TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you will be shown an extract from a movie plot. You need to read the extract and create questions that can be answered from the extract. The questions should be well-formed and grammatically correct. The questions should be completely answerable from the given passage and should not require any external knowledge. Subjective questions are not allowed. Create questions that result in factoid answers. A simple rule of thumb to decide whether a question is factoid or not is to see if two different people with average reading/comprehension skills would come up with the same answer after reading the passage.
PROBLEM: Supremely entertaining, amazingly true story of the raucous music scene in Manchester, England- circa 1979-1992 and the man, Tony Wilson and the bands behind the movement that changed the history of pop culture forever. Wilson, as played brilliantly by Steve Coogan, narrates the movie; which has a fast paced, unconventional style of narrative in which Wilson speaks directly to the audience and explains what's going on. He basically has to, because it is often hard to tell what has just happened or what is happening from moment to moment. Surprisingly enough, this type of narrative works very well and adds a certain flair that accompanies the visceral, in-your-face style of filming, perfectly. It helps if you know something about some of the bands shown in the film (Joy Division, New Order,The Happy Mondays) or if you at least have a vague interest in learning about them. Of course, it also works on a basic comedic level too- with frenetic party scenes fueled by sex, drugs and pulsating new wave music. Though it is a film about the rise and fall of an empire - the treatment of the material is basically tongue-in-cheek and hilarious more often than thought provoking. This isn't SID & NANCY, after all- and despite a moving and very powerful eulogy to Ian Curtis (lead singer of Joy Division who hung himself in 1980), this isn't a cautionary tale at all. In fact, it's the opposite - a complete satiric parody of true events, that at their time had to be intense and somewhat tragic. It's refreshing, though, to see this type of film- free from moralizing and horrific drug withdrawal sequences, that only wishes to entertain and to tell its twisted tale. Entertaining, it is (to say the least), fast paced and extremely witty; with enough awesome music and actual archival footage of great bands in their prime to make any fan of sex, drugs and rock n roll salivate. Highly recommended.

SOLUTION: Who is the lead singer of Joy Division?

PROBLEM: The film can be seen as an allegory of post-World War II Eastern European political systems - told as a black-and-white cinematic poem with 39 long, single-camera takes. It examines the brutalization of a society, its political systems and ethics through the metaphor of a decaying circus whale and its star performer. It is set in a desolate, isolated small town in Hungary during Soviet times.The film starts with JÃ¡nos Valuska, a simple person, conducting a poem and dance with drunken bar patrons. The dance is of the total eclipse of the sun, which disturbs, then silences the animals. It finishes with the grand return of the warm sunlight.One of the significant reoccurring characters in this plot is the subtle transitions between light and darkness. The first appearance of this motif is a lamp in the bar, moving to a door into the darkness. The circus arrives like a Trojan Horse in the darkness of night. A window is opened as a glimmer of hope and dressed to shut out the world. The antagonist is only ever seen as a shadow.JÃ¡nos' uncle GyÃ¶rgy is a composer, and therefore one of the intelligentsia. GyÃ¶rgy observes the imperfection and compromise of the musical scale (as defined by Andreas Werckmeister a historical theorist). GyÃ¶rgy proposes changes to the scale to make it more harmonious. This utopian approach to music represents a flawed, naive idealism that never can be achieved; it is not developed any further in the film or the book. It is just a statement indicating that human governance will always be flawed.GyÃ¶rgy's estranged wife tries to leverage her political and social status by giving GyÃ¶rgy a list of names to recruit for the "clean up the town movement" (with the blessing of the police chief).However, a stuffed smelly circus whale and its star performer, Prince, come to town in the silence and darkness of night. This is a metaphor for a bloated political system and the unseen Prince who represents the power of politically inspired, emotive dogma.JÃ¡nos philosophizes about God and the beast.The post office workers are unsettled by the ominous signs of the circus' arrival and are disturbed by the cloud that settles over each town it visits, a reference to the spread of the externally imposed centralised monolithic government system onto all the Soviet buffer nations just after the war.GyÃ¶rgy's struggling cobbler brother gets the list and passes it on to the agitated throbbing masses in the town square who are unhappy at public services failing. GyÃ¶rgy's former wife sleeps with the drunk gun toting police chief.The presence of the whale and the Prince stir up the masses. JÃ¡nos overhears the circus master losing control of his faceless Prince, who is becoming drunk with his own voice of revolutionary dogma. The circus master disowns him. The Prince, now free, inflames the masses, and the people riot.The film is shot as a visual poem, and has been described as both beautiful and haunting. Lengthy single-shot scenes with a hypnotic and rhythmic pace build up to the peaceful observation of the thuggish destruction of the hospital and its patients. The rioters are brutal. Their inhumanity almost seems normal and natural. When the rioters finally come to beat a helpless old naked patient, they see their impotent, sad and powerless selves. The patients they are destroying in the hospital are themselves.After the riot, JÃ¡nos comes across the diary of a rioter. It explains that the rioters did not know what they were angry with; so they were angry at everything. Then it recounts the mobs horrendous rape of two working class post office girls.JÃ¡nos comes across his killed cobbler uncle who got naively involved in the riot. JÃ¡nos is told, by his cobbler uncle's wife, to leave town for his own safety.He is intercepted by a helicopter. He finds himself committed to a mental institution with caged beds (a tool of the time for dealing with political dissidents). JÃ¡nos appears drugged and broken.GyÃ¶rgy, his composer uncle, is evicted from their society house but gets to live in a shed in the garden whilst GyÃ¶rgy's former wife, with her new status as a collaborator, now occupies the big house with the police chief. The intelligentsia is displaced by political opportunism.GyÃ¶rgy tells a vacant JÃ¡nos, in the ward, that if he is released from the mental institution they can live contentedly together in the shed with his piano. GyÃ¶rgy also mentions that he has re-tuned the piano so that is now like any other, a personal capitulation apparently abandoning any present hopes of reform. JÃ¡nos just stares.It finishes with GyÃ¶rgy looking directly into the eye of the whale, then, walking away and looking back at the now sad and disheveled whale, destroyed by the rioters the night before, its rotting carcass slowly enveloped by the fog which gets whiter and brighter. Warm bright sunlight returns.

SOLUTION: What does the circus and cloud mean?

PROBLEM: Philippe Abrams is the manager of the postal service (La Poste) in Salon-de-Provence, Bouches-du-RhÃ´ne, in southern France. He is married to Julie, whose depressive character makes his life miserable. Philippe does everything to get a job at an office on the Mediterranean seaside to make her happy. As this favourable position will be granted to somebody who is disabled, Abrams decides to pretend that he is. However, the management finds out. As punishment, he is banished for two years to Bergues, a town near Dunkirk in northern France. Northern France â and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region in particular â is considered "the sticks" â a cold and rainy place inhabited by unsophisticated ch'tis who speak a strange language (called "ch'ti" in local parlance, and "cheutimi" in the South). He has to spend his first night at the home of Antoine, a co-worker of his. Philippe initially dislikes Antoine for his rude behaviour and because he thinks Antoine is gay (he found photographs of Antoine dressed as a woman, but they were taken during a carnival party). However, later in the film, Antoine and Philippe become best friends.To Philippe's surprise, Bergues proves to be a charming place teeming with warm, friendly people and co-workers. Soon, he is completely won over, eating smelly Maroilles cheese; talking to virtually every local (by delivering their mail, and accepting the recipient's invitation for a drink); playing at the beach; playing the bells at the bell tower together, drinking beer like a local, going to an RC Lens football match and so forth. He tries to describe the happy turn of events to his wife who has remained in the South with their young son, but she does not believe him. This inspires Philippe to tell her what she wants to believe: that his life is wretched there.Everything goes fine until Julie decides to join him in the North to relieve his gloom. Philippe is forced to confess to his new friends and colleagues that he has described them as barbarians to his wife. First, they are angry, but they then decide to help him by behaving as such to cover for his lies and to scare Julie so she will depart quickly. Also they let her stay in the old mining place of Bergues, pretending it is the main town. Julie has a very bad weekend, but decides she will move to Bergues to stay with Phillipe, to be supportive.Just when she's ready to go back south, she discovers that she has been tricked when a local biker tells Julie that the actual town of Bergues is several kilometers away. When Philippe finds Julie at his real Bergues home, he tells her the truth about the happiness and friendship that the town has brought him. Julie is disappointed at first, but after realising her husband is happy, she decides to move north to be with him.Meanwhile, Antoine and Annabelle had been dating for over a year, but had broken up due to Antoine's passiveness towards his mother. Despite their split, Antoine still has feelings for Annabelle, who now has a new boyfriend. Upon learning this, Antoine cheers himself up by drinking alcohol during his work hours and behaves in an erratic manner. When Phillipe urges Antoine to take courage and be assertive, Antoine finally confesses to his mother that he loves Annabelle and is planning to move to a new place with her. Unexpectedly, his mother is happy about it â she has waited all these years for Antoine to stand up for himself. As a result, Antoine proposes to Annabelle by the bell tower when it is playing a Stevie Wonder song. Annabelle accepts, and they get married.Three years later, Phillipe receives a transfer to move south. Accepting the offer, Phillipe and his family move south. Just as he is about to say goodbye, he is reduced to tears, proving Antoine's theory on the Ch'tis proverb ("A visitor brays [cries] twice up north: once on his arrival and once at his departure.")

SOLUTION:
Is Bergues nice?