CineLinkr #52: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Batman Returns has a Happy Meal problem. McDonald's attached a children's promotional campaign to the film in 1992, with toys and packaging, before anyone had watched a movie in which the villain's origin involves a baby being thrown into a river by his parents on Christmas Eve. The campaign was pulled mid-run. Warner Bros. imposed formal content guidelines on all future Batman productions as a result. No one has ordered a Batman Happy Meal since. This is not quite how the film ends, but it is perhaps how it deserved to.

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🟢 Easy: The pairing is the whole film

Movies: Hot Fuzz · The Intouchables · Some Like It Hot · Good Will Hunting

Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg spent months cataloguing action-film clichés before shooting Hot Fuzz in Wells, Somerset, where the cathedral doubled as the fictional Sandford church. The film is designed to fire every genre convention at a rural English village, and Nicholas Angel and Danny Butterman are the ideal unit for this precisely because one is obsessively competent and the other is enthusiastically wrong. They balance.

The Intouchables was based on a documentary about Philippe Pozzo di Borgo and Abdel Sellou. It opened in France to modest expectations and grew through word of mouth into one of the highest-grossing French films ever released domestically. The film was remade in English in 2017 as The Upside. The remake is fine. The original is considerably better.

Some Like It Hot puts two men in drag for reasons of organized crime survival and sustains the premise for the full running time without ever asking you to notice the effort. Good Will Hunting is the one where the chemistry is not physical attraction but intellectual respect, and where the pairing works because Sean is the only person who refuses to let Will use his intelligence as a deflection shield. Both films understand that chemistry is not about similarity. It is about what each person brings that the other lacks.

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🟡 Medium: Ancient and medieval epic dramas

Movies: The Seventh Seal · Ran (1985) · Braveheart · Hero (2002)

Ran was ten years in development. Akira Kurosawa spent the decade unable to secure financing as he grew older. He completed a long series of painted storyboards covering the entire film before French co-production money finally arrived. The storyboards were later published and exhibited. The battle sequences, which used 1,400 extras and 200 horses across a mountainside, are among the largest practical sequences ever filmed in Japan.

The Seventh Seal was made in 35 days on a budget of roughly $150,000 in today's terms. The chess-against-Death sequence was partly improvised on the day of shooting when Bergman noticed the coastal light was better in the morning than planned. He had a knight, a set of chess pieces, and a very good actor playing Death, and he used what the day offered.

Braveheart and Hero (2002) sit at opposite ends of the historical epic's tonal range. Braveheart is maximalist and emotionally direct; it wants you to feel every death. Hero is formal and cool, structured around unreliable narrators who each tell a different version of the same events, and the film is as interested in the act of storytelling as in the history it depicts.

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🔵 Hard: Films about addiction and its fallout

Movies: Requiem for a Dream · Trainspotting · Uncut Gems · The Lost Weekend

The Lost Weekend was screened at a Paramount preview in 1945 and received strongly negative audience reactions. The studio delayed its release for a year. The liquor industry reportedly offered several million dollars for Paramount to shelve it entirely. The studio declined. The film won four Academy Awards including Best Picture. It was the first major Hollywood film to treat alcoholism as a condition rather than a moral failing, and the industry tried to make it disappear.

Trainspotting was filmed in Glasgow because the production could not cover Edinburgh location costs, despite the novel being set in Edinburgh. Danny Boyle shot it in six weeks with a largely unknown cast. Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, and Jonny Lee Miller were not yet household names. The film launched all three of them simultaneously.

Darren Aronofsky shot Requiem for a Dream using hip-hop editing techniques (very rapid cuts to punctuate drug use) and split-diopter lenses (allowing two subjects at different distances to remain in simultaneous focus) to make addiction look the way it feels from the inside: fast, then slower, then impossible to escape. Uncut Gems is the gambling film of the group, and it works because the film never allows the bet to resolve. Every win generates a new risk. The relief you are waiting for never comes.

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🟣 Tricky: Christmas films that refuse the label

Movies: Tokyo Godfathers · Batman Returns · Lethal Weapon · Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Tokyo Godfathers was the first Satoshi Kon film set in a recognisably real contemporary city rather than a constructed fantasy or dream space. Three homeless people find an abandoned infant on Christmas Eve in Tokyo and spend the film trying to return it to its parents. Kon considered it his most accessible work. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at 46, leaving four completed features and an unfinished project that was released with notes in its incomplete form. Four features is not enough.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang uses the Los Angeles holiday party circuit to assemble its cast in one place, and Shane Black uses Christmas as an irony generator: the warmth and goodwill of the season exist as backdrop for a film that is interested in murder, mistaken identity, and Raymond Chandler. Black has made several films where Christmas is the setting for violence. He has described it as an aesthetic position: Christmas is when everyone is supposed to be happy, which is when everything actually goes wrong.

Lethal Weapon opens on a dead woman in a Christmas tree farm and follows two detectives through December Los Angeles heat. Batman Returns uses the seasonal warmth as explicit contrast against every scene of supervillain dysfunction. The seasonal setting is doing something in all four of these films, but it is not making them Christmas movies.

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The Christmas category was designed to be the last one you solve. If you found it early, that is either impressive film literacy or a very specific kind of December watching habit.

PixelLinkr ran its own puzzle today -- FPS games that built the genre's grammar, visual novels that demand everything, and a grand strategy section that will tell you whether you can name four Paradox games without help.