Quiz number two
April 13, 2007 | 12:00am
Here are 20 short synopses of 20 movies set in six different cities. Name the movies. The first five people to get all the answers right will each get a copy of my new book, Twisted Travels. Which, coincidentally, includes these cities.
An Australian journalist arrives to research the anti-Sukarno movement.
His photographer and guide is a male dwarf played by an actress. The journalist falls for a secretary in the British Embassy, who lets slip a piece of confidential information.
3. The movie begins with two urban legends: the scuba diver in a tree, and the boy whose suicide turns into a murder. The cast of characters includes a former TV whiz kid, a current TV whiz kid, the trophy wife of a dying TV producer, the cokehead daughter of a quiz show host, a kind-hearted cop, a kind-hearted caregiver, and a motivational speaker. There are amphibians. Lots of amphibians.
4. A detective investigating a murder discovers a conspiracy over water rights, falls in love with a suspect, discovers something terrible about her daughter ("She’s my daughter, and my..."), gets his nose sliced by a nasty little man, solves the case, and is told to "Forget it, it’s (the title of the movie)."
New York
5. A very wealthy man dies and leaves his entire fortune to a relative, a small-town poet who writes greeting card verse. The poet goes to Manhattan, where he falls in love with a poor but feisty young woman.
The young woman turns out to be a shrewd newspaper reporter who is out to expose him as a sap. Meanwhile, the directors of his late uncle’s corporation try to have him declared legally insane.
6. He’s a TV comedy writer dating a pretty girl who’s much too young for him. He quits his job to become a serious writer. Then he falls in love with his friend’s mistress, an intellectual who trashes all the writers and artists he admires. He dumps his very young girlfriend, then realizes he’s made a terrible mistake.
7. A tennis player on his way to the US Open meets a creepy man on the train. The creepy man proposes that they swap murders. The creepy man will kill the tennis player’s ex-wife, and the tennis player will kill the creepy man’s father. This way they cannot be suspected of murder, since they have no connection to the victims and therefore no motive.
The tennis player declines the offer, but then his ex-wife is murdered and he becomes the prime suspect.
8. At the celebration marking the end of World War II, an ambitious saxophonist meets and falls in love with a rising singer. They get married, and the trouble begins. He wants to create a new sound and dreams of finding "the major chord." She wants to entertain the audience, not challenge them. Her career rockets, his doesn’t.
9. There are two friends. One of them wants to be good, even as he runs errands for his uncle, a neighborhood gangster. He decides to be his friend’s savior. His friend is a wild kid who runs into debt, then insults the local loan shark. The loan shark decides to have him killed.
The two friends try to get away, and the director turns up as the hitman.
11. A clever young Englishwoman is in love with a journalist, but can’t marry him because he has no money. She has a friend, an American heiress who is terminally ill. The heiress is interested in the journalist. So the Englishwoman convinces her journalist boyfriend to pretend to reciprocate, so the heiress will leave him her money.
12. She’s a Venetian aristocrat, he’s a soldier with the occupying Austrian forces. They meet at the opera. She becomes obsessed with him, and he turns out to be a heel. The Italian war of independence begins.
13. An English couple whose little daughter has died go to Venice, where the husband is restoring a church. They meet two old women, one of them blind and clairvoyant. She tells them that she can see their dead daughter. Later the man thinks he sees a little girl in a red cape...
The genius writes an opera, and the emperor himself comes to the premiere. Asked to comment on the music, the emperor declares that it has "too many notes."
15. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a surgeon finds himself working as a window cleaner. He’s in love with two women at the same time; one of them is given to wearing a bowler hat.
Enter Ms. Rita Gomez as a Kinsey-style sex researcher.
17. The film ends with Nora Aunor and Vilma Santos staring at each other without a word for what feels like ages (about three minutes). We never do find out who gets Christopher de Leon.
18. The evening gown competition of a beauty pageant is held on a yacht on Manila Bay. The yacht catches fire and the finalists wind up on a desert island along with a maid, three men, and a bitchy gay socialite. The class struggle breaks out on the island. There are many catfights, cannibalism, and a sing-along of Somewhere from West Side Story.
19. Four friends find themselves being tailed by a mysterious four-fingered Japanese hitman, a Chinese gang, and a priest. To unravel the mystery they go to a convent in Baguio and discover that there’s something in those holy wafers. Nuns, hitmen, and dragon ladies burst into song in this comedy-musical from the 1980s.
20. Four young women attend the University of the Philippines in the early 1980s. The aimless one falls in love with a student radical and ends up sheltering his pregnant wife. The old-fashioned girl marries an ultra-conservative man who keeps her pregnant and barefoot. The smart one marries a man who is in love with another man. The aspiring singer becomes a star despite her lack of singing talent.
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