Modern H.R. initiative / SUN 10-20-24 / Futuristic microscopic machine / Marquee at the Tri-Plex mistaken as a promo for ... "Godzilla"? / ___ Sidle, longtime role on "C.S.I." / Italian sauce whose name sounds like a French stew / Bandmate of Keith for 60+ years / Band whose name is sometimes rendered with a backward B

Constructor: Jerry Miccolis

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME:"Triple Features" — each answer is an imagined "Marquee at the Tri-Plex" featuring three movie titles, which, together, seem to describing a fourth, different movie:

Theme answers:

• BIG GIANT MONSTER (23A: Marquee at the Tri-Plex mistaken as a promo for ... "Godzilla"?)
• WITNESS ALIEN ARRIVAL (37A:  ... "E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial"?)
• HANCOCK SIGNS THE PAPER (54A:  ... "Independence Day"?)
• TANGLED FROZEN TRAFFIC (75A: ... "Rush Hour"?)
• WIRED SLEEPERS MISERY (91A: ... "Insomnia"?)
• MANHATTAN HOOK-UP (110A: ... "Sex and the City"?)

Word of the Day:HANCOCK (see 54A) —

Hancock is a 2008 American superhero comedy film starring Will Smith as an amnesiac, alcoholic, reckless superhero trying to remember his past. The film is directed by Peter Berg based on a screenplay by Vince Gilligan and Vy Vincent Ngo. The film also stars Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman.

The story was originally written by Vy Vincent Ngo in 1996. It languished in development hell for years with various directors attached, including Tony Scott, Michael Mann (who would later co-produce the film), Jonathan Mostow and Gabriele Muccino, before being filmed in 2007 in Los Angeles with a production budget of $150 million.

In the United States, the film was rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America after changes were made at their request in order to avoid an R rating, which it had received twice before. Columbia Pictures released the film in theaters in the United States on July 2, 2008. While Hancock received mixed reviews from critics, who found it promising, but let down by the mid movie change in tone, it grossed $629.4 million worldwide, becoming the fourth highest-grossing film of 2008. (wikipedia)

Still fighting off a head cold, so this write-up might not be as elaborate, or coherent, as you have come to expect (or at least hope for). I really gotta polish this off and get some sleep. So ... movies! I like movies. It took me a bit to figure what was going on here because after I got BIG GIANT MONSTER, I thought all the answers were going to be "three movie titles that are all synonyms of one another.""BIG GIANT" is pretty bad here. Unmotivated redundancy. The other answers work, more or less. It's a cute idea—three movie titles that suggest another movie title. But that's twenty-four (24!) movie titles you're being asked to know, or be at least vaguely aware of: six theme clues with a movie in each clue and then three movies in each answer. 6 times 4 = 24. Were you familiar with all of them? I was ... almost. Couldn't place WIRED. Had to look it up. It's the biopic about Belushi (1989), based on the Bob Woodward book of the same name. It is by far the least successful movie of the twenty-four. According to wikipedia, it made just over $1 million on a $13 million budget. I only kind of remember SLEEPERS ... is that the one from the '90s about a group of criminals, or maybe hackers? [looks it up] Well, it is from the '90s (1996), and it does involve criminals, but the core story involves a group of men who, as boys, served time in a juvenile detention facility and experience terrible abuse. So the movie is about the aftermath of that. I don't know where I got "hackers" from. I think I was thinking about not SLEEPERS but SNEAKERS (1992), which is about a group of security specialists (though not computer security, I don't think). Annnnyway, WIRED and SLEEPERS seem like outliers, fame-wise. I would've said the same about HANCOCK, but it turns out that movie grossed over $600 million, so ... clearly somebody saw it! Oh, THE PAPER, that wasn't that big of a hit, was it? As I recall, it was about this thing that used to exist called a "newspaper." Ask your parents.