There are certain things in life you instinctively hold at arm's length, or they will move in with you and put their feet on the furniture.
August 13, 2006 (Press Release) --
There are certain things in life you instinctively hold at arm's length, or they will move in with you and put their feet on the furniture. I've spent enough time working crossword puzzles to know I could become addicted. In the documentary "Wordplay," we observe that to be a crossword champion, you have to be incredibly intelligent; be capable of intuitive, lateral thinking; know everything, and focus your knowledge into a narrow and ultimately meaningless pursuit. Yes, that makes you an obsessive eccentric, but they're really the only interesting people left, don't you sometimes think?
The movie centers on the 28th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, hosted every year in Stamford, Conn., by Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzles. It also visits fans of the Times puzzles (which run in the Sun-Times and countless other papers). These include Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Yankee pitcher Mike Mussina and the Indigo Girls, although they missed my friend Dusty Cohl, who descends into a deep mental well once a day and does not emerge until the puzzle has been completed (I think "filled in" is not the approved terminology).
The film is made with a lot of style and visual ingenuity. Patrick Creadon, the director, uses graphics to show us crossword grids with the problem areas highlighted, and then we see the letters being written in. In one especially ingenious montage, he has all of his celebrities working on the same puzzle in interlocking shots. During the final championship round, with three contenders working on giant crosswords on a stage, he makes their progress easy to follow; I can imagine another film in which it would have been incomprehensible.
You have to be very well-informed to be a crossword puzzle champion. Scrabble and spelling bees require knowledge of a lot of words, but crosswords require unlimited facts, encyclopedic knowledge, and an ability to figure out the author's unstated assumptions about the nature of the clues. The puzzles can be tricky; both Dole and Clinton remember that on the day after their presidential campaign, one clue asked for the name of the winner. Diabolically, the correct seven-letter word could be either CLINTON or BOBDOLE.
Source: http://www.yahoo.com
Posted by Roger Ebert
The movie centers on the 28th annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, hosted every year in Stamford, Conn., by Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzles. It also visits fans of the Times puzzles (which run in the Sun-Times and countless other papers). These include Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Jon Stewart, Ken Burns, Yankee pitcher Mike Mussina and the Indigo Girls, although they missed my friend Dusty Cohl, who descends into a deep mental well once a day and does not emerge until the puzzle has been completed (I think "filled in" is not the approved terminology).
The film is made with a lot of style and visual ingenuity. Patrick Creadon, the director, uses graphics to show us crossword grids with the problem areas highlighted, and then we see the letters being written in. In one especially ingenious montage, he has all of his celebrities working on the same puzzle in interlocking shots. During the final championship round, with three contenders working on giant crosswords on a stage, he makes their progress easy to follow; I can imagine another film in which it would have been incomprehensible.
You have to be very well-informed to be a crossword puzzle champion. Scrabble and spelling bees require knowledge of a lot of words, but crosswords require unlimited facts, encyclopedic knowledge, and an ability to figure out the author's unstated assumptions about the nature of the clues. The puzzles can be tricky; both Dole and Clinton remember that on the day after their presidential campaign, one clue asked for the name of the winner. Diabolically, the correct seven-letter word could be either CLINTON or BOBDOLE.
Source: http://www.yahoo.com
Posted by Roger Ebert
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