It's January again, time to show my freshmen O Brother, Where Art Thou?, our reward for having read The Odyssey over the course of the first semester. I guess I've seen the movie around thirty times now, and it still manages to delight me. My colleagues and I will spend the rest of the year quoting it to each other. One thing about teaching a movie is that you begin to notice tiny details about it. Here's a fairly hard O Brother trivia contest that I wrote up last year while watching the film in class. (I'll post the answers in the comment section.)
1) Which artist from the film's soundtrack has a cameo in which she asks for a record of the Soggy Bottom Boys singing "Man of Constant Sorrow"?
2) Who performs the version of "I'll Fly Away" that's used in the film? (It's different than the one on the Grammy-winning soundtrack album.)
3) Whose translation of The Odyssey is quoted at the beginning of the film?
4) What moment in the film could be construed as a joke about Foley art?
5) Which character is speaking at a moment in the film when the sound doesn't match up with the image—when the dialogue does not fit with the character's mouth?
6) In what year is the movie taking place—and how do you know?
4 comments:
Answers:
1) Gillian Welch
2) The Kossoy Sisters
3) Robert Fitzgerald's
4) Foley art is the use of sound effects in film to mimic other sounds. Near the beginning of the film, the three men think they hear bloodhounds barking in the distance, pursuing them. It turns out though, that the sound is the squeaking of a handcart approaching on the railroad tracks.
5) Big Dan Teague. (While talking with Everett and Delmar in the restaurant.)
6) 1937 or 1936. Pete has seven months left on his sentence, but when he anticipates getting fifty years added on for escaping, he says he'll be released in 1987.
What film does the title come from?
--Cummings
Sullivan's Travels....but everybody knows that. :-)
Actually, Pete has only two weeks left on his sentence, I just noticed. So the year can only be 1937.
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