CineLinkr #144: 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.
The Pink Panther gave its animated cat about as much screen time as Inspector Clouseau. Audiences liked the cat enough to hand him a separate cartoon career, which is efficient work for a title sequence.
🟢 Easy: Fake romantic or family arrangements
Movies: The Wedding Date · Green Card · Just Go with It · We're the Millers
The Wedding Date hires Dermot Mulroney for a family wedding. Green Card arranges a marriage between Andie MacDowell and Gérard Depardieu so he can remain in the United States. Both lies need witnesses, chemistry, and a terrifying amount of eye contact.
Just Go with It expands one fake marriage into a fake ex-wife and fake children. We're the Millers builds an entire fake family for a drug-smuggling road trip. Every extra person makes the story less believable and the paperwork somehow more ambitious.
🟡 Medium: Live-action films with animated opening credits
Movies: The Pink Panther · Grease · Charade · The Great Race
DePatie-Freleng created the animated titles for The Pink Panther. The sequence introduced the Panther as a character, then the character calmly escaped into television shorts while the film continued without him.
Grease turns its cast into cartoons before the first day at Rydell. Maurice Binder's geometric work on Charade keeps spinning while Henry Mancini's music suggests trouble in excellent tailoring. The Great Race uses animation to announce that Blake Edwards has arrived with machines, villains, and no interest in restraint.
🔵 Hard: A hidden stash turns deadly
Movies: A Simple Plan · Shallow Grave · Millions · Trespass
A Simple Plan finds $4.4 million in a crashed plane. Shallow Grave finds a suitcase of cash beside a dead flatmate. The money does not create greed so much as give it a detailed project plan.
Millions drops stolen banknotes beside a child just before Britain's fictional switch to the euro. Trespass sends two firefighters after hidden church gold in an abandoned building. The shared rule is brutally simple: unclaimed money always has claimants, and they tend to arrive armed.
🟣 Tricky: Possessive-name titles
Movies: Rosemary's Baby · Sophie's Choice · Ferris Bueller's Day Off · Charlie's Angels
Rosemary owns the baby grammatically, Sophie owns the choice, Ferris owns the day off, and Charlie owns the Angels. Four apostrophe-s titles, each built around a character's name.
The joke gets stranger in Charlie's Angels because Charlie keeps his face off screen. He gets the title, the office, and three elite agents. He does not have to appear for the group photo.
The animated credits group has the best afterlife here. A pink cat wandered through two minutes of typography and walked out with a franchise. Today's PixelLinkr puzzle has firefighters and live-action detectives, so the employment situation remains unstable.