There was some really interesting expressions in this article about Quentin Tarantino’s new movie on the BBC News website. I love his films so I’ll definitely go and see this one even though the reviews of it haven’t been very positive. The title of the film is also interesting because the second word ‘Basterds’ is spelt wrong. The correct spelling is ‘bastards’ and although the director has said that the title is deliberately spelt wrong, he hasn’t said why.
A ‘bastard‘ is a child born to parents who aren’t married but the word is often used as an expression to describe an unpleasant person.
The first interesting expression in this article is in the title:
Tarantino strikes box office gold
To ‘strike gold‘ is similar to ‘strike it lucky‘ in that it means to be very successful and in this situation it means to make a lot of money through that success. A ‘box office‘ is where you buy tickets for a movie, concert or play so to ‘strike box office gold‘ means to make a lot of money through ticket sales.
The next interesting expressions is in the third paragraph where it is mentioned that the film ‘beat the mark‘ set by the director’s earlier films. In this situation, to ‘beat the mark‘ means to increase the standard or level.
A similar expression we use sometimes is ‘benchmark‘ meaning the level or standard against which we can compare other things. We could say that this opening weekend has set a new benchmark for Tarantino.
There’s another interesting word slightly later in the article where Harvey and Bob Weinstein are described as ‘movie moguls‘. When we use the word ‘mogul‘ we mean a person who is important because he or she is wealthy or powerful.
It is mentioned in the next paragraph that they were ‘behind a string of big hitters‘. By ‘big hitter‘ we mean a person or thing which is very important. In this case, the films were ‘big hitters‘ because they were very successful. To be ‘behind‘ these films means they were responsible for creating them and a ‘string‘ just means a ‘series‘.
Here are some other words related to the movie industry:
- blockbuster: very successful and popular movie
- hit: successful movie, song or album
- flop: a movie which doesn’t do as well as expected
What’s the best movie you’ve seen recently?
Today’s photo is by Bart Groenhuizen.