CineLinkr #215: The Story Behind the Puzzle

Arnold Schwarzenegger's scientist in Junior agrees to become pregnant to test a fertility drug. When the experiment is supposed to end, he decides to carry the pregnancy to term. The project has acquired a rather substantial scheduling dependency.

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🟢 Easy: Ben Stiller performances

Movies: Meet the Parents · The Secret Life of Walter Mitty · Along Came Polly · Greenberg

Stiller's Greg Focker in Meet the Parents and Reuben in Along Came Polly turn ordinary relationship situations into sustained exercises in embarrassment. They're useful familiar anchors, but the row has room for much more than the same anxious romcom man four times.

Stiller also directed The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, taking the title role into an adventure built around his imagined and actual life. Noah Baumbach directs him in Greenberg, with Greta Gerwig as Florence. That film's uncomfortable conversations give his performance a different rhythm. I like a casting row that lets the actor get awkward at several different speeds.

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🟡 Medium: Pregnancy drives the central story

Movies: Junior · Waitress · Fools Rush In · Baby on Board

Junior makes its pregnancy deliberate, so surprise isn't a requirement. Waitress gives Jenna an unintended pregnancy inside an unhappy, abusive marriage; her pies become an outlet for experiences she can't neatly control. Adrienne Shelly wrote and directed the film, and Keri Russell plays Jenna. The premise leaves plenty of room for feelings that aren't remotely as tidy as a recipe.

In Fools Rush In, Isabel returns three months after a night with Alex to tell him she is pregnant. Baby on Board takes an earlier-than-planned pregnancy into a power couple's work and relationship misunderstandings, with Angela hiding it to protect a promotion. Pregnancy is doing the main plotting in all four. That's a narrower connection than any film with a pregnant character somewhere in its story.

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🔵 Hard: Cyberpunk science fiction

Movies: Alita: Battle Angel · Ghost in the Shell · Akira · Renaissance

Renaissance plants a missing-scientist investigation in Paris in 2054. A megacorporation called Avalon sits inside the case, while the motion-capture animation gives the future a largely black-and-white look. It is the row's quieter recognition test, and a useful reminder that a cyberpunk city needn't advertise itself in neon.

Ghost in the Shell follows a cyborg public-security agent in the fictional New Port City of 2029. Akira gives its biker gang a dystopian Neo-Tokyo in 2019. Alita begins with a cyborg who awakens without memories of her past. Their bodies and cities belong to worlds where technological power has changed ordinary life, often without making it kinder.

The connection asks you to recognise that kind of world. Putting a robot into any science-fiction film wouldn't be enough. Here, identity and the organisation of society keep getting tangled with advanced technology. A replacement body might solve one problem while introducing several people who would like to own the replacement.

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🟣 Tricky: Titles begin with My

Movies: My Cousin Vinny · My Big Fat Greek Wedding · My Favorite Year · My Dinner with Andre

Start at the first word and the row becomes pleasantly possessive. My cousin. My wedding. My year. My dinner. The standalone My is doing the linking, so you can leave courtroom plotting and family comedy out of the decision.

My Favorite Year follows a young comedy writer and stars Peter O'Toole. My Dinner with Andre has Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn as fictionalised versions of themselves, sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan. The two films have very different plans for filling an evening, but their opening word doesn't negotiate.

Meet the Parents is a useful nearby distraction. Meet begins with the same letter and belongs to the easy actor row, but it isn't My. The small spelling distinction is more useful than a long argument about which of these films feels most like a Ben Stiller comedy.

I like the cut from a gestation experiment to the cyberpunk row's questions about bodies. Both get much less appealing once someone explains what's involved.

For a less anatomical way to undo a mistake, PixelLinkr's November 1 puzzle has race rewinds, alongside kart weapons and protagonists with serious family grudges.