CineLinkr #180: 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.
Putney Swope hands control of a Madison Avenue agency to the one board member nobody expected to win the vote. Robert Downey Sr. then turns the office into a 1969 advertising mutiny. The ads get honest. The people do not.
🟢 Easy: Characters shrink to miniature size
Movies: Epic · Arthur and the Invisibles · The Ant Bully · The Incredible Shrinking Woman
Epic drops M.K. into a forest war where a hummingbird counts as transportation. The Ant Bully gives Lucas an even worse afternoon: ants shrink him and put him on trial for crimes against the lawn.
The older oddball is The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Lily Tomlin keeps getting smaller after exposure to household chemicals, which turns suburban consumer products into a science-fiction menace. The sofa eventually wins on scale alone.
🟡 Medium: Advertising professionals drive the story
Movies: What Women Want · Crazy People · Putney Swope · Boomerang
Nancy Meyers puts Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt inside Chicago advertising agencies in What Women Want. His sudden mind-reading ability is absurd, but the pitch meetings remain recognizable: everyone wants the insight and nobody wants to ask how it arrived.
Crazy People lets Dudley Moore sell brutally truthful slogans. Boomerang gives Eddie Murphy a cosmetics executive who discovers that office charm has limits. These films know the campaign is never just the campaign. It is leverage with a logo.
🔵 Hard: Protagonists confront copies of themselves
Movies: Infinity Pool · Replicas · Swan Song · The Reconstruction of William Zero
The copies here are not harmless doubles. Infinity Pool turns cloning into a grotesque legal loophole, while The Reconstruction of William Zero makes a scientist deal with carbon copies carrying his face and his mistakes.
Swan Song is quieter and meaner about the question. Mahershala Ali plays both a dying man and the replacement designed to inherit his family without telling them. The technology works. That does not make the decision remotely comfortable.
🟣 Tricky: Titles begin with a silent letter
Movies: Hour of the Wolf · Wrath of the Titans · Kneecap · Gnome Alone
Look at the first written letter, then say the title. The H in Hour, W in Wrath, K in Kneecap, and G in Gnome disappear before the sound reaches your mouth.
It is a tiny spelling trick with a wonderfully uneven guest list: Ingmar Bergman, Greek monsters, Belfast rappers, and garden ornaments. English invited four consonants to the party and left them standing outside.
The silent-letter set is the one that keeps rattling around after the solve. Today's PixelLinkr puzzle has clay worlds and disposable armies, where everything is much louder and easier to see coming.