The movie is made with a lot of style and visual ingenuity. Patrick Creadon, the director, utilizes graphics to show us crossword grids with the issue areas highlighted, and then we see the letters being written in. In one particularly innovative montage, he has all of his celebs working on the same puzzle in interlocking shots.
You need to be very educated to be a crossword puzzle champ. Scrabble and spelling bees need understanding of a lot of words, but crosswords need endless facts, encyclopedic knowledge, and a capability to determine the author's unstated presumptions about the nature of the clues. The puzzles can be tricky; both Dole and Clinton remember that on the day after their presidential project, one idea requested for the name of the winner.
wordplay - Hip-hop - The Guardian"/>Mike Mussina, the pitcher, states solving a Reagle puzzle "is like pitching to Barry Bonds." Jon Stewart laments that the Times has banished particular words, including those involving physical functions: "Words like urine and enema," he states, "are terrific, due to the fact that they load a great deal of vowels in five letters." We meet a few of the stars in the crossword world, including a former champ, Journey Payne, and 20-year-old Tyler Hinman, who is the kid to view.
The idea of a documentary about crossword puzzle fanciers might not instantly trigger everyone's pulse to race. Those of us addicted to doing the crossword puzzles in this newspaper ought to discover the spectacle of similar fetishists compulsively watchable. Nonaddicts may require more convincing. In "Wordplay" the director, Patrick Creadon, a veteran cameraman, utilizes playful techniques to keep both sets of viewers absorbed.
In one informing episode the crossword composer Merl Reagle shares his thought processes while putting together a brand-new puzzle, affording an insight into the deep linguistic structures that inform this seemingly insignificant pastime. Mathematicians and musicians, we are informed, are best at fixing crosswords rapidly, having the ability to glance the underlying orthographic patterns and puns like a system of numbers or notes.
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