Constructor: Kiran Pandey
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (mostly Easy, but a couple of these movie titles might be elusive for many solvers...)
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THEME: Movie? Magic! — ordinary phrases are clued as if they were very brief movie reviews (with movie title first and one-word assessment following)
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (mostly Easy, but a couple of these movie titles might be elusive for many solvers...)
Theme answers:
Really like this theme concept. It's ... tight. Generally. There are a couple of ways in which you could say the puzzle wobbles. The first is that the last "review" ("CRAZY!") is an outlier, in that all the other one-word assessments are uniformly and unambiguously positive. They are all one-word slang terms for "excellent.""Lit" runs more to "exciting," but if you call a movie "lit," that's always going to be a rave. Whereas "Crazy," yeah, maybe, but maybe not. Seems like it's in a fundamentally different category than the other one-word "reviews." The clue tries to force the issue by saying "Insanely good," but I just don't think "CRAZY!" means "good" the way the others mean "good." The bigger wobble today has to do with the relative fame of the movies, specifically the relative fame of MOON, which ... had critical success, and is known to scifi aficionados, but is not in the same solar system, not in the same universe, famewise, as the other movies involved in this theme. OK, maybe it's in the same *universe* as DRIVE, but FROZEN, UP, and GREASE are all iconic. Huge hits, enduring fame. DRIVE's fame is somewhat more modest than those Big Three, but DRIVE is a modern noir classic and it stars Ryan Gosling, so it has legs. I don't know that MOON has legs. I hadn't even heard of it when it got chosen as the movie for my Pandemic Movie Club (now just Movie Club) a few years back. It's good, but that's not the point. Famewise, it's a giant outlier today. I think it's famous enough to pass, but we're talking about wobbles, and it makes the theme wobble. A little. But for me, a movie fan who knew all the movies involved, this theme was enjoyable. (Still never seen FROZEN and never will—my daughter's princess phase was in the rearview by then)
- GREASE FIRE (17A: "That 1978 musical? Amazing movie!") (Grease? Fire!)
- UPTIGHT (25A: "That 2009 Pixar film? Incredibly well made!") (Up? Tight!)
- FROZEN SOLID (36A: "That 2013 Disney movie? Pretty decent!") (Frozen? Solid!)
- MOONLIT (51A: "That 2009 science fiction flick? Freaking epic!") (Moon? Lit!)
- DRIVE CRAZY (61A: "That 2011 neo-noir? Insanely good!") (Drive? Crazy!)
Moon is a 2009 science fiction film directed by Duncan Jones (in his directorial debut) and written by Nathan Parker from a story by Jones. The film follows Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), a man who experiences a personal crisis as he nears the end of a three-year solitary stint mining helium-3 on the far side of the Moon. Kevin Spacey voices Sam's robot companion, GERTY. Moon premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and was released in selected cinemas in New York and Los Angeles on 12 June 2009. The release was expanded to additional theatres in the United States on 10 July and to the United Kingdom on 17 July. A follow-up film containing an epilogue to the film's events, Mute, was released in 2018. A third installment, a graphic novel called Madi: Once Upon A Time in the Future, was released in 2020.Moon was modestly budgeted and grossed just under $10 million worldwide, but was well received by critics. Rockwell's performance found praise. The movie won numerous film critic and film festival awards and was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Film, and won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 2010. (wikipedia)
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| [Air? Cool!] |
The fill on this one is mostly ... solid. Not a fan of company names, especially the names of exploitive dystopian behemoths like DOORDASH (see "Controversies, lawsuits, and criticisms"here, for starters), but you can't say DOORDASH / KWANZAA isn't a fresh and original pair of long answers. I also liked TOM YUM—yum, indeed (23A: Thai hot-and-sour soup) OREOOS is the worst of the crosswordese cereals (bring back KIX!), and every time I see it, I think "wow, the constructor must've been desperate." Luckily it's the worst thing in sight in that NE corner. Bad fill can be tolerable as long as it's supporting a lot of good fill. My main criticism of the fill today involves STAY UP— (50D: What many children are gold not to do on Christmas Eve, but encouraged to do on New Year's Eve) [sidenote: who the hell is *encouraging* their kids to STAY UP, ever?]. I'd normally say that duping "UP" is not that big a deal, as long as the "UP"s are in different parts of the grid, but today, with "UP" being a theme element, I really think the rest of the grid should've had a "no extra UPs" policy. Duping is always an iffy practice. Duping some short words, some of the time, is excusable. But you really shouldn't dupe theme elements. Today, STAY UP becomes STAY IN no problem. You dupe the "IN" from "I'M IN," but that's better than duping a theme element. And you could still get a New Year's Eve clue out of it, e.g. [What I have done for every New Year's Eve as far back as I can remember] ...
[Is this ... MOON?]
The puzzle seemed generally easy today, but I struggled mightily in one place because of a particularly painful trap I fell into. I was flying along and off the "N" in TAINT I wrote in C'MON at 7D: "Let's do this thing!"and then confirmed it (ughhh) with TIMID (15A: Like a mouse). So C'MON was locked in tight, and seemed indisputably correct. It fit perfectly, both sense-wise and grid-wise. And then I hit the "Deity" (5A: Deity from whose hair flows the river Ganga) and was staring down SHC- ... and my first instinct was to doubt not C'MON but HIFI! (6D: Preference for an audiophile). Gah! I got ADE easy, but the whole area up there was made much, much worse by VIRTU (!?!?!), what? (8D: Collection of traits necessary for "The achievement of great things," as theorized by Machiavelli). You can tell by that paragraph-long and overly detailed clue that you've got an obscure answer on your hands there. I thought the theme would fix it, but GREASE ... what? I had GREASEFO-E. Looking back now, I really should've seen the problem. But I truly did not. "GREASE... DOPE!" Nope. I had to back in there after getting the terminal "U" in VIRTU from "UP." Then the "V" gave me SHIVA (d'oh! of course...) and finally "I'M IN!" showed up. I assume the "I'M IN" clue was written specifically to elicit C'MON as a guess. Or I'm just a weirdo who fell in his own self-made trap. Both possible.
That's all. More Holiday Pet Pics now. Actually, today, just one, and the letter that came with it. RIP, Kairos, you beautiful shepherd baby.
Hi Rex,
Thanks as ever for your wonderful, illuminating, and so often vindicating blog!
My family had to put down our beloved dog today [Dec. 14], just shy of his ninth Christmas. Although he couldn’t do the NYT crossword, he loved sitting at our feet while we did :) Here’s him last year waiting to unwrap his frisbees:
