Movie Review: Wordplay

Wordplay: Torgo approves

The other day, the boy pulled my high school yearbook off the bookshelf. Since I fled the state a month after graduation, then the time zone, I haven't had many opportunities to reminisce about my high school years. My graduating class had over 700 people in it and so, despite the fact that I was the editor of the newspaper (with a staff of about 40), in a bunch of clubs, and physically at the school most days, I never knew most of the people there. 10 years later (holy crap, it's my 10 year reunion...), I'd forgotten most of the people I knew.

The fact is, I had classes with most of the same 20 or 30 people. The AP kids. The NHS kids. The nerds, geeks, etc. The socially awkward. I wondered what happened to them.

I think some of them might be in "Wordplay." This movie is about crossword puzzle geeks. Specifically, Will Shortz, the NY Times puzzle, and Shortz' annual tournament in Connecticut. To sell the movie, there are interviews with Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton, Mike Mussina, etc. But it's really all about the geeks.

Ok, so I was in those AP classes. I was(/am) socially awkward. But I never was obsessed with crossword puzzles. I liked logic puzzles. Those grids with 5 people wearing 5 hats with 5 jobs and 5 cars or whatever, and you had to figure out who did what with whom. I was a puzzle junkie, just never crosswords. It's ironic, in a way, b/c aside from liking puzzles, I like word games (like Scrabble) and I'm a pop-culture junkie (hence my dominance in Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy).

The people in this movie are good. I used to listen to Will Shortz on Weekend Edition on NPR Sunday mornings. I never realized that he spends 10-12 hours of every day on puzzles. That's the best part of the movie. Here's a guy who loves puzzles and he's made a career out of it. He seems completely happy while sitting on the stage watching the top 3 contestants fight it out.

I also learned that my wife is more of a geek than she lets on. One of the many crossword clues in the movie that stumped me, she got immediately: the answer was Zolaesque, a hybrid word that's also a moderately obscure reference. Zolaesque? Really? I never would've gotten that.