CineLinkr #165: 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.
Air Bud asks one vital legal question: is there a rule saying a dog cannot play basketball? The answer has carried a franchise much farther than most human athletes manage.
🟢 Easy: Animals trained for organized competition
Movies: Seabiscuit · Secretariat · The Black Stallion · Air Bud
Three horses train for the track. Seabiscuit became a Depression-era celebrity, Secretariat won the 1973 Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths, and The Black Stallion moves from island survival to racing.
Then a golden retriever enters the gym. The training arc still works, but the footwear budget drops sharply.
🟡 Medium: A heat wave fuels the tension
Movies: Falling Down · In the Heat of the Night · The Seven Year Itch · Summer of Sam
Heat presses on every scene here. Los Angeles traffic helps crack Michael Douglas in Falling Down, while the Mississippi night in Norman Jewison's murder mystery makes an already hostile town feel airless.
Billy Wilder uses a Manhattan heat wave for temptation in The Seven Year Itch. Spike Lee uses the brutal summer of 1977 for paranoia in Summer of Sam. Same thermometer, wildly different emergency.
🔵 Hard: Rated NC-17 by the MPA
Movies: Blue Is the Warmest Colour · Killer Joe · Lust, Caution · Henry & June
NC-17 replaced the old X rating in 1990, and Henry & June became the first film released under the new label. The change was supposed to separate adult films from the pornography associations that had swallowed X.
The rating still created a commercial wall. Many theaters and newspapers would not carry NC-17 films, so distributors often cut them or released them unrated.
These four all met that wall. Their subjects differ, but the ratings board gave each the same scarlet letters and left the marketing department to develop a headache.
🟣 Tricky: Titles open with Hello or Goodbye
Movies: Hello, My Name Is Doris · Good Bye, Lenin! · Hello Again · Goodbye Christopher Robin
The opening words do all the work: two greetings and two farewells. Good Bye, Lenin! adds a space and an exclamation point, but it is still leaving.
Wolfgang Becker's film was Germany's submission for the foreign-language Oscar. Its goodbye is political and personal, built around a son preserving a vanished East Germany inside one apartment.
Read the titles as somebody entering or exiting a conversation. Doris arrives. Christopher Robin leaves. Lenin gets a carefully managed send-off.
The greeting group wins on manners alone. PixelLinkr is less polite today, especially when an RPG companion decides your choices are reason enough to quit.