CineLinkr #8: 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.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? has a question mark in the title. So does Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? So does What's Up, Doc? and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? The category today required noticing the question marks. That is not how most people read film titles. That is the point.
🟢 Easy: James Bond Films
Movies: Dr. No · Goldfinger · GoldenEye · Skyfall
Twenty-five Bond films across sixty years; four of them are here. They span four actors and four distinct phases of the franchise's self-understanding.
Dr. No (1962) is where it starts: Sean Connery, Jamaica, Ian Fleming's world made material on a budget that showed in the sets and didn't show in Connery. The formula arrives mostly assembled, impossible villain, island lair, woman in a bikini, one-liners before kills. Goldfinger (1964) sharpened every element: Auric Goldfinger as the template villain, the Aston Martin DB5 with ejector seat, the Fort Knox plan. "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die" is in this film. It defined the series.
GoldenEye (1995) came after a six-year production gap and was Pierce Brosnan's debut. It had to prove the franchise still worked in a post-Cold War world. It mostly succeeded, and the N64 game bearing its name became a separate cultural institution of comparable significance. Skyfall (2012) is the one that decided Bond could be a film as well as a Bond film: Sam Mendes directing, Roger Deakins shooting, Javier Bardem as a villain with a coherent motivation beyond world domination. It made $1.1 billion. The franchise has been trying to figure out what came next ever since.
🟡 Medium: Distributed by A24
Movies: Ex Machina · Moonlight · Lady Bird · Hereditary
A24 was founded in 2012 and over the following decade developed a reputation that most studios never build: a recognizable aesthetic, a curatorial identity, and an audience that will see something because it's an A24 film rather than because of who's in it.
Ex Machina (2014) was Alex Garland's directorial debut: Caleb, a programmer, brought to a remote facility to evaluate Ava, an AI. The film is about gender, power, and the test itself. Moonlight (2016) was their first Best Picture winner, three chapters of Chiron's life across a childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Shot in Miami. Cinematography by James Laxton that made fluorescent light feel like warmth and moonlight feel like revelation. Lady Bird (2017) is Greta Gerwig's first solo directorial effort: Sacramento, 2002, a daughter and mother, the specific anger of being 17 and wanting to be somewhere else.
Hereditary (2018) is the film that established A24 as a serious horror label. Ari Aster, a grief family, a grandmother's secrets, and a third act that doesn't give you a single stable handhold. It was marketed as a horror film and people went expecting standard horror and got something that operates at a different register entirely. Some of them were angry about this. I was not one of them.
🔵 Hard: Neo-Noir Films
Movies: Chinatown · Blade Runner · Zodiac · Drive
The term "film noir" refers to Hollywood crime dramas from roughly 1940 to 1958, low-key photography, morally compromised protagonists, femmes fatales, institutional corruption. "Neo-noir" is what happened after directors started making those films again with the period's aesthetic vocabulary but without the period's formal constraints.
Chinatown (1974) is the reference point. Roman Polanski, Robert Towne's screenplay, Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes believing he understands the city he works in and discovering that power operates at a scale that understanding cannot help with. The ending refuses the conventional release. It stays with you because it refuses. Blade Runner (1982) is science fiction in the body of noir: a detective hunting androids in a rain-soaked Los Angeles, the case becoming a meditation on consciousness. The director's cut and final cut removed Harrison Ford's voice-over, which changed the film's philosophical implications significantly.
Zodiac (2007) is David Fincher resisting the serial killer movie structure in favor of something more honest: investigative obsession that consumes careers and lives without resolution, because the Zodiac Killer was never identified. Jake Gyllenhaal's Graysmith builds a case; the film refuses to pay out the satisfaction the genre promises. Drive (2011) is Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling's driver, few words, a very specific moral code, and violence that arrives suddenly when the code is violated. The first forty minutes are about silence. The rest is about what silence contains.
🟣 Tricky: Title Ends with a Question Mark
Movies: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? · Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? · What's Up, Doc? · What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
Titles ending in question marks are rare because they're stylistically unusual, films tend to assert rather than ask. These four ask, and the questions range from gothic horror to screwball comedy.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) is Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as sisters, a former child star and a former film star, now elderly, isolated in a decaying Hollywood mansion, tormenting each other. The film was marketed against the real tension between Davis and Crawford, which the film fed and the actresses reciprocated. It operates as horror, camp, and tragedy simultaneously.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) is Mike Nichols and Edward Albee's play made film: a married couple (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were actually married) drinking and destroying each other over one night while hosting two younger guests. Taylor and Burton were each nominated. Taylor won. What's Up, Doc? (1972) is Bogdanovich channeling screwball: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, identical plaid bags, San Francisco, a chase. What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993) is Lasse Hallström in small-town Iowa, Johnny Depp, and a 19-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio's first Oscar nomination as Arnie.
The question mark titles are some of the most formally interesting in today's puzzle because they reveal the puzzle structure only after you've read all four and stepped back. You have to notice a feature below the word level. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? doesn't look like it has anything in common with What's Up, Doc? until you're looking for what they share, not what they say.
If studios as curation models interest you, PixelLinkr had a puzzle category about Annapurna Interactive recently, a games publisher that operates on exactly the A24 model.