CineLinkr #48: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Persepolis (2007) is an animated film drawn in black and white, made in France, based on an autobiographical graphic novel by an Iranian woman about growing up during the Islamic Revolution. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards the same year as Ratatouille. It lost. Marjane Satrapi became the first woman ever nominated in that category. She was up against a Pixar film about a rat who wanted to cook.

---

🟢 Easy: Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Movies: Reservoir Dogs · Inglourious Basterds · Kill Bill: Volume 1 · Django Unchained

This one should have gone fast. Four films, one director, immediately recognisable style running through all of them. If it slowed you down, it was probably Kill Bill: Volume 1 specifically, listed with the Volume 1 suffix, which changes nothing about who directed it but does make you second-guess for a second.

Reservoir Dogs was his debut, shot in around 25 days on under $1.5 million. That budget is remarkable given how confident the film still looks. The warehouse, the suits, the ear: Tarantino mortgaged everything he had to get it made. It does not look like a film that was fighting for its existence.

Kill Bill was one film until it wasn't. The edit ran over four hours and Miramax split it into two theatrical releases, nine months apart. An original combined cut exists and has been screened privately a handful of times. Tarantino has said he will eventually release it. He has been saying this since 2004.

---

🟡 Medium: Films centered on a natural disaster

Movies: Dante's Peak · San Andreas · The Impossible · Into the Storm

Four disaster films covering four different catastrophes: volcanic eruption, earthquake, tsunami, tornado. Three of them are primarily interested in scale and spectacle. One of them is not.

Dante's Peak (1997) arrived four months before the competing volcano film Volcano, and it is better. Pierce Brosnan, a small Washington town, and a surprisingly sober approach to evacuation logistics. Scientists were less furious about Dante's Peak than they were about the other film. That is its legacy and it is a fine one.

San Andreas (2015) is Dwayne Johnson driving a helicopter into a stadium while California falls into the ocean. Seismologists took to the press after it opened to explain, patiently, that what is depicted could not happen. This did not stop anyone from watching it. The film earned over $470 million worldwide.

The Impossible is the outlier. Based on the true account of a Spanish family's survival during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, directed by J.A. Bayona, with Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor. The production filmed near the actual affected coast and worked with survivors during development. It is harder to watch than the others. That is the point.

---

🔵 Hard: Adapted from a graphic novel, no superheroes

Movies: Road to Perdition · A History of Violence · Ghost World · Persepolis

The category that catches people. All four source comics are real and documented. None of the four films advertise the connection particularly loudly. Road to Perdition does not look like a comic book adaptation. A History of Violence especially does not.

A History of Violence came from a 1997 Vertigo graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke. The original is starker and considerably more brutal than the Cronenberg film. Most people who have seen the movie have never heard of the source material. That gap is exactly what this category is for.

Ghost World (2001) is the Daniel Clowes adaptation, directed by Terry Zwigoff, with Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson. The Clowes graphic novel ran in serialised form from 1993 and collected in 1997. Every generation of teenagers rediscovers both the film and the comic on their own schedule. It is one of those works that keeps finding new readers.

Road to Perdition was Conrad Hall's final film as cinematographer. He died before the film was released. The Academy Award for Cinematography went to him posthumously. The shots of rain and lamplight through a Chicago winter are some of the most deliberate images in any film of that decade.

---

🟣 Tricky: Vampire films

Movies: Nosferatu (1922) · The Hunger · Let the Right One In · A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Not one of these titles tells you it is about vampires. Nosferatu comes closest, if you already know the name. The other three could be almost anything. That was the design.

Nosferatu (1922) was made without authorisation from the Bram Stoker estate. Florence Stoker sued after the film released, and a court ordered all prints destroyed. Several copies survived in archives. The film exists today because some people chose not to comply. Max Schreck's Count Orlok remains one of the most unsettling screen presences in film history, achieved entirely through physical staging.

The Hunger (1983) opens with Bauhaus performing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in a club while David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve sit in a cage above the crowd. It is a Tony Scott film, which surprises people who know him only from Top Gun and Man on Fire. Deneuve, Bowie, Susan Sarandon. Erotic, cold, deliberate. It was a commercial failure at release and is now considered a landmark.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) was written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour and shot in Taft, California, while being set in an unnamed Iranian ghost town called Bad City. The Girl moves through the streets at night on a skateboard, a black chador catching the wind behind her. It is a film that rewards patience. First-time viewers often cannot place what they have just watched.

---

Today's PixelLinkr puzzle has a hard group built around a structural game design mechanic that is genuinely difficult to crack, and a tricky category that conceals its publisher much better than you would expect. Worth a look if games are your thing.