Film producer Ponti / TUE 2-11-25 / 2007 quadruple-platinum Alicia Keys album / Title setting for a Christie mystery / Betting setting / Good standing for a sailor? / Best-selling pop group that includes the members V, RM and Suga

Theme answers:

• HEARTEYES (17A: Emoji that means "I'm crazy about you") 😍
• MOUTH ORGAN (30A: Harmonica)
• MUSCLEHEAD (47A: Obsessive bodybuilder)
• HANDS BACK (59A: Returns, as graded papers)

Word of the Day: CARLO Ponti (53A: Film producer Ponti) —

Carlo Fortunato Pietro Ponti Sr. OMRI (11 December 1912 – 10 January 2007) was an Italian film producer with more than 140 productions to his credit. Along with Dino De Laurentiis, he is credited with reinvigorating and popularizing Italian cinema post-World War II, producing some of the country's most acclaimed and financially-successful films of the 1950s and 1960s.

Ponti worked with many of the most important directors of Italian cinema of the era, including Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Vittorio De Sica, as well as many international directors such as Agnès Varda and David Lean. He helped launch the career of his wife, international film star Sophia Loren. He won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film for La Strada (1954) and was nominated for Best Picture for producing Doctor Zhivago (1965). In 1996, he was appointed as a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. (wikipedia)

Well there's one obvious problem, which is that you can point to your heart, eyes, mouth, head, hands and back—those are specific, unmistakable things—but if I ask you to point at your ORGAN ... Actually, scratch that. I absolutely do not want you to point at your ORGAN. This is a family blog. Anyway, since I assume the puzzle is not using ORGAN as a euphemism, it's weird for it to be here, since it's a category of body part, and not a specific thing. Ditto MUSCLE, though somehow MUSCLE feels less out of step with the theme than ORGAN does. ORGAN is just ??? especially since you already have a couple of ORGANs in your themer set (namely HEART and EYES). Yeah, ORGAN is a real sour note today. Other things make the theme not so shiny. I think the ideal theme answer today is HANDS BACK, since the meaning of both HANDS and BACK are changed by the theme (i.e. neither word is a body part in the phrase HANDS BACK). Whereas MOUTH is the body part in its base phrase, and HEARTEYES couldn't mean (body part) HEART and EYES more if it tried, since that's practically all the emoji is composed of. HANDS BACK is the only answer that seems to be really trying to get into the whole spirit of a theme like this. The others feel a little slapdash and halfass.

The revealer also feels like it's missing something. Namely HARMONY. TWO-PART on its own feels sad. Insufficient. Abbreviated. Yes, you're supposed to reimagine the "part" as a "body part," but the phrase still doesn't feel punchy enough without the HARMONY. I guess a 14-letter revealer is too much to ask, or was too much to handle, but I think you can make a case that HARMONY belongs in the revealer. You are taking two (body) parts and bringing them into one harmonious phrase. And there you go. But instead we just have this truncated TWO-PART. Meh. What else? I have never heard the term MUSCLEHEAD in the wild. I'm sure it's a thing, but it feels forced, and possibly dated, to my ear, so I didn't love that one. But the thing that clunked worst is definitely ORGAN. The rest of the grid was plain as plain can be. Nothing exciting going on at all, in part because the grid is built without the two (or more) marquee long Down answers that early-week themed grids often have. We get banks of 7s, but those banks yield very little in the way of interesting fill. In fact, outside the theme, only SEND HELP and ICES OVER even reach to 8 letters (. Everything else is short short short, which means (largely) dull dull dull. I'd list it all (ACAI ORALB AGAME etc) but why, you can see it, it's right there. 

I like AHH under BTS, but only if you reimagine AHH as not a sigh but a scream, as in "AHH! Not BTS again! Make it stop!" (I'm sure they're lovely, but wow are they in the grid a lot). There were not many places to get stuck in this one. If you didn't know the names of the BTS guys, then it's also possible you didn't know the name of the Alicia Keys album AS I AM—I certainly forgot it (38A: 2007 quadruple-platinum Alicia Keys album) (she also has a song called "NO ONE," which I also know from crosswords). I thought the PARER (57A: Kitchen cutter) was a DICER and so had ISSAC someone as the [Player of one of the Barbies in "Barbie"] at first (ISSA RAE). Wondered briefly if there was a cross-dressing Barbie in that movie that I'd missed (obviously failing to notice that ISSAC is not spelled that way). Thought the [Betting setting] was a RACE well before I could see it was RENO (stupid deceptive "R"). And I wobbled a little (aptly) while struggling to find my SEA LEGS (11D: Good standing for a sailor?). Blame the "?" clue. There's nothing else of note in the grid, difficulty-wise or interest-wise, that I can see, but let's do a few Additional Notes anyway.

Additional notes:

• 2D: Title setting for a Christie mystery (THE NILE)— was flipping around Hulu just last night and saw the recent Branagh version of Death on THE NILE there. Thought about adding it to "My Stuff" (I love all, yes all, filmed Christie, with the Ustinov-as-Poirot, Maggie Smith-starring Evil Under the Sun being my childhood favorite). Then remembered I had already seen it and let it drift by. Only to have it drift straight into my next morning's grid. Weird. 

• 30D: Sound from a litter box (MEW)— there are lots of places you could've put your MEWing cat. Also, my cats don't generally MEW in the litter box. I can only imagine that the editor / clue writer wanted to echo the "litter" in 25D: Some littermates (PUPPIES). Me, I'd like to spend as little time with the litter box as possible. Kitties MEW for all kinds of nice reasons. Use one of those. 
• 39D: ___ generis (SUI) — as you get older, do you find yourself using phrases that you would never have used as a younger person, even if you (mostly) understood them? Like, under-50 me would never have used the phrase SUI generis, except maybe in a college paper where I was trying to sound smarter than I really am. But lately, it keeps popping into my mouth. I used it once while talking to my wife recently and she just looked at me like "who are you?" (btw it means "constituting a class alone; unique; peculiar" (m-w))
• 53A: Film producer Ponti (CARLO) — such a familiar name, which is strange, as it's rare for a person to become household-name famous for movie production alone. But Ponti's career is legendary, from Fellini (La Strada) to Varda (Cleo from 5 to 7) to Lean (Dr. Zhivago) and on and on. Oh, and he was married to Sophia Loren for five years in the late 50s / early 60s. That probably didn't hurt his fame. Sidenote: CARLO hasn't been clued via Ponti since '04 ([Monte ___] is the more popular option), and PONTI last made the grid nine years ago, Feb. 2016 ([Carlo in the film business]).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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