sometimes the folks at Empire go too far. Sometimes it appears they have too much time on their hands. Sometimes they are just a little too interested in the mechanics of
There’s an amusing entry on “Actors who should get married for comic value.” Hence, if Whoopi Goldberg married Peter Cushing (highly unlikely, for a number of reasons), she’d be Whoopi Cushing; if Ellen Barkin married Alan Arkin, they’d be Ellen and Alan Barkin-Arkin. Furthermore: “If Isla Fisher married George Wendt, then divorced him to marry Ted Danson, divorced him to marry Alan Alda, then divorced him to marry Wayne Knight, and divorced him to marry Justin Long, she’d be” — wait for it — “Isla Wendt Danson Alda Knight Long.”
Clearly, those people over at Empire need to get a life.
