Constructor: Kevin Christian
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (much, much harder if those longer proper nouns are out of your wheelhouse)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: ALPHAVILLE (27D: "Forever Young" band, 1984) —
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This puzzle had its moments but all I could think of was the rather large segment of the solving population that is going to be brutalized by the proper nouns. I wrote in ALPHAVILLE no problem because holy cow is that in my particular generational wheelhouse but I would never, ever expect anyone not solidly Gen-X to know who the hell ALPHAVILLE are. I'd've expected to go to the Godard film of the same name, but even that is pretty obscure. Wow, "Forever Young" ... a semi-iconic melancholy anthem if you were a suburban 80s teen. The song was almost wholly ruined for me when, in my first semester of college (at POMONA, in fact), I went to a test-screening of Listen to Me, a college debate drama (!?) starring Jami Gertz and Kirk Cameron (back when he was famous for starring on the TV show Growing Pains, not for being a religious and zealot and bigot like he is today). I guess the college thought they were doing something "fun" by giving us these free test-screening tickets. We saw it at a mall, I remember that—the Montclair mall ... Montclair Place, was it? Maybe. Anyway, the movie was not just bad, it also featured a clumsy climactic debate between whatever fictional college the movie's stars went to and (of course) Harvard. The subject: abortion. Yes, the hot topic all the kids are talking about, the topic that can *definitely* be done justice in a Kirk Cameron vehicle. So I had to watch these allegedly sympathetic characters wax poetic about the merits of making abortion illegal or whatever and even at 17 I was like "this is bad, right?" And *then* "Forever Young" by Alphaville started playing. I was like "But ... but ... I like this song ... I LIKE THIS SONG, STOP THE MOVIE!" We filled out comment cards at the end. I like to believe I just wrote "No" in big letters. I also have a traumatic memory of Kirk Cameron hosting some kind of wacky Ice Capades TV special in the late '80s, with, like, skating Smurfs and random musical acts ... that can't be real, can it? CAN IT!?
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Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (much, much harder if those longer proper nouns are out of your wheelhouse)
Word of the Day: ALPHAVILLE (27D: "Forever Young" band, 1984) —
Alphaville is a German synth-pop band formed in Münster in 1982. They gained popularity in the 1980s. The group was founded by singer Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd, and Frank Mertens. They achieved chart success with the singles "Forever Young", "Big in Japan", "Sounds Like a Melody", "The Jet Set" and "Dance with Me". Gold remains the only continuous member of Alphaville. [...] Alphaville's song "Forever Young" was featured in the movie Listen to Me (1989) featuring Kirk Cameron in one of his first film roles. (wikipedia) (emphasis—and movie-going low point—mine)
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) is a 1965 French New Wave science fiction neo-noir film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.Alphaville combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. There are no special props or futuristic sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (that in 1965 were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city's interiors. The film is set in the future but the characters also refer to twentieth-century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.
Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British crime novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth-century setting and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville. [...] German synthpop band Alphaville took their name from the film. (wikipedia)
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Then there's POST MALONE, which ... sigh (13D: His 2016 debut album unseated "Thriller" for the most weeks spent in the top 10 on Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop chart (77)). Yes, he's somehow tremendously popular and yet if you are over 50 it's entirely possible you have literally never heard of him. Pop culture is weird these days. Heavily sectored, segmented, silo'd. Between ALPHAVILLE and POST MALONE I could practically hear many older and/or pop-culture-challenged solvers tearing their hair out (if they still have hair) (I sure don't). My own personal proper noun struggle came with WAYMO (40A: Self-driving car company that started as a Google project), which I hated not because I didn't know it, but because ugh, cars, self-driving cars, Google ... it's a dystopic tech bro nightmare. Build efficient public transportation! It's doable! And it's so much better than this apocalyptic vision of hyper-individualism they're trying to sell you. "Oooh, robot cars." Bah. Pffffft. WAYMO, because you'll get "way mo'" pedestrian deaths and way less human accountability for those deaths. Google will not be satisfied until you have Google Brain Implants. At some point you have to stop worshiping your tech overlords, who hate people except insofar as they can be hooked up to machines (literally or figuratively) and drained of their resources and volition. Gonna stop before I write a manifesto and Google tells the feds on me.
I think that ultimately the proper nouns in the puzzle are crossed fairly, but I'm kinda giving side-eye to a couple of those ALPHAVILLE crosses, the proper noun crosses: CHE and "EVIL DEAD" (another longer proper noun that I suspect is unknown to many solvers) (46A: Horror movie franchise known for both its action and slapstick humor). Puzzles should not get *all* their difficulty from proper nouns, because for those who know the nouns, it's not difficult at all, and for those who don't, there's rarely a feeling of satisfaction waiting for you once you get the answer. I like proper nouns, I think they can give a puzzle personality and life, but I wish constructors/editors were more careful about how they used them. Oh well, at least this one started with a gimme. Too easy, perhaps, but it's nice to start out with a little success:
That WAYMO section was tough not just because I didn't know WTF WAYMO was, but because it gets really tight in there, and there are only a few clues to help you out with WAYMO, and those are either cross-referenced or vague. Two of my three initially wrong answers today went straight through WAYMO (STUN for SLAY, WIN for AIM) (29D: Knock dead, 33D: Hoped-for result). Figuring out that CROC / LACED pairing was the key to finally fixing all that mess, but that really was the only Saturday-hard part of the grid for me today. There was one other clue that wicked + clever quality I like in a Saturday: 12D: Props for some plays (OBIE AWARDS). Just a fantastic example of clue misdirection with "Props" there (it's common slang for "credit," short for "proper dues"). I had SOD before ALE (35A: Product that may be sold by the yard), but no other troubles. Tougher than yesterday's, but not by much. See you tomorrow.