His mom is spaghetti

There seems to be some kind of rite of passage for young children of this generation to learn the lyrics to "Lose Yourself" by Eminem. I can't really explain it, since that song is 22 years old. But one of my older son's friends once showed us how quickly he could spew out the lyrics to the song, in such a way that it created a sort of meme in the family, at least from where I sat, of this kid half-closing his eyes in earnest bordering on autistic concentration, unleashing a stream of words indecipherable from one another but containing enough distinguishable moments to identify themselves as "Lose Yourself."

This couldn't have made much of an impression on my younger son, who would have probably been about seven at the time, but now this is a thing he can do and wants to do also.

It was just this week that he showed us his mastery of the lyrics, but the story of "Lose Yourself" goes a few weeks back. 

When he was first in the rough draft stages of reciting the lyrics, he was showing me what he could do and I noticed he was repeating the line "Whoa, there goes gravity" instead of coming back with the line "Whoa, there goes Rabbit he." I think he probably couldn't conceive of the fact that the rhyme came before the sentence ended in a complete thought, and also, he had no reason, not having any reference from the movie 8 Mile, to think that the character's name would be Rabbit.

It was one of those "conflicts" between a parent and child where the child has enough confidence in what they know that they entirely discount the possibility that their parent might be right -- but of course I was right. He soon incorporated the correct lyrics, and like an idiot I secretly feel proud about having pointed him toward them -- about being right. Yes, frail human being that I am, I must take satisfaction from knowing something that a ten-year-old did not.

Anyway, the other lyric I felt we weren't sure about, and maybe I was just substituting in a phrase that would go along with the rhyming scheme, was "his mom's spaghetti." That is actually the correct lyric, though I think it's just "mom's spaghetti." That being the thing that Rabbit had already vomited on his sweater in his nerves about the upcoming rap battle, "already" being the rhyme with "spaghetti."

To me, it was funnier if this was just a random comment among everything else: "his mom's spaghetti." And in my way of thinking about it, it was not a regurgitated spaghetti dinner he was describing, but the fact that his mother is a creature made of spaghetti. In order words, "his mom's spaghetti" could be translated as "his mom is spaghetti."

It just makes me laugh to think of this spaghetti monster mother doing all the things a mother would usually do, only she is made of a moving clump of slighting red-stained Italian pasta, with meatballs appearing in strategic locations to give her identifiable features.

The reason I'm telling you this today is that last night I caught up on CineNerdle, the game vaguely inspired in some way by Wordle, though it's only really related to Wordle in the most strained game of telephone you could ever imagine. I think it's just that every game that tries to be popular now wants to have a "dle" ending so that you will think it is in some way associated with Wordle.

Anyway, this game involves picking out the names of five movies in a 16-square grid based on words that give you clues to what movie it is, especially when paired with three other words in the grid. I get waaaay behind on CineNerdle during baseball season, which I guess is useful because it gives me more archived games to play during the offseason.

As luck would have it, last night I played this game:

For the record, the other answers were Straight Outta Compton, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Mother!, but it's the green column you're focusing on today.

Until we had had this dissection of the lyrics with my son a few weeks ago, I wouldn't have even considered "mom" and "spaghetti" to be key clues for the movie 8 Mile. And given that it had been a couple weeks since I'd played any of the archive CineNerdle games waiting for me, this was just pure coincidence -- not that it wouldn't also have been coincidence if this were today's game.

The other thing I think is funny is that this CineNerdle puzzle underscores my possible reading of the lyric, that Marshall Mathers' mother is a benevolent spaghetti monster.

Oh but the coincidences do not end there.

The very same night, when taking my older son back from his one-on-one basketball coaching -- which his little brother also attended because my wife was out at an industry drinks -- we got into a discussion of older rap, my older son being a rap fan.

He said he didn't know Ice Cube but had heard he was lame.

Au contraire, mon frere. Or, mon fils.

Rushing to Ice Cube's defense, as we pulled into our driveway, I called up NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" on Spotify.

Now, from various posts I've written on this blog, you know that I don't like to intentionally expose my children to excess profanity, especially since one of them is only ten. But I figured, if even my younger son is starting to think of "Lose Yourself" as a foundational text, he is certainly tangentially exposed to other things that are not as clean as that is. The older one is deep into songs with profanity already, and I don't really believe I have a meaningful role of standing in between them and this stuff for much longer.

So I played about 30 seconds of "Straight Out of Compton," which you know has the word "motherfucker" and the n-word within that first 30 seconds. The street cred of Ice Cube demanded it.

It allowed me to briefly recount the story of narrowly preventing my grandparents -- my highly traditional, highly conservative, very old grandparents -- from being exposed to this song back in college. 

They were on campus for their only campus visit of my college career during my freshman year, and we were walking back to my dorm room from dinner. For some reason I had the sixth sense that I needed to go ahead of them and my parents to make sure that there weren't shenanigans going on in my room with my other two roommates, not knowing what those shenanigans might be. (But the possibilities were endless, as these guys were drunken reprobates, in addition to being good guys.)

My advanced scout mission revealed that the title track to the NWA album Straight Outta Compton was playing at full blast, and would likely give both of my grandparents heart attacks in about 30 seconds if it weren't shut off. Which it was.

(Side note: I do owe a lot to this one roommate, Craig, in terms of my musical tastes. He was the first guy who ever exposed me to Nine Inch Nails, which to this day is my favorite band. I certainly would have been exposed to Nine Inch Nails at some point anyway, but who knows if I would have adopted them in the same way if he didn't have Pretty Hate Machine, which I could play whenever I wanted.)

So yes, it was funny also that Straight Outta Compton, the movie based on this group and that album, also came up in the random CineNerdle I happened to play last night.

I did wonder if maybe we could show my kids 8 Mile. I remember it is laden with f-bombs, but that might be about the only thing that's really preventing a child from watching it, since I think the violence is more implied than anything. Plus there is one more reason this movie is significant for me personally, which is that I am childhood friends with Evan Jones, who plays Cheddar Bob in the movie. We haven't kept in touch but I saw him as recently as 20 years ago -- I think just after 8 Mile came out, actually.

If I can play "Straight Outta Compton" for my kids -- even 30 seconds of it -- I can probably show them 8 Mile. 

Ryan Gosling loves Emma Stone a lot

On Friday I was playing a game of CineNerdle (discussed here if you don't know it), and one of the pivot answers -- in other words, an answer that helps you get the name of two different movies -- was "Ryan Gosling loves Emma Stone."

And I suppose if you do play CineNerdle but you haven't yet played Puzzle #469, this is your SPOILER WARNING.

The spoiler is: Neither of the movies was La La Land.

With an average worldwide score of 4.1 out of 5 for this particular puzzle, that told me that on average, players were getting better than four of the five movies. But I could only conclude one of the two movies that this clue ended up applying to, that being Crazy Stupid Love.

I ultimately did the desperation move that you do when you don't know the answer, where you start randomly moving around tiles until you get the yellow indicator that you have three in a row and only need the fourth. As it turned out, I got the three in the row on the first try so easily ended up solving the puzzle, even though I had not seen the movie in question.

That movie was Gangster Squad, which I still haven't seen even though I have actually written about it before on The Audient.

Anyway, the takeaway was that not only have these two actors already appeared together three times in their careers, but that in each of those three movies they were in a relationship.

Should we begin thinking of them as the modern-day Hepburn and Tracy?

Probably not, but I did find it interesting that they have this sort of professional relationship, because we don't really talk about them as actors who are known for appearing together more than once on screen. I guess people don't really talk about Gangster Squad much in general. (I only talked about it when anticipating its release, wondering whether we'd get the good version of director Ruben Fleischer that we saw in Zombieland, or the bad version that we saw in 30 Minutes or Less. I obviously never bothered to find out.)

I did a quick run through the rest of Gosling's filmography on IMDB and concluded that Stone wasn't in any of his other movies, and since I did Gosling I didn't need to do Stone.

I did wonder, though, who they could have played in each other's movies over the years, while still meeting the requirement of being in a relationship.

Stone could have been:

1) A Barbie, though after Margot Robbie there wasn't really any room for other A-list actresses, and Stone would never have been cast as Stereotypical Barbie;

2) A blow-up doll that Lars falls in love with, though that would have required even better acting skills than even Emma Stone has;

3) Micelle Williams in Blue Valentine (best fit, probably);

4) The Ana de Armas hologram in Blade Runner 2049, or

5) Neil Armstrong's wife.

Honorable mentions: Carey Mulligan in Drive, Eva Mendes in The Place Beyond the Pines

Gosling could have been:

1) Duncan Wedderburn, indulging in his fondness for comedy by playing a foppish rake;

2) Jonah Hill in Superbad;

3) Bradley Cooper in Aloha (best fit, probably);

4) Spider-Man, or

5) Joaquin Phoenix as a stand-in for Woody Allen? (Irrational Man)

Honorable mentions: Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight, Andrea Riseborough in Battle of the Sexes?? A cartoon caveman in The Croods or its sequel??

Anyway, this has been fun. 

CineNerdle reads The Audient

I've been playing CineNerdle for something like eight months now and I've never even mentioned it to you.

One of the countless online puzzles that grew out of the Wordle craze, as you can tell by its "-rdle" suffix, CineNerdle requires its players to find five movie titles or themes in a 16-box grid. Each title or theme is comprised of four individual boxes. For example, if you had "Space," "Wookiee," "George Lucas" and "It's a Trap," you'd swap boxes until these four appeared on one row or column, and your answer would be Return of the Jedi. (Lucas didn't direct Return of the Jedi, but he is affiliated with it.) You get 15 swaps to find all five themes or movie titles, and the trick is that there's one where each of the first four answers contributes one box to a fifth answer. 

Once you get three, the boxes turn yellow to let you know you're one away. However, sometimes you'll have two series of yellow overlapping crossing the same rows, so all four boxes in one row or column will be yellow, meaning you have to move one of them to a different row or column, thereby wasting precious swaps. 

The original version of CineNerdle involves getting five movie titles from clues that are not the names of movies. Then there is also the reversal version, accessed from a different tab on the game interface, where you are given titles of movies and then need to figure out five themes that relate to four of the movies each. For example, all four of the movies might be directed by Ron Howard or all four might feature Harrison Ford. But then it even gets silly and superficial, like all four movies have a number in the title or all four movies are about a talking duck.

Then there are also logical games, only about a dozen of which have ever been submitted because they are very complicated. There's a grand theme for the puzzle and then clues about where things need to be moved, like "the four movies directed by Quentin Tarantino are in the four corners" but then also "no films featuring Meg Ryan are adjacent to any of the Quentin Tarantino movies." You get five chances to see if your configuration is correct. These are very rewarding but very time consuming, so they don't easily fit into my need to pass the time quickly for five minutes, which is when I usually play.

I was big into CineNerdle when I first started playing. I had exhausted all the puzzles and had to wait for a new one to be released each day. (The benefit of CineNerdle over something like Wordle is you can play all the puzzles in the archive, so you can pick up any time and not miss any of the games that have ever been offered.)

But then during baseball season, I had the more pressing need to read player news updates or even just stare at the accrued stats of my current fantasy players. Yes, there is a lot of starting at information you already know by heart in fantasy baseball, such is the strength of the obsession. So for six months I really fell behind on CineNerdle, and had more than 100 of each of the mainstream types of puzzle waiting to be played, and a handful of the logical. 

Since the normal baseball season ended six weeks ago, I've had a chance to catch up on CineNerdle and now I am in danger of exhausting all the puzzles again. I'll deal with how to pass my time next when that moment arrives and not before. 

Why am I telling you about this today?

Well, two nights ago I played the game you see above you, reversal #163, two of whose themes were particularly appropriate for The Audient. The print is rather small so let me show you in better detail.

This ...

... is four movies directed by Baz Luhrmann. Immediately below that, at least the way I swapped the tiles, this ...

... is four movies directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Unless this is your first day reading The Audient, you would know that two of my three bi-monthly series in 2023 involve re-watching the films of Luhrmann and Aronofsky. And these two of the three are being conducted in the same months, which are February, April, June, August, October and December. 

In Luhrmann's case I'm re-watching the exactly six features he's made, which is easy enough. With Aronofsky, who has made eight, I eliminated the two I had already re-watched within the last two years, which were The Fountain and The Wrestler. The CineNerdle puzzle designer acknowledged that as well, including only titles I was actually re-watching for each series.

To play out the rest of this game and further demonstrate how it all works, the other three answers were:

1) Films directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

2) Films written by Charlie Kaufman.

3) Films about stage productions.

There's no one right way to orient them, by the way. The answers can appear on any row or column as long as their relationship to each other is the same. It's a smartly conceived puzzle engine.

In a way, the other answers here further the notion that the person who submitted this puzzle reads The Audient. Films written by Charlie Kaufman was my bi-monthly theme in 2021, the year after Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things topped my year-end rankings. If you want to go one further, Inarritu also directed a #1 for me, Birdman, so this puzzle also includes three directors who have made one of my #1 films -- even if Kaufman is being acknowledged for his writing here rather than his directing. (He needs to direct one more feature before he will have four.) 

Look I know it's just a coincidence. Aronofsky and Luhrmann are both big directors. They both had 2022 films that were nominated for Oscars, with The Whale actually winning a best actor statue for Brendan Fraser. I still thought it was funny to see it ... and it gave me an excuse to finally sell you on CineNerdle, if you too are always seeking ways to pass five minutes of your time.

In December I will indeed be wrapping both bi-monthly series by re-watching those 2022 Oscar nominees, one of which was my #1 film of 2022.