CineLinkr #1: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Puzzle #1 had a secret agenda: it wanted to know how quickly you'd defend Notting Hill.

For the record, Notting Hill is good. A London bookshop owner ends up in a relationship with the world's most famous actress and the film never once stops to ask whether this is plausible. It just commits. That's a choice, and it works.

Here's what was sitting inside today's sixteen movies.

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🟢 Easy: Starring Julia Roberts

Movies: Pretty Woman · My Best Friend's Wedding · Notting Hill · Erin Brockovich

Three romantic comedies and then Erin Brockovich, which is the one where Roberts played a real person who took a utility company to court over groundwater contamination and helped win a $333 million settlement. The Academy gave her Best Actress for it. She deserved it.

These four hold more range than the grouping suggests. Pretty Woman is a film about a sex worker falling in love with a billionaire that treats this arrangement as the purest kind of romance, and Roberts makes you go along with it without even noticing she's done it. My Best Friend's Wedding is one of the only mainstream romantic comedies where the protagonist is clearly wrong, clearly loses, and kind of had it coming, a quietly subversive thing to do in 1997. Notting Hill gets to just be charming without justifying itself, which the film earns by being, genuinely, charming.

Then Erin Brockovich shifts the whole frame. The same magnetic pull that made Roberts irresistible in the rom-coms shows up again: she walks into rooms and changes them. The legal drama context just makes the mechanism visible.

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🟡 Medium: Directed by Wes Anderson

Movies: Rushmore · The Royal Tenenbaums · The Grand Budapest Hotel · Asteroid City

There's a Wes Anderson protagonist who shows up in all four of these films. He's a person so committed to his own mythology that reality keeps glancing off him. He suffers. He doesn't fully register that he's suffering. The film is sympathetic about this in a way that mostly works.

In Rushmore it's Max Fischer, overcommitted extracurriculist, terrible romantic prospect, genuinely compelling anyway. Max is the blueprint. The Royal Tenenbaums scales the idea into an entire family: a household full of Maxes, each failing in their own specific way, all living together in a brownstone that looks like a set for a stage play about failure. It's still his best film and I'll die on that hill.

The Grand Budapest Hotel hides the same story inside maximum aesthetic spectacle. An aging concierge's whole world is ending; he's just too elegant to face it head-on. Asteroid City is the one where Anderson stopped trying to explain himself, it's a film about a play being adapted into a television broadcast about something that maybe happened, and he made it anyway, and I mean all of that as a compliment.

Small note for the people who nearly selected these four before the penny dropped: cinematographer Robert Yeoman shot essentially every Wes Anderson live-action film, including all four of these. If you were desperately trying to group by director of photography, you were also correct.

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🔵 Hard: Twist Ending That Recontextualizes the Entire Film

Movies: The Sixth Sense · The Prestige · Get Out · The Game

Spoilers. You solved the puzzle. You knew this was coming.

The Sixth Sense's revelation (that Malcolm Crowe has been dead since the opening scene) has soaked so thoroughly into cultural memory that genuine first viewings are nearly extinct now. Everybody knows. What's interesting is that the twist isn't what holds the film together: there's a grief story underneath it, and that story still works whether or not you see the ending coming.

The Prestige is more mechanically constructed. Nolan built a magician film around a twin-swap trick, meaning the magic act Angier performs through the second half conceals the fact that he's been drowning a copy of himself in a tank every night of the run. It's the most structurally clever film in the group, and you either find that satisfying or you find it cold. Both positions are defensible.

Get Out structured its entire first hour as social dread (every nervous smile at Chris, every compliment about his physique, every slightly-too-enthusiastic white liberal in the room) and then snapped it into body horror. The Coagula procedure, where the Armitage family transplants aging minds into Black bodies, was hiding in plain sight the whole time. On rewatch, everyone in that house is talking about it constantly.

The Game from 1997 is the most underrated film in the group. Fincher made it between Seven and Fight Club and almost nobody talks about it. Michael Douglas's entire ordeal (staged chaos, apparent death, months of paranoia) turns out to be an elaborate birthday present organized by his brother. The reveal reframes the genre entirely. Watch it if you haven't.

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🟣 Tricky: Title Contains an Animal

Movies: The Silence of the Lambs · The Deer Hunter · Birdman · Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

None of these films are about animals.

The Silence of the Lambs is about an FBI trainee working with a cannibal to catch a different serial killer. The lambs appear in one childhood flashback (the source of a nightmare Clarice has carried for years) and the scene does a lot of work, but this film is definitively not about livestock. The Deer Hunter is three hours about friendship, Vietnam, and Russian roulette. The deer hunting is maybe fifteen minutes across a film that runs nearly three. Birdman is about a washed-up actor trying to reclaim artistic credibility on Broadway while possibly hallucinating. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon involves neither a crouching tiger nor a hidden dragon in any literal sense, though the title tracks metaphorically if you squint at it long enough.

Crouching Tiger also gets to contain two animal names, which is either a bonus trap or a double-point play depending on where you were in the puzzle when you noticed.

The wordplay category is always the last resort: when the thematic and metadata groupings run out, something like this is hiding in there. The tells are invisible until they're not, once you see LAMBS and DEER in the same column, BIRD follows about four seconds later.

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If today's twist films group is still sitting with you, The Game in particular is worth going back to. It holds up.

The sister puzzle PixelLinkr ran its first puzzle today as well, if you want to find out whether your Valve knowledge holds up as well as you think it does.