CineLinkr #203: 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.
Mac and Me contains an extended dance number inside a McDonald's. This is not a rumor invented to make the film sound less restrained. Ronald McDonald appears, receives billing, and watches product placement achieve sentience.
🟢 Easy: Households shelter nonhuman visitors
Movies: Harry and the Hendersons · Mac and Me · Batteries Not Included · CJ7
Harry and the Hendersons brings Bigfoot home after a road accident. CJ7 gives a struggling father and son an alien creature that looks like a toy and behaves like a complication. Mac and Me handles alien refuge with less dignity and more soft-drink exposure.
Batteries Not Included lets tiny alien machines move into a threatened apartment building. The tenants protect them, and the visitors return the favor. It is a landlord dispute with spaceships small enough for the kitchen table.
🟡 Medium: Baseball scouting or recruitment drives the story
Movies: Trouble with the Curve · Million Dollar Arm · The Scout · Sugar
Trouble with the Curve follows an aging scout defending observation against data-driven front offices. Million Dollar Arm turns recruitment into an international contest for Indian cricket bowlers who might become baseball pitchers.
The Scout makes talent discovery a comedy of impossible expectations. Sugar takes the quieter route, following a Dominican prospect through recruitment and the dislocation of minor-league life in Iowa. Being found is only the first inning, unfortunately.
🔵 Hard: Adults reunite with childhood friends and old history
Movies: Sleepers · It Chapter Two · The World's End · Grown Ups
These reunions come with baggage that cannot fit in the rental car. The Losers Club returns to Derry after twenty-seven years. Sleepers reunites men bound by childhood abuse and a dangerous plan for reckoning.
The World's End hides apocalyptic trouble beneath a failed pub crawl. Grown Ups keeps the stakes domestic, gathering childhood teammates after their coach dies. Both understand that old friends can restore a role you thought adulthood had deleted.
The link is the past becoming active again. Memory is not backstory. It walks into the room, orders a drink, and starts making decisions.
🟣 Tricky: Titles contain contractions
Movies: Don't Worry Darling · Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? · It's Complicated · You've Got Mail
The apostrophes are tiny, which is exactly why the group can hide. Don't, Who's, It's, You've: each title squeezes two words together before doing anything else.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won five Academy Awards and remains the least soothing question in the set. You've Got Mail updates the anonymous-correspondence plot of The Shop Around the Corner for dial-up internet. It's Complicated provides the cleanest summary of every Nancy Meyers kitchen and relationship.
Once the contractions register, the row becomes impossible to unsee. Four apostrophes have been standing there like nervous stagehands.
Batteries Not Included wins the houseguest prize because the visitors perform useful repairs. Today's PixelLinkr puzzle offers playable cats, who have reviewed that arrangement and rejected the labor clause.