In a Venn Diagram puzzle, there are three overlapping circles, marked A, B, and C. Each circle has a different rule about who or what can go inside. The challenge is to guess the rule for each circle. You can find a more detailed explanation of Venn Diagram puzzles, along with an example, here.

This week, in honor of the Oscars, Conundrum goes to the movies! All eight titles below refer to motion pictures.

Have you figured out one of the rules? Two? All three? Feel free to post whatever you’ve got in the comments below. Just tell us which circle you’re solving, and what the rule is.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Circles A and B solved by Irene. Circle C solved by DeLisa. See comments for answers.

There’s absolutely nothing to work with today at The Onion. The fake headlines are all clearly fake headlines. So instead, this week I invite you to play a different game. Sorry for the last minute substitution.

Six of the twelve names below have been the Secretary General of the United Nations. The other six are characters from Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace. Can you tell the historical names from the fantastical?

1. Padme Amidala
2. Kofi Annan
3. Jar Jar Binks
4. Boutros-Boutros Gali
5. Lord Gladwyn Jebb
6. Qui-Gon Jinn
7. Obi-Wan Kenobi
8. Ban Ki-Moon
9. Trygve Halvdan Lie
10. U Thant
11. Chancellor Finis Valorum
12. Mace Windu

Bonus Question: Can you pick out the current UN Secretary General from the list?

Answers: Phantom Menace, United Nations

How did you do?

Well, it’s Oscar week once again. If you have any opinions about which of the nominees are going to win, which ones you’d like to win, or who should have been nominated that wasn’t, feel free to post them here. But that’s not the Question of the Week.

This year, the ad campaign for the Oscars centers around great movie lines. I may not agree with all of their choices, but I love the idea.

What are your favorite lines from the movies? What movies are they from? Which lines made you smile in the theatre, and which lines made you gasp? Which lines do you find yourself quoting when just the right situation arises, and which lines do you quote for no reason at all? Which of your favorite lines are from your favorite movies, and which of your favorite lines are from movies that were otherwise ordinary? Which lines are so famous that they are even larger than the movies themselves, and which lines bring us back to their original movies again and again?

My personal favorite may be this one, from Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in The Silence of the Lambs:

A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

How about you?

What’s your favorite line from a movie?

I was talking to some colleagues about the upcoming Get Smart movie, and I had to be honest. I don’t have very high hopes.

I was a big fan of the television series, and the movie will have a hard time living up to that. I think Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway are both good casting choices, both for talent and for box office appeal, but without the creative team from the series (Buck Henry, Mel Brooks), I worry that the movie might seem derivative.

It’s not easy to make a good movie from a television series, and it seems like Hollywood doesn’t even try anymore. They just want to hijack the brand identity of a vague, but pleasant memory to create another mediocre blockbuster. Look at all of the terrible TV show-based movies that have come out in the last ten years or so. But people recognize the name, and so they go to see the movie, expecting to relive their memories of watching those shows from long ago.

In some cases, television shows do make good movies. South Park made for a much better movie than anyone had a right to expect. But that was from the same creative team that did the show, so let’s put that aside for a moment. I did enjoy the first Mission: Impossible movie on its own terms, but as an action/adventure movie, not as a faithful adaptation of one of my favorite shows. If you hold it to that standard, the movie failed. The hero wasn’t even part of the original series. The villain was the hero of the original series. What’s up with that? I have to confess that I enjoyed the Brady Bunch Movie a great deal, but that was a parody, so I don’t know if we can count that.

It seems even more difficult to turn a movie into a successful TV series. Of course, M*A*S*H and The Odd Couple come to mind. I’ve never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ve heard good things.

What makes a successful adaptation from television to movie? Should the goal be to reach out to established fans from a previous generation, or to redefine the essential elements of the original for an audience of a new age? Can a movie that has a beginning, middle, and end, really be extended into a television series without compromising its integrity? Or does the film remain immune to whatever experimentation happens on the small screen?

And some shows that I remember from childhood as being of very high quality are almost unwatchable to me now. If a film were to be made of one of those shows, it might be considered charitable to rework it.

But I digress. On to the Question of the Week:

What, in your opinion, have been successful crossovers between film and television (in either direction), and what lessons do these successes have to teach those who would follow?