CineLinkr #208: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Smile means the 1975 Michael Ritchie pageant satire here, not the horror film with the dental situation. The contestants want the Young American Miss crown. The adults would like you to believe this is a wholesome enterprise. I trust the adults less than the horror smile.

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🟢 Easy: Hugh Grant performances

Movies: About a Boy · Music and Lyrics · Florence Foster Jenkins · Two Weeks Notice

Hugh Grant can make selfishness sound as though it has just remembered your birthday. About a Boy gives him Will Freeman, a London bachelor whose comfortable isolation starts to fall apart around a kid. The film adapts Nick Hornby's novel; its appeal depends on allowing Will to be dreadful before asking him to grow up.

Music and Lyrics and Two Weeks Notice both have Marc Lawrence behind the camera, but they give Grant different kinds of evasive charm. One needs a songwriter. The other needs a lawyer with a functioning boundary. Florence Foster Jenkins moves the performance to 1944 New York: Grant plays St. Clair Bayfield, the companion who helps protect Meryl Streep's singer from the truth about her voice. The smile is still persuasive. The job has become considerably sadder.

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🟡 Medium: Beauty pageants drive the story

Movies: Drop Dead Gorgeous · Little Miss Sunshine · Misbehaviour · Smile

Drop Dead Gorgeous places a documentary crew around a small-town teen pageant and lets the competition become lethal. The mockumentary format is perfect for people who think explaining their behavior will make it look better. It rarely does.

Little Miss Sunshine approaches the same institution through a family road trip from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach. Olive wants to compete; the family's collapsing arrangements become the real show. Misbehaviour instead dramatizes the protests at the 1970 Miss World competition in London. Paired with Smile's Santa Rosa contest, the row covers contestants, families and protesters, all caught in the machinery of a crown. The pageant drives the action in every case, even when the film wants to dismantle it.

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🔵 Hard: Alcohol addiction and recovery shape the story

Movies: Clean and Sober · Smashed · When a Man Loves a Woman · Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

Smashed makes sobriety a problem for a marriage built around drinking together. Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Kate begins to change while Aaron Paul's Charlie remains attached to their old life. Co-writer Susan Burke drew on her own experience of getting sober young. That detail matters: getting well can disrupt the arrangement that once passed for normal.

When a Man Loves a Woman also puts recovery inside a marriage, with Meg Ryan and Andy García facing the adjustments after Alice enters rehabilitation. Clean and Sober follows Michael Keaton's Daryl into treatment for both cocaine and alcohol. The category includes his alcohol dependence without pretending it is his only addiction.

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot takes its story from cartoonist John Callahan's memoir, with Joaquin Phoenix playing Callahan and Jonah Hill his AA sponsor. The shared connection is the work of recovery and its effect on relationships. A character having a drink would be far too loose. These stories change when their characters try to stop.

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🟣 Tricky: Titles begin with names of chemical elements

Movies: Iron Man · Goldfinger · Silverado · Nickelodeon

IRON Man. GOLDfinger. SILVERado. NICKELodeon. The opening letters spell chemical elements, and the spaces are optional. That last part is the little trap: you have to stop treating each title as a complete word and look at where it starts.

Iron Man and Goldfinger offer conspicuous metallic bait. Silverado gets there through a western town, while Nickelodeon concerns early silent-film production. Peter Bogdanovich's 1976 comedy stars Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds and Tatum O'Neal; the television network is not making a guest appearance on the board.

The element symbols are Fe, Au, Ag and Ni. Knowing those symbols will not solve the row faster than reading the titles, which is mildly insulting after every chemistry exam I have ever sat. The satisfying turn is realizing that the four films can remain completely unrelated as films. Their first few letters do all the work.

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I like that Nickelodeon can be the least familiar film here and still give you everything you need. Sometimes the answer really is printed on the box.

For another row that asks you to reconsider a familiar word, the same date's PixelLinkr puzzle puts Rain and Pain among everyday homophones.