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Saturday, 3:57 pm in Archive

Just finished watching Brazil. Finally. For those not aware, when I was very little I used to notice this movie in the video store every time we went because of its cover (a winged man flying out of a filing cabinet). I’ve been wanting to watch it ever since. Now I have. I am glad. It has problems, to be sure, but I thought it was a good movie.

Oh yeah, it also has a very young Ian Holm in it (okay, not that young, it was made in 1985, but young enough for me to not recognise him until I went back and watched his expressions after seeing his name in the credits).

Brazil also, much to my chagrin, had a character named Jack. That means that out of the five movies I rented from Blockbuster the other day, of which this is the last one, four contained a major character named Jack. From Hell had Jack the Ripper (and also Ian Holm), as did Dr. Strangelove (minus the ‘the’), and while the Jack from The Importance of Being Earnest didn’t go around cutting people up as far as I know of, he would have been alive when the other Jack did.

The only movie not in some way connected to Jack the Ripper was Death to Smoochy, but ~wolf [h] rented that and I’ve seen it before, so it doesn’t count. So that’s four-of-four very different movies linked by the common theme of Victorian serial killers.

Hey, I’d better go watch Pirates again because not only does that also contain a Jack, but is linked two ways to Ian Holm. That would make it an even five-by-five.

Ah, what an incestuous place Hollywood is.

Incidentally, ever since I started reading Stephen King books – notably The Shining – I’ve made it a policy never to trust anyone named ‘Jack’. There seems to be an inordinantly large number of fictional characters with that name who are, if not downright evil, then up to no good in some way.

Then again, now that I think about it, Jack is also my grandpa’s name.

Did I mention that I also have an obsession with names beginning with ‘J’? I did the maths; 23% of the NPCs in the original Vampire game, Bite Me had names beginning with the letter (Jenny, Joyce, Juliet, Jade, Jericho, Josh, James… hell, there was probably even a Jack in there). Which doesn’t sound like a lot until you take into consideration the percentage of names beginning with any other single letter. Nothing even came close. I worked that out as well.

Well, there we go. An entire post about the name Jack. I really should… go study… or… something…

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