CineLinkr #212: 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.
Flushed Away looks like an Aardman film, but those rats are computer-animated. The studio traded its usual stop-motion approach for CGI and sent Hugh Jackman down a toilet. An unusual career move, even before the sewer romance.
🟢 Easy: Animated stories with rodent leads
Movies: The Nut Job · Flushed Away · Ernest & Celestine · The Tale of Despereaux
The squirrel counts. Surly, the protagonist of The Nut Job, belongs to the same animal order as the rats in Flushed Away and the mice in the other two films. His nut-store raid gives the group its least cuddly business plan. Everybody needs to eat; he has chosen organized crime.
Celestine shares her film with Ernest, a bear. The connection asks for a rodent lead, not a cast populated exclusively by rodents. Their friendship is the reason I'd linger on this row: Ernest & Celestine lets its mouse stand beside someone enormous without turning her into a mascot. Despereaux gets a different sort of mouse-sized heroism, trying to restore happiness to an entire kingdom. Modest workload.
🟡 Medium: Kidnappers demand cash or a secret code
Movies: Proof of Life · Trapped · Kidnap · Don't Say a Word
Kidnap puts a number on the nightmare: Margo demands $10,000 in exchange for Karla's son. Proof of Life treats negotiation as a longer professional process, beginning with a $50,000 "good faith" demand before the negotiators settle on $650,000. The phrase "good faith" is doing some appalling work there.
Trapped also centers on ransom money, but Don't Say a Word wants information. Michael Douglas's psychiatrist must get a remembered number out of Brittany Murphy's traumatized patient while abductors hold his daughter. Cash and code are different currencies, with the same horrible exchange rate: someone else's freedom.
🔵 Hard: Monochrome and color share the screen
Movies: The Wizard of Oz · A Matter of Life and Death · The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey · Europa
Kansas isn't neutral black-and-white in The Wizard of Oz. Its sequences use sepia-tinted monochrome, which makes the arrival of Technicolor Oz feel like the screen has opened a second pair of eyes. In A Matter of Life and Death, the Other World has a pearly monochrome look while earthly life gets color. Heaven apparently has strict opinions about saturation.
The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey changes visual treatment as its journey takes medieval travelers into modern New Zealand. The switch makes a new time and place look different before anyone needs to explain them. That's the pleasure of this connection: remembering what the image does, rather than who appears in it.
Europa complicates the pattern. It can put color into selected portions of an otherwise black-and-white frame, rather than simply switching one whole scene for another. Howard Hampton's Criterion essay describes color leaking into strategic details. All four films use both looks, but they don't agree on what the boundary should mean.
🟣 Tricky: Titles contain geographic adjectives
Movies: The French Connection · The Italian Job · The African Queen · The Manchurian Candidate
French. Italian. African. Manchurian. These words point to places, even when the rest of the title suggests a completely different activity. A connection, a job, a queen, and a candidate have very little reason to attend the same meeting. Geography supplies the invitation.
The first two describe countries, African describes a continent, and Manchurian refers to a region. You don't need a shared filming location or a single nationality among the casts. The clue lives in the words you can already see. After a row about cinematic color, returning to the title cards feels almost cheeky.
The years matter for identity, though. This is Peter Collinson's 1969 The Italian Job, with Michael Caine, and John Frankenheimer's 1962 The Manchurian Candidate, with Frank Sinatra. Their later remakes aren't standing in for them. The words may survive a remake; the film on the board still has to be the right one.
I keep coming back to the tiny mouse with an enormous bear for a friend. That's a more appealing arrangement than most of the negotiations elsewhere on this board.
The newsroom interns in October 29's PixelLinkr puzzle have their own workplace problems, plus a Sonic Team reunion that somehow includes a giant egg.