CineLinkr #134: 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.
Adventureland puts Jesse Eisenberg at a Pittsburgh amusement park in 1987, where the rides look safer than the staff's emotional decisions. The park scenes were filmed at Kennywood, which had the useful production advantage of already looking like memory.
🟢 Easy: Summer jobs frame a coming-of-age story
Movies: Adventureland · The Way, Way Back · Snack Shack · The To-Do List
The Way, Way Back gives Duncan a job at Water Wizz and lets Sam Rockwell's manager supply the encouragement missing at home. Snack Shack moves the business to a Nebraska pool, where two friends discover that running a concession stand is mostly heat, sugar, and arguments about money.
The To-Do List also uses a pool job, although Aubrey Plaza's private summer project has little to do with lifeguarding. These films understand the seasonal job as a temporary country. The uniform is bad, the hierarchy is ridiculous, and September is coming.
🟡 Medium: Directed by Jeremy Saulnier
Movies: Murder Party · Blue Ruin · Green Room · Hold the Dark
Saulnier photographed Murder Party and Blue Ruin himself before Sean Porter shot Green Room. Macon Blair appears across the early films, moving from doomed party guest to revenge lead and then a very nervous club employee.
Green Room traps a punk band with neo-Nazis and gives Patrick Stewart one of his coldest roles. Hold the Dark exchanges the club's tight corridors for Alaska, but the violence stays blunt and badly behaved.
🔵 Hard: Argentine crime and justice stories
Movies: Nine Queens · The Secret in Their Eyes · Argentina, 1985 · The Clan
Nine Queens runs on a forged stamp sheet and the possibility that every conversation is another layer of the con. The Secret in Their Eyes turns an old murder investigation into a story about memory, impunity, and the limits of legal closure.
Argentina, 1985 dramatizes the Trial of the Juntas, with Ricardo Darín playing prosecutor Julio César Strassera. The Clan also draws from history, following the Puccio family's kidnappings in Buenos Aires.
The four films approach justice from different angles: swindle, investigation, state prosecution, and criminal family business. Courts matter, but so do the gaps where institutions fail and private reckoning rushes in.
🟣 Tricky: Long titles name people and summarize an action
Movies: The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain · The Man Who Killed Don Quixote · The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared · The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Christopher Monger's Englishman title gives away the entire hill-to-mountain dispute. The 100 Year-Old Man announces its escape before the old man has cleared the window.
Terry Gilliam spent decades trying to finish The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is even less coy, naming victim, killer, act, and editorial judgment.
The titles give themselves away grammatically. Each acts like a sentence with people and an action, not a compact label. By the time the pattern appears, the poster designer has already requested overtime.
The Argentine group packs the most moral weight, while the long-title group has the funniest physical presence. Today's PixelLinkr puzzle also turns mechanics into objects you can point at: dice, typewriters, and two versions of the same world.