CineLinkr #3: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
Ocean's Eleven opens with George Clooney walking out of a New Jersey parole board looking like he's already won. Twelve Angry Men opens with twelve men sitting in a room on a hot day, and the air conditioning is broken, and one of them is going to ruin everybody's afternoon. Both movies contain the word "eleven" or "twelve" in the title, and that's today's tricky category. Welcome to puzzle #3.
🟢 Easy: Starring Will Smith
Movies: Men in Black · Hitch · The Pursuit of Happyness · King Richard
The interesting arc across these four films is how deliberately Will Smith moved from the version of himself that everyone loved into something harder and more exposed.
Men in Black is pure charm delivery. The film needed someone to carry "this is insane and we're all having fun" across about ninety minutes, and Smith does that with the specific ease of someone performing at fifty percent capacity. Hitch works the same mechanism, he's a dating coach, the stakes are fake, the charm is doing everything. Both films are genuinely good at what they're trying to be, which is effortlessly watchable.
Then The Pursuit of Happyness in 2006, which is about a man who is failing and cannot stop: the internship he can't afford to take, the storage locker he has to sleep in with his son, the BART station bathroom scene. Smith stopped performing charm and started performing desperation. It didn't get the Oscar that year. It probably should have.
King Richard (2021) is where he finally won Best Actor, playing Venus and Serena Williams' father, a man with a plan so specific and so stubborn that it reads somewhere between visionary and controlling depending on which scene you're in. Smith's performance holds that ambiguity. The film doesn't resolve it, which is the right call.
🟡 Medium: Directed by the Coen Brothers
Movies: Fargo · The Big Lebowski · No Country for Old Men · Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coens have a reputation for black comedy, but the actual organizing principle of their filmography is the way they depict a world where being good, competent, or morally serious offers no protection. People get unlucky. The landscape doesn't care.
Fargo is the canonical example. Marge Gunderson is competent, decent, and solves the crime. But the crime happens. Jerry Lundegaard's plan fails in every direction because everyone underestimated everyone else's capacity for violence and stupidity, and there's a wood chipper, and Steve Buscemi. The Coens shared the editing pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, an entirely fictional person who earned Oscar nominations. That's the kind of guys they are.
The Big Lebowski is the anomaly. It is actually funny in a way that isn't about anyone suffering. Jeff Bridges as the Dude is a character so committed to doing nothing that the entire plot slides off him. It's the Coens making a film with the specific feeling of a very long, very comfortable afternoon.
No Country for Old Men is what happens when the Coens stop making jokes. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh sets the temperature of that film by the end of his third scene and never releases it. The film ends on a dream, ambiguously, without resolution, which is the point. Ed Tom Bell can't catch the violence because the violence is ambient now.
Inside Llewyn Davis is the one where nothing works out and no one earns their failure. Davis is talented, self-sabotaging, and loses the cat twice. Shot by Bruno Delbonnel in grey and brown. It ends more or less where it started, which the film intends as its statement.
🔵 Hard: Films with an Unreliable Narrator
Movies: The Usual Suspects · Fight Club · Shutter Island · Atonement
Spoilers. You already knew Keyser Söze was Verbal Kint. Everyone knows. The question is whether the film holds up when you know, and it does, because the pleasure shifts from surprise to watching how carefully Roger Verbal Kint has been lying to you the whole time.
The Usual Suspects (1995) is the cleanest version of this. Verbal's framing story is invented in real time using details from the police precinct, the manufacturer on the bulletin board, the mug on the table. The last shot is the whole point: the limp disappears on the walk to the car, and then the car is gone.
Fight Club is the one that inspired the most tattoos and the most misreadings. Tyler Durden is a fantasy (a projection of what the Narrator wishes he were. On rewatch, every scene between them has Tyler doing something the Narrator conveniently wasn't watching. The film is not endorsing the project; it's diagnosing the appeal of the project. Those are different things, and the ending is very clear about which one the Coens) sorry, Fincher, comes down on.
Shutter Island is Scorsese making a genre film. Teddy Daniels is his own delusion: he invented the identity of the detective to protect himself from the memory of what actually happened on the island. The film telegraphs this and you still end up wanting to argue about whether it's true, which is the right response.
Atonement is the most literary of the four, partly because it comes from an Ian McEwan novel and partly because the deceit is structural rather than twist-based. Briony misremembers (or misreports) what she saw the night Robbie was accused. The third act drops you into her confession. She spent her whole life writing toward something she couldn't give back. The movie's ending is genuinely devastating in a way that a conventional unreliable-narrator film usually isn't.
🟣 Tricky: Title Contains a Number Spelled as a Word
Movies: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest · Ocean's Eleven · Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri · Twelve Angry Men
ONE. ELEVEN. THREE. TWELVE.
They were all there the whole time. These four films have nothing to do with each other (different decades, genres, directors, everything) and yet all of them put a spelled-out number into the title. The trap is that your brain reads around the number when you're looking for genre or cast connections.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is Miloš Forman's 1975 adaptation of Ken Kesey, with Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher in performances that are now so embedded in cultural memory that the film is almost impossible to see fresh. Ocean's Eleven is the heist movie that reinvented the heist movie, mostly by making everyone in it look extremely cool and giving them nothing particularly heavy to do. Three Billboards is Martin McDonagh being angry about the American Midwest and making that anger funny and sad at the same time. Twelve Angry Men is twelve men in a room seeing how long it takes for one person's certainty to unravel a room full of other certainties.
All numbers. Different everything else.
The Coens pseudonym thing (the totally invented film editor named Roderick Jaynes) gets better when you learn that the two of them actually cut all their own films under that name. They built an entire fictional biography for him in case anyone asked.
Today's PixelLinkr puzzle explored the Dreamcast and time loop games, which is a different kind of unravel.