CineLinkr #182: 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.
Interstella 5555 uses Daft Punk's Discovery as its complete soundtrack and tells the story without spoken dialogue. It is an album visualization with alien musicians, corporate kidnapping, and no meeting where somebody asks whether this is too much.
🟢 Easy: Wishes bring dangerous consequences
Movies: Wonder Woman 1984 · Wish Upon · Three Thousand Years of Longing · Wishmaster
The Dreamstone in Wonder Woman 1984 grants what people ask for and collects a cost afterward. Wish Upon uses the same broad customer-service model, except its music box is quicker about killing people.
George Miller gives the premise room to breathe in Three Thousand Years of Longing. Idris Elba's Djinn knows that wishes are rarely simple because he has spent centuries watching owners turn desire into a trap.
🟡 Medium: Adapted from concept albums or rock operas
Movies: Tommy · Pink Floyd: The Wall · Quadrophenia · Interstella 5555
The Who supplied two routes from record to screen. Ken Russell made Tommy loud, gaudy, and populated by performers who attack every song. Quadrophenia keeps its boots closer to the pavement and follows Jimmy through 1964 mod culture.
Pink Floyd: The Wall puts Bob Geldof inside Pink's collapse. Interstella 5555 sends Discovery into space. None of these films merely places songs behind a plot. The record is the load-bearing wall.
🔵 Hard: Body horror played for laughs
Movies: Death Becomes Her · Teeth · Frankenhooker · Bad Milo!
Death Becomes Her won the visual-effects Oscar for making immortality look physically exhausting. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn survive injuries their bodies cannot plausibly accommodate, then keep arguing.
Frankenhooker rebuilds a fiancée from body parts. Bad Milo! locates stress in the least dignified possible anatomy. The laughs work because the films do not soften the gore. They stare at the wound and wait for it to develop comic timing.
🟣 Tricky: One performer plays many named characters
Movies: Manifesto · Holy Motors · The Mouse That Roared · The Scapegoat
Cate Blanchett moves through thirteen roles in Manifesto. Denis Lavant spends Holy Motors changing identities as his limousine carries him between appointments. The performer becomes the anthology.
Peter Sellers handles three parts in The Mouse That Roared. Alec Guinness plays English schoolteacher John Barratt and his French lookalike Jacques De Gue in The Scapegoat. The resemblance is impeccable and extremely bad for personal boundaries.
The concept-album group has the best afterlife: four records that escaped the turntable. Today's PixelLinkr puzzle trades rock operas for momentum, parries, and a French Revolution with more menus.