Review: TCM's Ultimate Movie Trivia Challenge Game

My regular readers know that I mostly review books, DVDs, and records aimed at groovy ghouls, retro rockers, and kooky cultists here on Psychobabble, but I'm branching out ever so slightly with this post to write my first game review. Turner Classic Movie's Ultimate Movie Trivia Challenge doesn't stretch too far from the usual Psychobabble subject of retro-pop culture, but it did force me to alter my usual solitary review approach. So I wrangled my wife, Elise Nussbaum, for assistance. I didn't simply choose her because she is conveniently located or basically the only other adult human I talk to (although both of those things are true); she was also the perfect candidate because she is a former three-day Jeopardy champion, so I knew she would go easy on neither TCM's Ultimate Movie Trivia Challenge nor me. 

Game play is refreshingly simple in an age of games with unnecessarily convoluted rules. One player draws a card with four questions. The other player randomly selects a number from one to four, and the question-asker asks the corresponding question. Each correctly answered question earns a player one point, and on it goes until one player accumulates a set number of points. The rules suggest 10, 12, or 15.

Review: 'Stanley Kubrick Produces'

Stanley Kubrick is one of the most recognizable and revered film directors and arguably the one who most effectively and indelibly smuggled big ideas and experimental storytelling into mainstream cinemas. However, a close look at his career reveals that Kubrick put a lot more of himself into producing than directing. Over the final three decades of his career, he directed only five films, but he was constantly busy with distribution, marketing, home video releases, dubbing for foreign markets, etc. And he lavished all the attention on this unglamorous stuff that he expended on his directing. Ultimately, his obsession with every facet of production so consumed his time that he could direct only one picture in the final twelve years of his life.

I'm a major Kubrick fan, and I've read several books about him, but I didn't quite grasp why his career was as odd as it was until reading James Fenwick's Stanley Kubrick Produces. Bolstered with a tremendous amount of research in the Stanley Kubrick Archives at the University of the Arts London, Fenwick highlights how dedicated Kubrick was to maintaining control of his work from the very beginning of his career. It began with media spin in the days when he wanted to project the idea that he had more control than he really did and he tended to bungle his productions. He made the ultimate blunder when he and partner James B. Harris signed a contract with Kirk Douglas's production company that gave the actor far more say than it gave Kubrick. 

The interesting takeaway from Stanley Kubrick Produces that Fenwick doesn't overemphasize is that Kubrick's obsession with control was often about creating and presenting his work as well as he possibly could. It may seem crazy for a producer to get involved in how his movies are dubbed for foreign markets, which is a task usually farmed out to companies that specialize in that kind of work. However, anyone who has ever seen a film dubbed with flat, unengaged voices knows how integral voice acting is to the effectiveness of a film. Kubrick was rightly offended by attempts to market Paths of Glory as a blood and guts war movie or 2001: A Space Odyssey as pulp sci-fi and one can understand why an artist of his caliber would want to get involved in that side of the business for the sake of how the world approached his art. While the many mistakes documented in Stanley Kubrick Produces expose Kubrick as not as infallible as some fans consider him to be, and his attempts to subvert labor union rules were downright immoral, the infamous obsessiveness it also documents only highlights how complete his artistry was.

Review: 'Planet Wax: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Soundtracks on Vinyl'

There have been a lot of compilations of album cover art, and they’re usually good for a flip-through but lack focus and insight. Planet Wax: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Soundtracks on Vinyl is in a whole other universe. Collecting the covers of sci-fi and fantasy soundtracks, Aaron Lupton and Jeff Szpirglas’s new book has a specific focus and is atypically enlightening.

Psychobabble’s Favorite Year at the Movies: 1968!

A somewhat recent trend in cinema studies finds writers naming their choice for the best year in movies and penning full-length arguments to back up their picks. There have been a couple of books arguing in favor of the year of The Wizard of Oz  (yay!) and Gone with the Wind (gag!). I have not read Charles F. Adams’s 1939: The Making of Six Great Films from Hollywood’s Greatest Year or Thomas S. Hischak’s 1939: Hollywood’s Greatest Year, though I have read and reviewed Brian Rafferty’s Best. Movie. Year.Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen and Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan’s Cinema ’62. I enjoyed both of those books very much even though I do not share the respective writers’ opinions that 1999 or 1962 are cinema’s best years. They did get me thinking about my personal choice, though, and let’s be honest, all of these books are nothing if not expressions of their writers’ personal tastes. I’ve settled on 1968.

Review: 'Kubrick’s Music—Selections from the Films of Stanley Kubrick'

Stanley Kubrick’s work is often more like world’s you visit than movies you watch. The galactic emptiness of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The grimy yet candy-colored near-future dystopia of A Clockwork Orange. The cavernous, ice-encrusted hotel of The Shining. The opulent dream vision of NYC in Eyes Wide Shut. The oil painting landscapes and chiaroscuro interiors of Barry Lyndon. Even the desolate suburbs of Lolita are inhabitable environments that engulf you, shutting out any trace of our real world for two or three hours. Kubrick put an absurd amount of thought into how to best create these fully dimensional worlds visually, but he put a great deal of thought into the sounds swirling between their borders as well. He’d spend hour upon hour researching music, and the fruits of his labors are clear to anyone who cannot separate the visuals of great spacecraft tumbling through the cosmos without hearing “The Blue Danube Waltz” or a tiny car traversing a treacherous path swarmed by foreboding forests without hearing Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s “Dies Irae”.

Much of the music to which Kubrick bestowed additional dimensions can be heard on El Records’ Kubrick’s Music—Selections from the Films of Stanley Kubrick. This set is both fascinating and frustrating. It is frustrating because so many essentials are not present. The Shining’s sprawling soundtrack is largely reduced to the jazz-age tracks Kubrick used to stir the ghosts of the Overlook’s bloody past. “Dies Irae” only appears within Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique”, a stirring piece of bombast far removed from The Shining’s brooding tone. Carlos and Elkind’s chilling synth production is not present. The same is true of the synthesized music from A Clockwork Orange: the pieces only appear in traditionally orchestrated versions. While we get an eerie prelude by Ralph Vaughan Williams that Kubrick considered using in the stargate sequence of 2001, we do not get the more transformative and disturbing Ligeti piece he ultimately used in the film. While pop songs are present in the use of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” (Dr. Strangelove), Gene Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” (A Clockwork Orange), and a non-soundtrack song Sue Lyon sang on the B-side of the “Lolita Ya-Ya” single, none of the great pop songs used in Full Metal Jacket appear. In fact, that film, as well as Killer’s Kiss and The Killing, is completely unrepresented.

However, some of these issues also point to one of the more fascinating aspects of Kubrick’s Music since we get to hear much of what inspired Kubrick to use the music he ultimately used, and the inclusion of discarded ideas such as the Ralph Vaughan Williams prelude makes Kubrick’s Music a sort of enlightening look at Kubrick’s musical sketchpad. So while this is hardly a definitive collection of Kubrick soundtracks, it is an educational one, and with such great pieces as John Coltrane’s “Greensleeves”, Nelson Riddle’s “Lolita Ya Ya”,  Rimskey-Korsokav’s “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship” (incidentally, a piece shut out of the original Clockwork Orange soundtrack), and several movements from Ludwig Van’s glorious “Ninth”, there is quite a lot of gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh to slooshy, o my brothers.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 99

The Date: January 7

The Movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

What Is It?: The greatest science-fiction movie ever made is more of a trip backwards and forwards in time than a science-fiction movie. Shut the lights. Get close to the big screen. You’ll munch on twigs and tapirs with ape people. You’ll walk upside down in space capsules. You’ll float in the terrifying emptiness of space. You’ll rocket through a psychedelic star gate and descend to Jupiter’s weird terrain. You’ll sink deeply into the limitless brilliance of Stanley Kubrick’s brain.

Why Today?: On this day In 1610, Galileo announces he has discovered the first three satellites of Jupiter.

Review: 'Famous Robots & Cyborgs: An Encyclopedia of Robots from TV, Film, Literature, Comics, Toys, and More'

Famous Robots & Cyborgs: An Encyclopedia of Robots from TV, Film, Literature, Comics, Toys, and More is a big name for a slim book that doesn’t really qualify as an encyclopedia. There are fewer than sixty entries covering this fairly rich topic, which left me wondering, “Where are the GoBots? Where are those robo-bugs from Runaway starring Gene Simmons and Magnum P.I.? Where are the Star Wars robots that aren’t C-3P0 and R2-D2? No love for IG-88, 2-1B or R5-D4? How about 2-XL?” OK, so the trivia toy 2-XL was more of an eight-track player than a functioning robot (in fact, I used to listen to eight-track tapes on my 2-XL), but if author Dan Roberts thinks that Batman’s nemesis Mr. Freeze and Lisa from Weird Science qualify as robots he has to cut “The Toy with a Personality” some slack.

If you don’t go into this encyclopedia expecting it to be an encyclopedia (the entries aren’t even arranged alphabetically) you will find it to be a breezy and entertaining read. Roberts arranges his entries according to each robot’s appearance, level of artificial intelligence, cuteness, and scariness before delving deeper with origins, memorable moments, assessments, and trivia arranged neatly in bulleted lists. Written in charming British parlance (no surprise that Roberts doesn’t skimp on the “Doctor Who” details), Famous Robots & Cyborgs also breaks up the proper entries with fun extras, such as a timeline of mechanical milestones, different methods for annihilating androids, robo-relationships, and artificially intelligent space ships (though the absence of 2001’s HAL from this section is a major fumble). One should be wary of an encyclopedia that only takes a couple of hours to read, but it can’t be said that those hours haven’t been enjoyably spent.