On a flight from Auckland to Los Angeles yesterday, one of the movies available was Wordplay, which I had heard about but not yet seen. About the New York Times crossword puzzle, the puzzle editor for the paper, the guys who create the crosswords and the people from all walks of life who solve them. Highly recommended.

It's a well put together movie/documentary which doesn't lead one to think of crossword puzzle solvers as a fringe society. Of course, this is made easier when the people they interview as "solvers" include Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart.

By comparison, Word Wars, a similar movie about Scrabble players, did not make me want to start playing competitive scrabble when I saw it last year. To be fair, though, I suspect if somebody made a similar movie about "everyday" chess players — my left-field hobby of choice — it would look like a pretty strange group of people, too. The fact that Wordplay did not have this result is one of the reasons I liked it (plus, it wasn't an interest group I knew much about).

Topics: entertainment/movies

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