CineLinkr #4: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Rope is a 1948 Hitchcock film that takes place in a Manhattan penthouse over the course of one party, shot to appear as a single unbroken take. Locke is a 2013 Tom Hardy film that takes place entirely in a car on a British motorway. Buried is Ryan Reynolds in a coffin for 95 minutes. These are not easy films to make. They are also the three most formally interesting group in today's puzzle, which also features a group of English-language remakes, and a group of Villeneuve films, and Christopher Nolan's four most structurally aggressive movies.

A busy day.

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🟢 Easy: Directed by Christopher Nolan

Movies: Inception · The Dark Knight · Interstellar · Memento

Nolan is the director who convinced mainstream audiences to sit through films with complicated temporal structures and then go home and argue about what happened. That's a specific skill.

Memento (2000) is where the template formed: Leonard Shelby has anterograde amnesia and is investigating his wife's murder by tattooing clues on his body. The film runs in reverse. The chronological version exists as a DVD special feature and it's significantly less interesting, which is the point. The structure is the meaning.

The Dark Knight is the best superhero film and one of the best crime films. Heath Ledger's Joker is worth everything that's been said about it. What doesn't get said enough is how much of the film's moral weight comes from Gordon and Dent, and the specific tragedy of what happens to Dent, a man who believed in the system, put in front of someone who wanted to prove the system was meaningless.

Inception is Nolan's most technically demanding because you have to hold multiple dream-layer timelines simultaneously while the film keeps changing the rules of what time dilation means between levels. The ending's ambiguity (is the top still spinning?) is less interesting than the question of whether it matters.

Interstellar runs on Kip Thorne's actual science (time dilation near a black hole, the gravity of Cooper Station), filtered through a father-daughter story across 48 years. The tesseract sequence in the fifth dimension is either the most moving thing in the film or the moment it loses you. Hans Zimmer's organ score arrives before Cooper enters the wormhole and doesn't stop.

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🟡 Medium: Directed by Denis Villeneuve

Movies: Blade Runner 2049 · Dune · Sicario · Prisoners

Villeneuve's films feel like they're taking their time because they're confident you'll follow. The patience isn't arrogance, it's the idea that dread lands harder when it builds slowly.

Prisoners (2013) is his English-language debut and still his most formally tight thriller. Two daughters disappear. Their fathers (Hugh Jackman and Terrence Howard) operate differently. Jackman's character is specifically terrifying: a man who is certain he's right doing things that can't be undone. Roger Deakins shot it in a grey-brown color palette that the film never leaves.

Sicario is the same palette different zip code. Emily Blunt's FBI agent gets recruited into a borderlands operation that keeps revealing new layers of who is actually running what. Benicio del Toro's character trajectory is the film's actual subject, and the film hides this from you for most of the runtime.

Blade Runner 2049 took a Ridley Scott film that failed theatrically in 1982 and became a masterwork on home video, and it made a sequel that's arguably better. Roger Deakins won his Oscar for this. Ryan Gosling walking through an orange dust storm is the single frame that defines Villeneuve's aesthetic: scale, isolation, a human figure against something incomprehensible.

Dune is the Frank Herbert adaptation that the 1984 Lynch film tried and couldn't complete. Villeneuve filmed Part 1 before knowing he'd get Part 2, which is either confidence or stubbornness and probably both.

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🔵 Hard: Set Almost Entirely in a Single Confined Location

Movies: Buried · Locke · Phone Booth · Rope

All four films stay inside the box. Different boxes.

Rope (1948) is actually set inside a penthouse, not a box, but Hitchcock filmed it as a series of eight-to-ten-minute takes (the longest film reels at the time) cut together to flow as a single shot. A man is murdered, put in a trunk, and dinner is served on top of him by the people who killed him. The film is claustrophobic before it's a thriller, and Jimmy Stewart's realisation arrives late by design.

Phone Booth is Joel Schumacher at the top of his ability: Colin Farrell stuck in a Times Square phone booth with a sniper on the other end and New York watching. The film runs 81 minutes and earns all of them.

Locke is Tom Hardy alone in a car for 85 minutes. He's driving to London because someone he slept with once is about to give birth alone, and he's made the decision to go to her, and then his phone rings, and rings, and rings, and he is both arriving and losing everything simultaneously. It shouldn't work. It does.

Buried puts Ryan Reynolds in a coffin in Iraq with a phone, a lighter, and no exits. The entire film is those 95 minutes in the dark. The ending is genuinely difficult.

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🟣 Tricky: English-Language Remakes of Acclaimed Foreign Films

Movies: The Ring · The Departed · Let Me In · The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

All four are remakes. All four remade better-known originals. The range of quality is instructive.

The Ring (2002) remade Ringu (1998, Japan). Gore Verbinski's version is not worse, it's a different kind of horror, more surreal and suburban, and Naomi Watts navigates its logic with enough commitment that the tape still works. Ringu is sparer and scarier. Both exist.

The Departed (2006) remade Infernal Affairs (2002, Hong Kong). Scorsese won Best Director and Best Picture. The original is tighter (it's 100 minutes vs 151). The remake has Jack Nicholson chewing through scenes wearing a monster mask, which is its own thing. It also finally got Scorsese his Oscar after running out of the patience to give it to him for Goodfellas, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver first.

Let Me In (2010) remade Let the Right One In (2008, Sweden), which is one of the best vampire films ever made. The American version is also tender and strange and not a desecration. They coexist fine.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) is David Fincher remaking Niels Arden Oplev's 2009 Swedish film. Rooney Mara's Lisbeth Salander earned the Oscar nomination. The film performs flawlessly and the sequel never came.

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Villeneuve making Dune: Part Two before knowing Part One sold is the same structural gamble as every confined-location film: commit completely to the form and trust the result. Most of the time that pays off. The times it doesn't are still interesting.

Today's PixelLinkr puzzle had a group about games played through in-world computer interfaces, desktop gaming in a different sense.