CineLinkr #2: The Story Behind the Puzzle

The Devil Wears Prada is a horror film.

Miranda Priestly never raises her voice. That's the whole bit. Every other movie villain telegraphs intent, there's volume, there's a score change, there's something to brace for. Priestly speaks quietly and the entire room rearranges itself around her. The horror isn't that she's evil. It's that she's completely rational and everyone around her has agreed, in advance, to be afraid.

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

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🟢 Easy: Directed by Steven Spielberg

Movies: Jaws · Raiders of the Lost Ark · Schindler's List · Bridge of Spies

Spielberg's range over these four films is a kind of argument by itself. Jaws in 1975 invented the summer blockbuster, not the concept of a blockbuster, but the specific infrastructure of it: national wide release, saturation advertising, a film designed to be seen in a crowd. Studios had been doing slow platform releases before this. Spielberg changed the economics of the industry with a rubber shark that barely worked and a John Williams theme that still makes people nervous in the ocean.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is adventure perfection. It's a film that keeps doing the next thing before you've finished processing the last thing, and the imitators have spent 45 years trying to reverse-engineer why nobody has managed it quite the same way. The boulder. The truck. The face-melt. It's just relentless.

Then Schindler's List (1993), shot in black-and-white, three hours, depicting the Holocaust with a restraint that makes it more devastating than spectacle would have been. Spielberg shot it and then went directly into therapy. That's not a trivia fact. That's context.

Bridge of Spies (2015) is the most underrated film in the group. Tom Hanks as a Brooklyn lawyer who ends up negotiating Cold War prisoner exchanges, shot by Janusz Kamiński with the grey palette of someone who genuinely understands what 1960 East Berlin looked like. Hanks won nothing for it. The film made no noise. Go watch it.

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🟡 Medium: Starring Meryl Streep

Movies: Kramer vs. Kramer · Sophie's Choice · The Devil Wears Prada · The Iron Lady

Three Oscars total across this filmography. More acting Oscars than any other performer in history, including the ones who've had four decades to try to catch her.

Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979 is the one about divorce, custody, and what happens when a father who was never around suddenly has to be the one who's always around. Streep's Joanna is the one who left, which in 1979 meant the character was the villain by default. Streep didn't play it that way. The film is better for it.

Sophie's Choice is built around a single flashback: the choice Sophie made at the train platform at Auschwitz, which child would accompany her and which would not. William Styron wrote the novel; Alan Pakula directed the film. Streep won Best Actress. She learned Polish and German for the role, and carries the memory of that choice in her performance for the entire run time without ever placing it at the center of a scene until the moment it has to be.

The Devil Wears Prada I've already made my position clear on. Miranda Priestly is a legitimately frightening character dressed in a comedy. The film knows this is funny and horrifying at the same time, and so does Streep.

The Iron Lady is the controversial one. It won Streep her third Oscar. The film itself is not very good, a biopic structure that can't decide whether it's sympathetic or critical, carrying a confused politics from beginning to end. Streep is exceptional inside a movie that doesn't deserve her. The Academy agreed with the first part of that assessment.

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🔵 Hard: Films Told Out of Chronological Order

Movies: Pulp Fiction · Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind · Gone Girl · Arrival

These four films use non-linear structure but not for the same reason, which is the interesting thing about grouping them.

Pulp Fiction uses it for irony: Vincent Vega dies early in the film but appears throughout it. The effect is that you've already watched his death when you see him alive, which turns every scene he's in after that into something else. Tarantino isn't hiding the chronology, the opening title card tells you exactly what each section is. The disorder is the joke.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind runs backwards because memory itself isn't linear. Joel is having his memories of Clementine erased in the wrong order, which is both the medical procedure and the architecture of how anyone actually loses someone. The film argues, through structure alone, that forgetting is random and you lose the early memories before the late ones, which means you lose the reasons things went wrong before you lose the feeling that they did.

Gone Girl uses the non-chronology to mislead. Amy Dunne's diary is read as evidence and then revealed to be authored as fabrication. The non-linear past was a lie told by a character inside the film's fiction, which means the film doesn't actually have a non-linear structure, it just appears to. That's a genuinely clever move that almost nobody noticed on first watch.

Arrival is the one where the non-linearity is the entire concept. Louise Banks is learning the alien language, which encodes time differently. The scenes we read as flashbacks to her daughter are not the past. The film is waiting, patiently, for you to catch up.

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🟣 Tricky: Title Contains a Numeral Written as Digits

Movies: Se7en · (500) Days of Summer · 127 Hours · 1917

A numeral in the title, specifically as digits rather than spelled out: 7, 500, 127, 1917.

Se7en is the one with the stylized spelling, the 7 rotated to replace the V, which was David Fincher's choice over studio objection. Seven deadly sins, seven victims, seven days. The number does a lot of work before the film is over. What's in the box.

(500) Days of Summer presents itself as a love story and then announces in its first scene that it's not. The 500 days are shown out of order (there's your crossover with the hard category), and the film treats the relationship with the same combination of comedy and heartbreak that most films pick one of. The parentheses around 500 are doing work, this isn't 500 days of summer, it's the account of a fixed, bounded period of time. It ended.

127 Hours is about Aron Ralston, an experienced hiker who fell into a canyon in Utah and was pinned by a boulder for 127 hours. Danny Boyle shot it. Ralston eventually amputated his own arm with a dull multi-tool. The number in the title tells you what's coming the whole time.

1917 is the Sam Mendes one-shot, or rather, the film constructed to appear as a single unbroken take from opening to close. Roger Deakins shot it, which should tell you this was never going to look ordinary. The year in the title is precise: not the war, not a campaign, not a battle. April 6th, 1917. One day, one mission, one continuous camera.

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If the Arrival reveal is still processing, that's normal. The film earns the rewatch in a way that most twist movies don't.

Today's PixelLinkr puzzle had a group about games that break the fourth wall and address the player directly, same unsettling recognition energy, different medium.