TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you will be shown an extract from a movie plot and a question. You need to provide the correct answer for it. Short answers containing words that are present in the passage are preferred.
PROBLEM: In 1799, New York City police constable Ichabod Crane is dispatched by his superiors to the Hudson Highlands hamlet of Sleepy Hollow, to investigate a series of brutal slayings in which the victims have been found beheaded. A frequent user of new, though so far unproven investigative techniques such as finger-printing and autopsies, Crane arrives in Sleepy Hollow armed with his bag of scientific tools only to be informed by the town's elders that the murderer is not of flesh and blood, rather a headless supernatural warrior from beyond the grave who rides at night on a massive black steed.Crane does not believe them and begins his own investigation, until he comes face to "face" with the Headless Horseman. Boarding a room at the home of the town's richest family, the Van Tassels, Crane develops an attraction to their daughter, the mysterious Katrina, even as he is plagued by nightmares of his mother's horrific torture under his zealous preacher father when he was a child.Delving further into the mystery with the aid of the orphaned Young Masbeth, whose father was a victim of the Horseman, Crane discovers within the Western Woods both the Horseman's entry point between this world and the beyond, the gnarled Tree of the Dead with the heads of his victims within, and his grave. Ichabod discovers the horsemans skull is missing. The horsemen comes out of the tree and rides into town, taking two more victims. As the horseman leaves the house, It passes ichabod without killing him. Brom arrives and shoots at him; still the horseman doesnt try to kill him or brom. Brom finnaly pulls out a sword and duels with him, and the horseman finnaly kills brom. This prompts Crane to realise that someone must be using the skull to control the Horseman rather than the Horseman committing these murders of his own accord.Although evidence is briefly revealed suggesting that Katrina is the villain, Crane uncovers a murky plot revolving around revenge and land rights with the Horseman controlled by Katrina's stepmother, Lady Van Tassel, who sends the killer after her; her stepmother's family lost their land when her father died and it was given to Katrina's father, the young girl witnessing the Horseman's death and promising her soul to Satan if he would allow her to control the Horseman to avenge her family. Following a fight in the local windmill and a stagecoach chase through the woods, Crane eventually thwarts Lady Van Tassel by returning the skull to the Horseman, who regains his head and goes back to Hell along with Lady Van Tassel. With His job in Sleepy Hollow completed, Crane returns to New York with Katrina and Young Masbeth, just in time for the new century., Question: Who discovers within the Western Woods both the Horseman's entry point between this world?

SOLUTION: Answer: Crane

PROBLEM: A family is driving down a desert highway when they hit a deer. The dad gets out and comes back with half his face gone. The family is attacked by something.In a lavish apartment, Trip meets with a dealer, Radford, who provides him with pills for a rave in the desert. Trip steals all of the pills. He meets with his friends Cookie, Nelson, Jack and Gretchen. The group notices an overturned car on the highway, which they dismiss as an abandoned accident.Gretchen discovers that Trip is carrying drugs and stops the vehicle to kick him out. While parking at the side of the road, the group notices a short, but strong tremor. Gretchen agrees to take Trip back to a diner, which has been abandoned. The car runs out of gas and breaks down, so they decide to stay at the Halfway Motel. Learning from the radio that the highway has been closed, Trip decides to walk down the road for help.Jack and Gretchen pitch camp and sleep outside. After a haunting experience with the drug dealer Radford, Trip escapes and meets a man named Henry driving an RV, who is looking for his missing wife. He goes with Trip to the motel and sets up camp there. Trip doesn't tell his friends about his run-in with Radford, but warns them to be careful.Looking for signal reception for his mobile phone, Trip releases from a rubbish skip the still-living head, torso and arms of a truck driver who then crawls away. Henry then meets Trip and discovers they both are seeing the dead people. While in his camper, Henry collapses, suffocating as a dark figure moves through the trailer. Still looking for reception, Trip is attacked on the roof by a hooded figure. Cookie is killed while sitting in an outhouse by being dragged into the hole.Nelson is almost dragged under his bed, but pulls himself back up and jumps on top of the bed. He takes his sneaker off and drops it on the ground, watching as it is shredded. He then tries to escape by jumping through the window, but fatally cuts his throat on a shard of glass. Gretchen and Jack discover Nelson's and Henry's bodies, prompting Gretchen to look for Trip. Jack encounters the creature but escapes when Trip shoots at the figure with his gun. Trip is overpowered by the creature and loses his arm, then dies.In reality an RV crashed into Gretchen's car after Trip stepped out to call for a ride, at the moment when they experienced the tremor. None of the group had noticed the RV, whose driver was Henry. His wife, Rose had explained that he was suffering a heart attack and lost control. The car that the group saw leaving the diner was in fact their own.Each of the deaths at the hotel were reflected by their own deaths in the car: Cookie died from internal bleeding, Nelson cut his neck when he was thrown through the windshield, Trip's arm was severed gripping the cell phone and he died from blunt force trauma. Gretchen survived the crash because she was wearing her seat belt and Jack, despite receiving a massive head injury, also remained alive in the car. Radford, who had been stalking Trip, witnessed the accident and attempted to assist; hence the visions of him at the motel and highway.In the final scene, Gretchen and Jack briefly discuss the fact that neither has any recollection of the accident, and no mention is made of the incidents at the motel. Jack comments that, for a moment in the crash, he thought he could see Gretchen, offhandedly mentioning the color of her eyes., Question: Who steals all of the pills?

SOLUTION: Answer: Trip

PROBLEM: The film opens to the sound of a gramophone playing Axxon N, "the longest-running radio play in history". Meanwhile, a young prostitute, identified in the credits as the "Lost Girl", cries while watching television in a hotel room, following an unpleasant encounter with her client. The Lost Girlâs television displays a family of surrealistic anthropomorphic rabbits who speak in cryptic statements and questions. Occasionally, there are laugh track responses within these Rabbit scenes. These three elements become recurring motifs throughout Inland Empire.The main plot follows an actress named Nikki Grace (Dern), who has applied for a comeback role as Sue in a film entitled On High in Blue Tomorrows. The day before the audition, Nikki is visited by an enigmatic old woman (Zabriskie) who says she is her neighbor; she predicts that Nikki will get the role, and recounts two folk tales. One tells of a boy who, sparking a reflection after passing through a doorway, "caused evil to be born." The other tells of a girl who, wandering through an alleyway behind a marketplace, "discovers a palace." The old woman presses Nikki for details on her new film, asking whether the story is about marriage and involves murder. Nikki denies both, but her neighbor disagrees. Disregarding Nikki's offended response, the old woman comments on the confusion of time, claiming that were this tomorrow, Nikki would be sitting on a couch adjacent to them. The film then pans to where the neighbor is pointing, and we see Nikki and two girlfriends sitting on the couch. Her butler (Ian Abercrombie) walks into the living room with a phone call from her agent, announcing that she has won the role. Ecstatic, Nikki and her friends celebrate while her husband Piotrek (Peter J. Lucas) ominously surveys them from atop a nearby staircase.Some time later, Nikki and her co-star Devon Berk (Theroux) receive an interview on a talk show. The host (Ladd) asks them both whether they are having an affair, to which each of them respond negatively. Devon is warned by his entourage that Nikki is out of bounds, due to her husband's power and influence. Later, on the set being built for the film, Nikki and Devon rehearse a scene with the director, Kingsley Stewart (Irons). They are interrupted by a disturbance, but upon investigation Devon finds nothing. Shaken by the event, Kingsley confesses that they are shooting a remake of a German feature entitled 47. Production was abandoned after both leads were murdered, creating rumors of the film being cursed.Immersed in her character, while the film is being shot, "Sue" / Nikki appears to begin an affair with Devon / "Billy". A strange scene follows based on what the old woman had described: Nikki appears in a mysterious alley walking to her car, carrying a bag of groceries, but then she notices a door in the alley marked Axxon N, and enters. It leads her back to soundstage where the earlier rehearsal took place. She witnesses that rehearsal from across the roomââshe herself was what had interrupted it earlier. This time, when Devon seeks to discover who's observing them, she disappears from the rehearsal scene, and flees among the half-built backgrounds and into the house of a character named Smithy (possibly her husband in the film's story, but this is never made clear). Despite the set being merely a wooden facade, Nikki enters to find an illuminated suburban house inside. Devon looks through the windows, but sees only darkness, not hearing her frantic cries of his character's name, "Billy."At this point, the film takes a drastic stylistic turn. Various plotlines and scenes begin to entwine and complement each other. The chronological order is often confused or nonexistent. Inside the house, Nikki sees her husband (whether it's "Smithy" or Piotrek is unclear) in bed. Hiding from him, she enters a different room and encounters a troupe of prostitutes. One of the women advises her to burn a hole through silk with a cigarette and look through the hole. Nikki complies and witnesses several strange happenings, many of which seem to revolve around her, or alternate versions of herself.Prior to these scenes, the woman who plays Billyâs wife tells a policeman that she had been hypnotised to murder someone with a screwdriver, but finds the screwdriver embedded in her own side. A mysterious organization claims to have captives from Inland Empire. A parallel plotline involves Polish circus artists in the present day, as well as Polish prostitutes in ÅÃ³dÅº during the 1930s, who are confronted by strange pimps while murder permeates their city. Nikki, having become one of the group of present-day prostitutes, wanders the streets while her companions ask, "Who is she?" Both Nikki and her prostitutes frequently ask people to look at them and "say whether you've known me before." In a parallel plotline, Sue climbs the dark staircase behind a nightclub to deliver long monologues to an unidentified man touching upon her childhood sexual abuse, disastrous relationships, and retaliations. Her husband Smithy seems to be connected with both the pimps and the organization, and then is hired by a circus from Poland because he is said to be "good with animals." There is much talk of the Phantom, an elusive hypnotist. Convinced sheâs being stalked by a red-lipped man, Sue arms herself with a screwdriver.Finally, Sue walks down Hollywood Boulevard, and is startled to see her doppelgÃ¤nger across the street. Before Sue can investigate, Doris arrives and attempts to kill her, having been hypnotized by The Phantom. Sue is brutally stabbed in the stomach with her own screwdriver, causing her to stagger down the street and eventually collapse next to some homeless people on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. One woman remarks that Sue is dying, then proceeds to debate with another, younger homeless woman about taking a bus to Pomona. Her companion talks at length about a friend named Niko, a prostitute whose blond wig makes her look like a movie star, thus allowing her to walk through the rich district without drawing attention. The older woman comforts Sue by holding a lighter in front of her face until she finally dies, promising her "no more blue tomorrows." Off-camera, Kingsley yells "Cut!" and the camera pans back to show this has merely been a film scene.As the actors and film crew wrap for the next scene, Sue slowly arises, Nikki once more. Kingsley announces that her scenes for the film are complete. In a daze, Nikki wanders off set and into a nearby cinema, where she sees not only On High in Blue Tomorrowsâencompassing some of the subplots of the filmâbut events that are currently occurring. She wanders to the projection room, but finds an apartment building marked "Axxon N". Eventually, Nikki confronts the red-lipped man from earlier, now known to be the Phantom. She shoots him, which causes his face to morph first into a distorted copy of Nikki's own face, and then an even more distorted face bleeding from its mouth.Nikki flees into a nearby roomâRoom 47, which houses the rabbits on television, though she fails to see them. Elsewhere in the building, Nikki finds the Lost Girl, who has been watching and crying all along. The two women kiss, before Nikki fades away into the light along with the rabbits. The Lost Girl runs out of the hotel and into Smithy's house, where she happily embraces a man and child.Nikki is then seen back home, smiling at the old woman from the beginning of the film. The concluding scene takes place at her house, where she sits with many other people, among them Laura Harring, Nastassja Kinski, and Ben Harper. A one-legged woman who was mentioned in Sue's monologue looks around and says, "Sweet!" Niko, the girl with the blonde wig and monkey, can also be seen. The end credits roll over a group of women dancing to Nina Simone's "Sinner Man" while a lumberjack saws a log to the beat., Question: Who is the Phantom believed to be?

SOLUTION:
Answer: Hypnotist.