CineLinkr #38: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Robert Redford won the Oscar for Best Director for Ordinary People on his first attempt behind the camera. Dan Aykroyd also made his directorial debut around the same era, and both films landed in the same row on this board, which is exactly where Nothing But Trouble belongs. This was a puzzle about monsters, actors who cannot stop playing themselves, and synthetic beings trying to qualify as human.

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🟢 Easy: Werewolf movies

Movies: An American Werewolf in London · Ginger Snaps · The Howling · Dog Soldiers

An American Werewolf in London still has one of the best transformation scenes in horror because it looks painful, long, and humiliating. There is nothing sleek about it. The Howling belongs in the same hall of fame, partly because Rob Bottin's effects are so gloriously excessive that the movie feels like it is testing how much body horror an audience will accept before it starts cheering.

Ginger Snaps is the row's sharpest curveball because it turns lycanthropy into a nasty puberty metaphor and refuses to make that metaphor tidy. Dog Soldiers goes the other direction: less metaphor, more soldiers trapped in a stone house trying not to get torn apart. I like this group because it catches how flexible the werewolf movie can be. It can be tragic, sticky, funny, militarized, adolescent, or all four if the director is feeling ambitious.

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🟡 Medium: Actors making their directorial debut

Movies: Nothing But Trouble · Dances with Wolves · Ordinary People · A Bronx Tale

Robert Redford won Best Director for Ordinary People on his first attempt behind the camera. Kevin Costner did the same with Dances with Wolves a decade later. As a category it starts to look like a workable formula.

Then Nothing But Trouble is here, and it earns its place. Dan Aykroyd built an entirely original nightmare world from scratch on Warner Bros. soundstages, played a 106-year-old judge in grotesque prosthetics, and somehow also played a giant mutant baby. Digital Underground performs for the judge in a sequence that marks a young Tupac Shakur's film debut. The film commits fully to its own dream logic in a way that has only grown more interesting over time, and it occupies a corner of horror comedy that nothing else has managed to replicate.

A Bronx Tale rounds out the row more quietly. De Niro adapted Chazz Palminteri's one-man play, cast himself as the working-class father, and made something genuinely affecting. Ebert gave it four stars.

Four well-known actors decided to direct. What they made is four completely different films, which is the point.

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🔵 Hard: Artificial beings searching for personhood

Movies: Her · After Yang · A.I. Artificial Intelligence · Bicentennial Man

Her works because Spike Jonze makes Samantha feel emotionally present long before the movie turns to the question of what she is becoming. The film is romantic, but it is also quietly unnerving because Theodore falls in love with a voice whose interior life keeps expanding beyond anything he can hold. After Yang is even quieter. It treats Yang's stored memories less like sci-fi evidence and more like the remains of a family member's private life.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Bicentennial Man go bigger and more openly sentimental, but both are stuck on the same question: what does a non-human being have to do before people stop treating it like a clever appliance? Spielberg pushes David toward a fairy-tale version of recognition. Bicentennial Man turns Andrew's struggle into a legal and social marathon that takes centuries to resolve, which is a wonderfully stubborn way to literalize the idea.

That is why this row felt right in blue. These are not just films with robots or AI in them. They are films about longing for admission into the category of person. The technology matters, but the ache matters more.

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🟣 Tricky: Actors playing versions of themselves

Movies: This Is the End · JCVD · The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent · My Name Is Bruce

This Is the End is the loudest version of the bit: a whole comedy built on the cast turning their public reputations into material. Everybody is playing a warped version of the celebrity the audience already recognizes, and the movie gets most of its speed from how shamelessly it leans on that knowledge. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent does something similar with Nicolas Cage, except the joke only lands because Cage's career was already half myth, half dare.

JCVD is the great surprise of the group because it is funnier and sadder than the setup makes it sound. Van Damme uses the self-fiction premise to talk about exhaustion, failure, and the weird embarrassment of becoming your own brand. My Name Is Bruce is looser, stupider, and very charming about Bruce Campbell's willingness to turn cult fame into a running gag.

The pleasure of the row is that none of these films would work with fictional stand-ins. They need the real face, the accumulated baggage, and the audience's preloaded opinion. The actor arrives carrying the whole extra-textual joke on their back, and the movie starts from there.

The self-mythology row is the one I keep thinking about, mostly because movies about fame are rarely as sharp as movies where the famous person walks into the trap on purpose. If you want another board about systems behaving strangely under pressure, today's PixelLinkr ends with games that fake technical failure and make you doubt the machine in your hands.