CineLinkr #145: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Peter Sellers spends Being There saying simple things about gardens while Washington hears economic prophecy. This is either a perfect satire of power or a warning that everyone should stop using seasonal metaphors in meetings.

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🟢 Easy: Boxing changes a family's future

Movies: Cinderella Man · The Fighter · Girlfight · Southpaw

James J. Braddock's comeback in Cinderella Man pays the bills during the Depression. The Fighter keeps Micky Ward's career tangled with his brother, mother, and a family business that makes every bout feel like the quiet part.

Girlfight lets Diana claim boxing against her father's violence and expectations. Southpaw makes Billy Hope fight his way back toward custody of his daughter. The bell decides more than a score in all four films.

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🟡 Medium: Closed-circle murder among gathered guests

Movies: Gosford Park · See How They Run · Crooked House · Bodies Bodies Bodies

Gosford Park locks aristocrats and servants inside one country estate, then lets Robert Altman watch the hierarchy breathe after the host dies. Crooked House puts an entire wealthy family under suspicion in the home they already distrust.

See How They Run moves the suspect list into the London theatre world around The Mousetrap. Bodies Bodies Bodies adds a hurricane, a party game, and a group chat's worth of resentment. Nobody can leave. Everybody has a theory. Most theories are terrible.

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🔵 Hard: Grief takes monstrous form

Movies: Men · Lamb · The Orphanage · The Changeling

Lamb gives a grieving couple a human-sheep child named Ada, after their dead daughter. The Changeling sends George C. Scott's bereaved composer into a mansion occupied by a murdered child's ghost.

The Orphanage folds a mother's search for her son into the ghosts of the building's past. Men turns guilt and bereavement into a grotesque cycle of repeated faces and bodies. These films refuse to leave grief inside the character's head. It gets a shape and starts moving through the house.

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🟣 Tricky: Ordinary people treated as powerful insiders

Movies: The Man Who Knew Too Little · Being There · Monte Carlo · The Prisoner of Zenda

Bill Murray thinks he has joined an interactive theatre game in The Man Who Knew Too Little. Actual spies think he is an operative. Chance the gardener becomes a political sage in Being There because rich people cannot accept that a sentence about roots might only concern roots.

Monte Carlo mistakes a Texas waitress for a British heiress. The Prisoner of Zenda installs an English gentleman as king because he looks exactly like the indisposed monarch. The clue is mistaken status, but the fun comes from watching institutions protect their own bad assumption.

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Chance never changes his vocabulary. Everyone else does the hallucinating for him. Today's PixelLinkr puzzle also rewards careful timing, although its RPGs are less likely to appoint a gardener president.