1995 cult classic directed by Kevin Smith / FRI 7-16-21 / Big name in pizza rolls / Last of the Ptolemys / Band featured in Disney World's Rock 'n' Roller Coaster / Ford vehicle, familiarly / Animal in the suborder Vermilingua worm tongue

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So many answers were clued in deliberately tricksy, occasionally baffling ways. The clue on PDAS is slightly nuts, and weirdly dated (9D: Palms, e.g., for short). I haven't heard PDA used to refer to anything but public displays of affection for a long, long time. It's a '90s term. Everyone has phones now. The clue references Palms, which I assume are Palm Pilots (!?!?), I brand that, again, I haven't even thought about since the aughts. And "Palms" is already "short," so asking for a short thing to be short, again, bizarre. I wasn't exactly fooled by the clue, but the spirit of the cluing there is ... not great. Really trying to force difficulty awkwardly onto an answer that a. could be clued in a much more current way, and b. isn't exactly great fill to start with, so why are you getting weird with it, thereby calling attention to it?? See also the clue on ZIP TIES, what in the world? The one thing I know about gaffers, and I would say the definitive thing that anyone knows about gaffers, is that if they are known to have a supply of anything, that thing is *tape*. Gaffers are chief electricians on TV / movie sets. So ... I guess the ZIP TIES are being used to, I don't know, bind wires together (?) ... I had _TIES and no idea what could go there. And I just finished reading Sidney Lumet's "Making Movies" last night. Lots of on-the-set technical information in there, nothing about gaffers having ZIP TIES. Again, I'm sure they do, but ... mostly I associate them with the police, or with the terrorists who invaded the capitol on Jan. 6 (I know at least one of those dudes brought a supply of ZIP TIES with him). 

There was some nice fill in here, but not as much as I'm used to from these constructors. Maybe I just didn't get / care about some of it. I don't like thinking about Zoom at all now, having lived my entire professional life on it for well over a year. I might've enjoyed ZOOM BOMB a year ago, when the tech was new to me. Now it makes me weary. I didn't know PLAY TEST, so, having TEST, I wrote in BETA TEST (a seemingly right answer, for sure), and then, when ACELA made BETA obviously wrong, I decided the term was ROAD TEST :( Like maybe they just used the car term by analogy. Sigh. SO SAD (which is what I had at 21A: "Alas ..."before SADLY, SADLY). Isn't the [Winter Olympics pairs event] ice dancing??? Hmm, looks like ICE DANCE is the main term at wikipedia, which says it's "sometimes referred to as ice dancing"; in my experience, it's only referred to as "ice dancing," so that answer was hard to parse for me. 

Also hard: ATROPOS (just forgot it, crosses weren't terribly helpful); PAPER (such a simple word ... but the clue did nothing for me) (38A: Scholarly work); BUILT (first BULKY, then BULGY) (27D: Muscly); OFT (looking for something conveying repetition far better than OFT does) (39A: O'er and o'er); TINNY (had REEDY) (19A: Thin in tone); MOONY (had MOODY) (4D: Distracted, as with romantic feelings); PRIMP (had PREEN) (9A: Groom). Two times I struggled in a section and then noticed a proper noun clue that I knew immediately but somehow hadn't bothered to look at earlier. This happened with Hannah ARENDT (3D: Hannah who wrote "The Human Condition") and with "MALLRATS" (12D: 1995 cult classic directed by Kevin Smith). Do you ever do this? Flail around in a corner only to realize you haven't actually looked at every clue in that corner yet (you idiot!)? I often do this with longer clues especially, because I have such a habit of attacking short stuff first (generally a good plan). Embarrassed that the "breakthrough" answer for me in the NW (where I struggled a lot) was AEROSMITH—I've been on the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster (circa 2011). Remains, to this day, the only roller coaster I've ever been on with a loop (you get shot into the loop right out of the gate while Steven Tyler screeches his blessings at you). This description is exactly as I remember it: