Name That Movie! – a painless vocabulary builder by Brian Leaf – review

Brian Leaf has put together what he calls “a painless vocabulary builder” for tests like the SAT, ACT, GED, and GRE.  The basic concept is, as the title implies, using movie quotes to give a context for the words, since that is one of the best mnemonic devices; the book promises 100 movie quotes and over 1000 vocabulary words.  I didn’t count the total number of words presented so I can’t vouch for the exactitude of that number (though it seems reasonable), but there are 100 “groups” of quotes so really you get more than just 100 quotes.

The thousand or so words aren’t gathered by jamming 10 words into every quote but by including secondary exercises after a block of 10 quotes that offer additional synonyms.  These “quizzes” include a direct matching of two words with more or less the same meaning (in some cases these are even more obscure than the original word from the quote, so they are worth paying good attention to–I didn’t even know them all, and I was an English major, and I have a robust vocabulary).  There is also a section to reinforce the general meaning by matching one of the quote words with a group of (usually easier) synonyms, along with actual definitions and discussions of the meanings.  The selected words themselves run the gamut from painfully obvious (“predator”?  You really think anyone taking the SAT doesn’t know that word from third grade biology?) to the difficult to in a few cases the genuinely advanced.  My personal opinion is that this works better as an SAT/ACT/GED vocabulary guide than a GRE.

The quotes themselves are presented problematically for me.  They are not just one snappy line with a good word in it, but a block of either dialogue or monologue–including attribution to character either by name or initials–to provide a context, and sometimes several words for the price of one.  The problem is that if you’re actually playing this study guide as a game with yourself (or a study partner) by trying to do what the title asks and name that movie…well, the character names in some cases give it away.  On the other hand, the fact is that lines like “I just want everyone here to know that I am the preeminent Proust scholar in the United States” and “It’s the acoustics; it’s all about diffusion” are not the kind of scintillating zinger that we all take away from movies to integrate into our own lexicon of expressions, so perhaps the context is just evening out the fact that these quotes are not often the memorable lines from the movies.

I have two different editions of the book, Comedy & Action Edition (read:  dudes’ version) and Romantic Comedy & Drama Edition (read:  chicks’ version).  The films included slant more to the modern, no doubt because movies from the last 10 years would be more immediate for kids in high school or college right now, but there are a few golden older movies mixed in.

As a study guide this is probably a helpful and more fun way to go about picking out words to memorize or remind yourself about than a drier vocabulary builder.

But I would suggest that the real value of these books is that they have a shelf-life for after you’ve aced that test, as well:  parlor game!  Or drinking game, if you are over 21.  My friends and I have a long-standing name-that-quote tradition, but you can only play so many rounds before you realize that you have memorized all the same quotes from the movies you have all seen, which makes the game either boring (everyone can name everyone else’s quotes) or excruciating (everyone starts thinking way too hard about how to stump everyone else).  So these little study guides could actually make quite fabulous cheat sheet, so to speak.  There are various ways you could potentially play it…have a book for every player (different editions to be preferred) and just flip through the pages to find your ammo; or roll dice for page numbers to read from; or really just about any other way you can think of to pick a quote at random (like just naming a number between 1 and 277).  Points and demerits can be meted out based on right answers, abstention, wrong answers, and I think it would be fun to have the option of “stealing” the point if someone decides not to answer (no gain and no loss of points) or gets it wrong.  Basically, the rules can be made up as you go with as many variations as there are friends to play it with.  Drink when you get it right!  No, drink when you get it wrong!  Either way you’re bound to have fun, and that’s what really makes these books winners:  they make studying, well, kind of fun.