XWord Muggles Forum

EmilyW wrote: ↑Tue May 18, 2021 12:47 pm I ended up picking the correct actress out of my two answers. I started reading Joon's review and then immediately noticed the first letters spelled out LEACH. I can't believe I missed that! Oh well, at least I picked the right one. This was pretty tough for a week 2.

Man, same, how did I miss that?? I think I should have caught that, but this probably more Week 3 than Week 2, I'd say. With some of the consternation on the boards, it sounds like 2.5 might be a trickle on the easy side. But a fun one, for sure!!

I figured it was LEACH- on "The Last Picture Show," i.e. doubling as "the last movie you need to focus on to get the meta right," which is a weak confirmation but whatever, haha. Definitely fair!!

My 100% wild guess was right... whoa.

Man oh man. In my first post, I said that I took a leap of faith to get to the correct answer. My logic was that all the theme answers were female actors with the MAN removed, or LEACHed away. Done and done. But of course Matt's intended road to the answer was much more elegant.

My habit of double checking everything in metas paid off this week. Looking at the cast of Grosse Point Blank to be sure it really did star Arkin, I saw Elfman and remembered the elf owl and knew that had to be key. I think I’d have had more trouble if I knew more about actors and didn’t feel the need to check these.

I wonder why Matt included the 70s Oscar qualifier. Seems like that just made it easy to guess.

This might have been easier if it was given as a week 3. Getting Natalie, Laraine, Jenna, etc., pretty quickly, it felt like *that* should have been the week 2 step that would produce the answer. As I was doing the grid I kept thinking that Matt should have known better than to distract a lot of solvers with all the irrelevant actor clues in a week 2 about an actress, so when I finally considered that there might be another layer of complexity I knew where to look.

I wonder why Matt included the 70s Oscar qualifier. Seems like that just made it easy to guess.

Probably because it was a week 2. Even still, it played like a week 3.

I got nowhere at first with the starred theme answers. In looking at the clues, I saw the preponderance of " [film].. actor" clues. Didn't take me long to get LEACH out of that. Remembering Kidman and Portman from "Days of Thunder" and "Closer" made the connection for me with the starred clues. That led to Cloris Leachman, who I knew had won for "The Last Picture Show." A slight bit of inelegance in that all five down clues are referred to as "actor," though Uta Hagen is a woman. And while often "actor" is used non-gender specifically, in the same puzzle we get the meta instructions to find an "actress."

Because I started with the LEACH part of the solve, it never even occurred to me to think of Ingrid Bergman, hence my wonder at a possible alternate solution.

All I could think of while doing this one was CATWO-man (and still cracking up). @Abide had me well-prepared!

viewtopic.php?f=42&t=934

Matt confirmed over on Fiend that it played like a week 3

DNF, there's always another meta

I had to be dragged across the finish line by Dr. Tom. I found the 5 down actors fairly quickly but could not come up with how they related to the 5 theme clues.

amusingly, I had as a wild guess Ms. Leachman, but without figuring out any mechanism, I didn't submit anything.

Was never going to get this one; a meta solution rooted in knowledge of popular culture is like kryptonite for Superman...

ReB wrote: ↑Sat May 22, 2021 2:18 pm Was never going to get this one; a meta solution rooted in knowledge of popular culture is like kryptonite for Superman...

I bet most people "just Googled it."