CineLinkr #10: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was Stanley Kubrick's final film and he died before its release. It's about a married couple in New York (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, then actually married) navigating one very strange night after a conversation about desire and jealousy. The film takes place over roughly forty-eight hours and it's two hours and thirty-nine minutes long. Kubrick shot in London and recreated Greenwich Village street-for-street. He filmed it over four hundred days. He controlled every variable. He was 70 years old when he died and it's the last thing he made and if you haven't seen it there's a whole conversation waiting for you.

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🟢 Easy: Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey · Full Metal Jacket · Eyes Wide Shut · Dr. Strangelove

Stanley Kubrick made thirteen feature films and stopped. He was a perfectionist who moved between genres and left each one permanently changed.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is the one that's still funny: Peter Sellers in three roles, the nuclear command structure depicted as a bureaucracy of fools, a satire so exact that it works as horror if you approach it from a different angle. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is the landmark: HAL 9000, the monolith, the Star Gate sequence, the hotel room at the end that has been analyzed for fifty years. It doesn't explain itself. The absence of explanation is the aesthetic choice.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) breaks into two halves (Parris Island boot camp and then Vietnam) and the first half is better-remembered because R. Lee Ermey's Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is one of cinema's great supporting performances. Eyes Wide Shut is the final one, the cold one, the one most people have still not resolved their feelings about. That's fine. Kubrick was not making films to make you comfortable.

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🟡 Medium: Score Composed by John Williams

Movies: Star Wars · Jurassic Park · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial · Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

John Williams has received more Academy Award nominations than any living person. He has five wins: Fiddler on the Roof, Jaws, Star Wars, E.T., Schindler's List. He also composed Raiders of the Lost Ark, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and everything in between, and beyond.

Star Wars (1977) established the leitmotif-heavy orchestral style that became blockbuster expectation: the Force theme, the Imperial March, the cantina band. Each character and faction has musical DNA. Jurassic Park (1993) has the theme that explains what wonder sounds like, the French horn entry over the brachiosaurus. E.T. (1982) has the bicycle flight, which is Williams and Spielberg achieving something that doesn't separate into music and image when you're in it.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) gave the series Hedwig's Theme, which became the audio signature for eight films and a global brand. He scored only the first three films; the franchise composers who followed were working in his shadow. He turned 93 in 2025 and was still active.

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🔵 Hard: Shot in Black and White by Choice

Movies: Raging Bull · The Artist · Roma · Nebraska

These films were made in color eras by directors who chose black and white for reasons that had nothing to do with budget.

Raging Bull (1980) is Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who gained fifty-five pounds for the later sections of the film: Jake LaMotta's boxing career and the destruction of everything around him. The black and white was Scorsese's choice to differentiate the film from television, which broadcast in color, and to evoke a specific mid-century feeling. The boxing sequences are some of the most formally inventive in film, slow motion, extreme close-up, unconventional angles. The Artist (2011) was Michel Hazanavicius committing the bit entirely: a silent black-and-white film about a silent film actor navigating the arrival of talkies. It won Best Picture.

Roma (2018) is Alfonso Cuarón's memory film: Mexico City, 1970, a domestic worker named Cleo in a middle-class family. Cuarón chose black and white to remove the contemporary nostalgia that color would have created. The frame is wide, the shots are long, the attention to peripheral movement is extraordinary. Nebraska (2013) is Alexander Payne, Bruce Dern, a road trip from Montana to Nebraska to collect a sweepstakes prize that doesn't exist. The black and white photographs the Great Plains with specificity that color would have softened.

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🟣 Tricky: Title Is Also an Iconic Pop Song

Movies: Stand by Me · Purple Rain · Yesterday · Bohemian Rhapsody

The category is not "films about musicians" or "music films", the specific requirement is that the title is also a famous song. Stand by Me (1986) takes its title from the Ben E. King song, which plays over the closing credits. The film is a coming-of-age story about four boys walking a railroad line to find a body. Purple Rain (1984) is Prince, the film that made him a movie star and also contained the album that sold over twenty million copies. It's a semi-autobiographical story about a musician called The Kid. It's the rare case where the film and the song are equally inseparable from each other.

Yesterday (2019) is a Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis film about a world where everyone has forgotten The Beatles ever existed except one musician who remembers and starts passing off the songs as his own. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) is the Queen biopic starring Rami Malek, whose Freddie Mercury performance is either great or distracting depending on where you stand. The film was shot partially under Bryan Singer and partially under Dexter Fletcher after Singer's departure. It made $900 million.

The category's challenge is separating the films from the music category, Bohemian Rhapsody is obviously a song, but is Stand by Me? You have to know the song well enough to recognize it before you can recognize the category.

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The black-and-white category is the most formally interesting of today's four. It asks you to hold in mind a choice (a director actively refusing color) and understand what that choice means for each film. Raging Bull and Roma reach for it for different reasons. The Artist uses it as the premise. Nebraska uses it as texture. The decision to work in monochrome when color is available is always a thesis statement.

For games with similarly bold formal choices (games that strip out genre conventions to make a point) PixelLinkr had a category recently about desktop-interface games where the game is entirely a simulated computer screen.