CineLinkr #7: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Thelma & Louise has a Hans Zimmer score. This information is correct and slightly disorienting because the score doesn't announce itself the way his later work does, there are no surging brass arrangements, no pounding bass from a trailer cut. It's guitar and space and heat and the American Southwest understood as a landscape that doesn't care about you. Zimmer was 33 when he scored it. He had not yet become the sound of every blockbuster. You can hear the difference.

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🟢 Easy: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Movies: Psycho · Vertigo · Rear Window · North by Northwest

These four films contain most of what cinema learned from Hitchcock, and they contain it in different forms.

Rear Window (1954) is about a photographer with a broken leg watching his neighbors through a window and becoming convinced he's witnessed a murder. The film never leaves his apartment. James Stewart plays Jeff Jefferies, and the camera turns his gaze into yours whether you want it or not. By the end you've become a voyeur and then the film implicates you in that. It invented a mode.

Vertigo (1958) was considered a minor work for decades and is now frequently cited as the greatest film ever made. James Stewart again, as a detective with acrophobia hired to follow a woman who may or may not be the reincarnation of a dead woman. The film does something in its second half that I won't describe, but the second half is only coherent because of the first half's obsessive accumulation of detail. North by Northwest (1959) is the one that's just fun: Cary Grant, mistaken identity, a chase across America, the crop-duster.

Psycho (1960) is where Hitchcock broke the contract with the audience. The marketing told people not to enter the theater after the film had started. The film killed its most recognizable star in the first third and continued without her. What it was doing with cinema's inherited system of main characters was not accidental. Norman Bates is in four subsequent films and none of them needed to exist.

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🟡 Medium: Won Academy Award for Best Animated Feature

Movies: Spirited Away · Toy Story 3 · Frozen · Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

The Best Animated Feature Oscar has existed since 2002, and it was created partly because animated films (specifically Beauty and the Beast in 1992) were starting to get Best Picture nominations and the academy wanted to contain that. Make of that what you will.

Spirited Away (2002) was the first and, through 2026, only hand-drawn non-English-language film to win. Miyazaki's story of a child navigating a bathhouse for gods has become one of the most analyzed films in the category, not because the animation is extraordinary (it is) but because the world-building has a logic the film never fully explains and doesn't need to. Toy Story 3 (2010) made a generation of adults cry in a movie theater about Andy going to college. Pixar built the emotional foundation across two prior films and then lit it.

Frozen (2013) had "Let It Go" and the cultural response to "Let It Go," which lasted longer than the film itself. The film is good. The song is a phenomenon with its own separate existence now. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) changed what people thought animated films were allowed to look like: comic book printing dots, halftones, motion blur as expressive rather than technical. Miles Morales as Spider-Man and the animation style as demonstration of it. The sequels continued the argument.

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🔵 Hard: Score Composed by Hans Zimmer

Movies: Gladiator · Dunkirk · 12 Years a Slave · Thelma & Louise

Hans Zimmer has scored more than 150 films. He helped establish Remote Control Productions, which trained much of the working film composing talent of the last thirty years. His style has become so prevalent in blockbusters that critics have a vocabulary for complaining about it: the "Inception BWOM," the trailer brass, the endless building. That's not the whole picture.

Gladiator (2000) is the one that crystallized his orchestral epic language: the choir for the Colosseum, the quieter cues for Maximus and his dead family. Dunkirk (2017) is the opposite approach: Zimmer used a watch Nolan gave him as a ticking metronome and built the score around it. The rising tension without resolution is a technical achievement. 12 Years a Slave (2013) is his most restrained dramatic work in recent memory, the score does what it needs to and then gives the performances room.

Thelma & Louise (1991) is the surprising credit. A road movie by Ridley Scott about two women whose friendly trip becomes something else entirely. The score has a tenderness the later Zimmer doesn't always reach for. He was still figuring out what he was.

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🟣 Tricky: Color in the Title

Movies: The Color Purple · Blue Valentine · Black Swan · A Clockwork Orange

Purple. Blue. Black. Orange. They're sitting in the titles, and if you're solving cold they're the last thing you notice because the rest of each title is louder.

The Color Purple (1985) is Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's novel (Celie's life in the American South from the early twentieth century, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in early dramatic roles, Danny Glover. It received eleven Oscar nominations and won none of them, which was the wrong call. Blue Valentine (2010) is Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams watching a marriage fail in alternating timelines) the beginning and the end intercut until you understand both. It was initially rated NC-17 for a scene that would have been rated R if the genders were reversed. The MPAA changed the rating after appeal.

Black Swan (2010) is Darren Aronofsky's ballet horror: Natalie Portman's Nina pursuing the Black Swan role while losing distinctions between performance and reality. She won Best Actress. A Clockwork Orange (1971) is Kubrick and Anthony Burgess's novel and Alex and his droogs and what state correction does to the mind. The film was pulled from distribution in the UK by Kubrick himself after threats against his family, and it wasn't screened there until after his death in 1999.

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The color titles are genuinely tricky because you're reading through the obvious text to find the structural feature. Black Swan registers as body horror before it registers as a color. A Clockwork Orange registers as Kubrick before it registers as an orange that doesn't tick. That gap between what the title means and the word inside it is a puzzle design worth admiring.

Today's PixelLinkr puzzle had Housemarque's catalog, GBA originals, interactive film games, and grapple traversal mechanics. The Housemarque group is worth knowing.