Up in the Air Trivia Quiz

Answer: Inception

The fundamental concept at the centre of Christopher Nolan's 2010 film 'Inception' is the ability of characters to enter the dreams of other characters, perhaps to extract some vital information or implant an idea. The plot of the film is incredibly adventurous, moving through several levels of dreams (i.e. a dream within a dream within... you get the idea), occasionally leaving both the viewer and some of the characters struggling to keep up.

Given the nature of his job, Leonardo di Caprio's Dom Cobb has a means of telling whether or not he is in a dream or in reality, known as a 'totem'. Dom's totem is a spinning top that falls over in the real world but keeps on spinning ad infinitum when he's in a dream. At the end of the film, Dom has returned home to his family and naturally gives his totem a spin. The film closes on a shot of the still-spinning top, leaving it open to the viewer whether he has actually returned to reality. Director Christopher Nolan has said that whether or not he has returned to reality is not what should be taken from this scene, the important thing is that he's with his family and not even looking to see what the top is doing.

Answer: Broken Flowers

Independent director Jim Jarmusch's 2005 film 'Broken Flowers' features Bill Murray as an ageing womanizer (named Don Johnston, a play on Don Juan) who has just broken up with his latest girlfriend. He receives a letter from an old flame informing him that he has a 19-year-old son and he decides to go and look for him after being prompted by his detective neighbour Winston.

As the film nears its conclusion, Don is no closer to finding his son, though he has managed to clear up some of his old relationships. As he stands by the side of a road a young man, played by Bill Murray's son Homer, drives past. The young man is listening to the same song as Don and Don wonders if he could possibly be the son he's been looking for. The film raises interesting questions about how our current experiences affect our memories of the past.

Answer: American Psycho

Adapted from the Bret Easton Ellis book of the same name, 'American Psycho' tells the story of the banking executive Patrick Bateman, portrayed by Christian Bale. Bateman is a total psychopath, obsessed with material possessions and unable to cope with the notion that anybody may be superior to him. In an early scene he notices that another character's business card is made using higher quality paper than his and he goes into a rage, killing a homeless man and his dog.

The finale to the film arguably begins when he tries to feed a cat into an ATM. A woman sees what he's doing and tries to intervene, so he kills her instead. As the bodies pile up he returns to his office, phoning his lawyer to confess everything that he's done. The next morning he goes to the apartment where he has been storing the remains of his victims, only to find that there is nothing there. Was it all just a very vivid hallucination?

Answer: Barton Fink

Four years before 'Seven' gave us the eminently quotable "What's in the box?", the Coen Brothers left their viewers with the same question at the end of 'Barton Fink'. The film centres on the eponymous playwright, played by John Turturro, who is invited to move from New York to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. When he arrives Fink is unsettled by pretty much everything in his hotel and his problems are compounded when he comes down with a severe case of writer's block. After a bizarre incident in which a lover dies in his hotel room, Fink is released from his writer's block by keeping her head in a box on his desk.

At the end of the film, Fink escapes the confines of the hotel and is on the beach, where he comes face-to-face with a mysterious woman that he recognises from the picture in his hotel room. She asks him what's in the box and he replies that he doesn't know - how strange!

Answer: Birdman

Winner of the 2015 Oscar for Best Picture and widely acclaimed for the cinematographic simulation of being taken in one shot, 'Birdman' stars Michael Keaton as the washed-up actor Riggan Thomson as he attempts to relaunch his career as a 'serious' actor. In the narrative of the film, Thomson is most famous for his portrayal of 'Birdman' in a superhero franchise of the same name (a clear reference to Keaton's appearance in the 'Batman' films of the late 1980s and early 1990s) and is now appearing in a staging of Raymond Carver's short story 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love'. Birdman haunts him throughout the film, telling him that he's a nobody.

The preview performances struggle through a series of fiascos before it is finally time for the opening night. Riggan takes a real gun on the stage and shoots himself in the head, much to the delight of the audience. He then wakes up and is told that the play received rave reviews. He is visited by his daughter Sam, who brings him some flowers. She leaves the room to get a vase and when she returns Riggan has gone, presumably having jumped out of the window. Sam walks up to the window and looks up at the sky with a smile on her face. Is Riggan actually Birdman? Can he fly? Your guess is as good as mine.

Answer: The Thing

A pioneer of 'body horror', in which the gruesome disfigurement of the human body plays a central role, John Carpenter's 'The Thing' is a chilling watch. The film is set at an Antarctic research station that has been besieged by an alien life form with the ability to assume the form of anyone or anything that it kills. Understandably, this leaves everybody feeling pretty on edge.

Each of the characters is picked off one by one until just two remain, Mac (Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David). Neither of them knows if the other one is an alien as they sit in the snow outside the station with flamethrowers at the ready. The really clever part is that the viewer has no idea either. Childs asks "What do we do?", to which Mac replies "Why don't we just, wait here for a little while, see what happens...". The film ends there!

Answer: Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola's masterpiece 'Lost in Translation' centres on an ageing movie star (Bob) who has come to Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial, and a young woman (Charlotte) who is accompanying her photographer husband while he works in the city. The film depicts the profound loneliness felt by both of the main characters, and as they repeatedly run into each other over a period of several days they build a friendship based on the understanding of each other's isolation.

All too soon Bob has to fly back to America and his brief friendship with Charlotte comes to an end. Unsure how to say goodbye, their separation as he leaves the hotel is awkward and stilted. Thankfully, he spots her from his car while on the way to the airport. He approaches her and they hug, before he whispers something in her ear and they kiss. As he leaves the scene Bob looks as though he has found closure. The director's decision not to let the viewer in on what Bob whispers in Charlotte's ear makes their farewell even more intimate.

Answer: The Blair Witch Project

The 1999 horror film 'The Blair Witch Project' centres around three film students who are wandering about in a forest in search of the local legend of the 'Blair Witch', supposedly the ghost of a lady called Elly Kedward who tortured children in the late 1700s. While not the first to use the technique (generally attributed to the 1980 horror film 'Cannibal Holocaust'), 'The Blair Witch Project' popularised the idea of 'found footage', meaning that the events of the film happened some time in the past and that we are now observing a tape made by those people but not published by them.

The genius of 'The Blair Witch Project' is that you never actually see any witch, banshee, ghoul, spirit, poltergeist or malevolent creature of any kind. The film plays on the viewer's (and the filmmaker's) fear of the unknown. In the final scene, the sound technician Mike is seen standing in the corner of an abandoned building before the director Heather's camera is knocked out of her hand and film ends.

Answer: Blade Runner

Harrison Ford stars as Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic 'Blade Runner'. The film is set in a future where the Tyrrell Corporation have created androids, known as replicants, that are approaching the same level of mental and emotional maturity as human beings. As such, they are outlawed on Earth and largely used for menial labour on other planets as the human race expands across the known universe. The job of a blade runner is to exterminate, or 'retire' any replicants who find their way into society on Earth.

Throughout the film there is the suggestion that Rick may in fact be a replicant himself. While this is never fully confirmed, near the end of the film Rick receives a small origami unicorn as a gift. This implies that someone has had access to his dreams, something that would only be possible if he were a replicant!

Answer: The Shining

What quiz about ambiguity in cinema would be complete without the inclusion of Stanley Kubrick? Many of his films, notably '2001: A Space Odyssey', leave you with your mind blown as the credits roll, but 1980's 'The Shining' is perhaps unique in that you feel you have a vague grip of the goings on before everything changes with the final shot. Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, a writer who becomes caretaker at the Overlook Hotel over the winter offseason, taking his wife Wendy and son Danny with him.

'Cabin fever' does not really begin to explain what happens to Jack as he descends into madness and has violent visions of previous happenings in the hotel. His madness fills him with the desire to kill his family and they narrowly escape his machinations as he freezes to death in the snow. While not explicitly stated, everything about the film would suggest that it is set in the same time period that it was made, the late 1970s. However, just before the credits begin the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph that shows a man that looks an awful lot like Jack Nicholson at the front of a large crowd of people in 1921. What?!