CineLinkr #49: 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.
Breaker Morant (1980) is one of the best courtroom dramas ever made and almost nobody outside Australia has seen it. Two Australian officers are tried during the Boer War for executing prisoners under orders that British command refuses to put in writing. The defence lawyer has never argued a military case. The verdict is communicated to headquarters before the trial ends. It is a film about how legal process gets used to produce convenient outcomes. Bruce Beresford made it for very little money, largely in South Australia, and the constraints gave it a precision the subject deserves.
🟢 Easy: Everything happens in the ring
Movies: Raging Bull · Rocky · Million Dollar Baby · Creed
Four boxing films that are not really about boxing. The ring is the setting, the climax, the metaphor. What each of these is actually about lives outside it.
Raging Bull does not care whether Jake LaMotta wins. It is about a man consuming himself and the people around him. De Niro trained for months to be credible in the ring, then gained substantial weight for the later scenes depicting LaMotta's decline. The black and white was Scorsese's choice, partly to distinguish it from conventional sports photography and partly because he genuinely feared the film would not last. He has revised that assessment.
Rocky is a film about taking the shot when you know you will lose. Stallone wrote the script in three days after watching Chuck Wepner last fifteen rounds against Muhammad Ali in 1975. United Artists wanted an established name in the lead. Stallone said no and walked. They came back. The film won Best Picture at the 1977 Oscars, competing against Taxi Driver, Network, and All the President's Men.
🟡 Medium: The lead barely says a word
Movies: Drive (2011) · Mad Max: Fury Road · WALL·E · The Piano
Four films where the emotional weight sits almost entirely in image and performance rather than speech.
Drive (2011) gives Ryan Gosling around 116 words of dialogue across two hours. The character has no name, a toothpick, a set of precise rules, and a jacket with a scorpion on the back. Nicolas Winding Refn built a genre film around the codes of a silent-era hero. Whether that succeeds depends entirely on whether silence reads as depth or as posturing. Most people who love this film do so without reservation. Most people who do not, find it self-satisfied.
The Piano was Jane Campion's third feature. Ada McGrath's mutism is a choice: she stopped speaking as a child for reasons the film never explains and does not need to. Communication comes through her playing. Holly Hunter trained seriously for the piano sequences and performed all the music herself. The film shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993 with Farewell My Concubine. Campion was the second woman to win it.
WALL·E has around forty minutes of the film pass before a human character speaks. The first third is effectively a silent short about a small robot stacking rubbish on an abandoned Earth, and it is better than most films that have dialogue throughout.
🔵 Hard: The verdict was never in doubt
Movies: M (1931) · Paths of Glory · To Kill a Mockingbird · Breaker Morant
Four films in which the legal proceedings exist not to find the truth but to formalise a decision already made elsewhere.
Fritz Lang's M is the one most players will have found hardest to place. Hans Beckert, a child killer, is being hunted by both the police and the Berlin criminal underworld. The criminals find him first. The trial they convene is not a search for justice. It is a kangaroo court with a predetermined verdict. Peter Lorre's speech in his own defence is genuinely unsettling because the argument he makes is not entirely wrong.
Paths of Glory (1957) sends three French soldiers to a firing squad for an attack that failed because their commanding general ordered it from a position he could not see and would not occupy. The court martial scene is brief and formal. The outcome was settled before the men walked in. Stanley Kubrick made this film when he was twenty-eight years old.
🟣 Tricky: The only name history needed
Movies: Lincoln (2012) · Elvis (2022) · Spencer (2021) · Napoleon (2023)
Four biopics. That is not the connection.
The connection is the title. One word. Lincoln. Elvis. Spencer. Napoleon. Each title is a single real name, chosen because no further context is required. The format claims that the subject is famous enough to stand alone and that the film has decided to trust that.
Spencer is the most formally unusual of the four. Pablo Larraín covers three days: Christmas 1991 at Sandringham Estate, Diana in a house that has decided she should not be there. The film is not interested in biography in the conventional sense. He described it as a fable based on a real tragedy. Kristen Stewart's performance was more widely praised than the film, which is not uncommon for this type of work.
Napoleon (2023) runs to over four hours in Ridley Scott's director's cut. The theatrical release removed around ninety minutes. Scott has said repeatedly that he is not concerned with what historians think about the gaps and compressions. The director's cut ending changes how everything before it reads. It is worth finding.
Today's PixelLinkr puzzle has a hard group built around solo developers who made games that look like they had teams. If you have played any of the four and never thought about how they were made, this one will reframe a few things.