CineLinkr #157: 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.
Peter Jackson's Braindead reached North America as Dead Alive. Both titles are accurate. One sounds like a diagnosis, and the other sounds like the distributor wanted the diagnosis to sell more tickets.
🟢 Easy: Released under different English titles
Movies: The Pirates! Band of Misfits · Formula 51 · The Rundown · Braindead
The British title The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! became The Pirates! Band of Misfits in North America. The 51st State became Formula 51. These are not translations. They are marketing departments staring across the Atlantic and losing confidence.
The Rundown appeared as Welcome to the Jungle in several markets, while Braindead became Dead Alive for North America. A film can travel internationally without changing a frame and still arrive wearing a new name tag.
🟡 Medium: Trapped aboard a moving vehicle
Movies: Snakes on a Plane · Passenger 57 · 7500 · Blood Red Sky
All four films choose an airliner, which is useful because the exits are terrible. Passenger 57 gives Wesley Snipes a hijacking. 7500 confines Joseph Gordon-Levitt largely to the cockpit and turns a locked door into the film's central moral problem.
Snakes on a Plane refuses subtlety at the title level. Blood Red Sky adds a vampire mother to its hijacking, which feels unfair to the hijackers but excellent for scheduling purposes. The plane keeps moving while everyone aboard runs out of options.
🔵 Hard: Young people chase academic competition titles
Movies: A Boy Named Charlie Brown · Bruno · Bee Nation · Science Fair
Charlie Brown reaches the National Spelling Bee in his first feature film, carrying the hopes of every child who has ever been publicly defeated by a double consonant. Bruno also builds toward spelling competition, though its route passes through Catholic school and the Vatican.
The documentaries widen the field. Bee Nation follows First Nations pupils competing for national spelling places in Canada. Science Fair tracks high-school students heading to the 2017 International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles, where the projects are complicated and the teenagers are alarmingly composed.
🟣 Tricky: A stage production mirrors personal lives
Movies: Venus in Fur · Noises Off... · The Dresser · The Salesman
In Venus in Fur, an audition inside an empty Paris theater becomes a two-person contest over control. Noises Off... makes the reflection comic: the farce onstage deteriorates alongside the cast's affairs and grudges backstage.
The Dresser uses King Lear to shadow an actor-manager's collapse. The Salesman places a Tehran couple inside a production of Arthur Miller while their home life fractures. The play is never decoration. It keeps finding the bruise.
The alternate-title group is a reminder that even a finished movie can be handed to marketing and returned with a fake mustache. Today's PixelLinkr puzzle has typed words changing the world on purpose.