Low-priced car introduced in 1980 / SAT 4-4-26 / Fulfillment center? / Tourist hotspot in Uttar Pradesh / Fashionable stars of showbiz, slangily / Conceited sort, disrespectfully / F or G but not H / Member of a militant Islamist movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan / Famous french filmmaker who was the son of a famous painter / One side of the college football rivalry branded as "America's Game" / Figures in the films "Kazaam" and "Wishmaster"

Constructor: Royce Ferguson

Relative difficulty: Easy (if you knew most of the many names, which I did)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: JEAN RENOIR (58A: Famous french filmmaker who was the son of a famous painter) —

Jean Renoir (French: [ʁənwaʁ]; 15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French filmmaker, actor, producer and author. His La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. In 2002, he was ranked fourth on the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of the greatest directors. Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the uncle of the cinematographer Claude Renoir. With Claude, he made The River (1951), the first color film shot in India. A lifelong lover of theater, Renoir turned to the stage for The Golden Coach (1952) and French Cancan (1955). He was one of the first filmmakers to be known as an auteur; the critic Penelope Gilliatt said a Renoir shot could be identified "in a thousand miles of film."

Pauline Kael wrote that "At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity—the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share." Per The New York Times: "The style that ran through Mr. Renoir's films — a mixture of tenderness, irony and Gallic insouciance‐was caught in a famous line from his 1939 masterpiece, The Rules of the Game. It was spoken by Octave, played by the director himself: 'You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.'” (wikipedia)

• • •

A lot like yesterday's. Insufficiently interesting. SO-SO. You can't really fault any of the marquee answers, but there's not much to get excited about. I was pretty excited about JEAN RENOIR, but that might be a niche feeling. Old cinema, foreign cinema, most cinema that isn't modern franchise cinema (and even some of that) I'm always going to love to see (can't believe we got full-named JEAN RENOIR before we got simple three-letter OZU, but whatever, that's not the puzzle's fault, exactly). JEAN RENOIR This one also had GLITTERATI and OSCAR HOSTS (side-by-side!), so it was a pretty cinematic puzzle, at least where the longer answers were concerned. But there's not much else you can say about these longer answers except "yeah, ok, that's fine, I guess." I don't really know the term SPACE SHOT (14D: Rocket to the moon, e.g.). Had to infer it from MOON SHOT (a very real term). EMAIL SPAM and PAID AD and POMPOUS ASS aren't exactly enjoyable topics. Also unappealing: TALIB, what the hell, why? Why would you want to center (literally) a brutally misogynist regime?) (35A: Member of a militant Islamist movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan). "The Taliban has been condemned for restricting human rights, including women's rights to work and have an education, and for the persecution of ethnic minorities" (wikipedia). You could've gone a different way with TALIB. It would've added (yet) another name to this grid, but in this case, I think it would've been worth it.

If the longer answers were, on average, just OK, the shorter stuff was worse than usual, I think. Lots and lots of overfamiliar, super-crosswordy stuff: SUPES, ARYA, ALIA, ALTA, SRO, stuff like that. EOCENE, AGRA, that spelling of GENII (which assumes the singular "genius" (!?)). Meh. The grid was also very name-heavy. I got name-lucky, in that JEAN RENOIR and Dennis LEHANE were both gimmes for me, and I was at least familiar with all the other names in the grid (even ARYA, which I am familiar with against my will, only because crosswords have forced the issue). There's also OPRAH and CECE and GAYE and SERRA and SVEN, and there could easily have been golfer Ernie ELS as well, but the crossword wisely chose to take that answer in a "letteral" direction (29A: Fulfillment center?) (two "L"s (ELS) sit at the "center" of the word "Fulfillment" ... they're a little off-center, actually, but I think I'm gonna let that slide). 

[27A: Chart toppers]

When's the last time anyone saw a YUGO! (in real life or in the grid)? (37A: Low-priced car introduced in 1980). It's been decades since I've seen one in the wild. Looks like it's been less than four years since the last crossword appearance for YUGO. Bizarrely (but also predictably), despite having its one moment of glory in the 1980s, the YUGO didn't appear in the NYTXW until 2010 (!?). Since then it's appeared six more times. YUGO is turning out to be far more popular as a piece of crossword nostalgia than it ever was as a car. The YUGO was marketed in the U.S. between 1985 and 1992. YUGOs were actually produced through 2008, but the car was withdrawn from U.S. markets in the early '90s due to U.N. sanctions on Yugoslavia. "Despite moderate success during its run in the United States and several other export markets, it was criticized for its design, poor safety, and reliability, though the car has also picked up a cult following" (wikipedia).

Bullets:

• 49A: Sold-out inits. (SRO) — Sold Right Out!
• 1D: Lunchbox staples, for short (PBJS) — dropped PBJS in immediately but then withdrew it when I couldn't think of a type of RYE that started with "J" (!???). I honestly had SEEDED RYES in there for a bit (17A: Popular loaves for corned beef sandwiches).
• 2D: "Twist, Lick, Dunk" product (OREO) — apparently OREO is gearing up for some kind of promotional "Twist, Lick Dunk Challenge" right now, with an embossed "Twist Lick Dunk" cookie and everything. This article about the campaign is from just five days ago. The OREOverse is vast. And yes, OREOverse is a valid word. From their website:

• 11D: Waste watchdog, in short (EPA) — gotta quit pretending this government is meaningfully "watching" anything. It's laughable.
• 44D: Someone having mixed success at work? (DEE JAY) — DJs create mixes, which is what the clue is punning on: "DJs commonly use audio equipment that can play at least two sources of recorded music simultaneously. This enables them to blend tracks together to create transitions between recordings and develop unique mixes of songs" (wikipedia).
• 54D: Like some tongues (TIED) — me: "PINK!" Too much time around kitties and puppies (and humans, I guess).

• 55D: One side of the college football rivalry branded as "America's Game" (ARMY) — LOL "America's Game." I think most "Americans" care about as much about this rivalry as they do about Harvard-Yale. "America's Game"!? I remember when the Atlanta Braves used to style themselves as "America's Team" ... because their games were on TBS and so could be seen across the country (which was not true of other teams, back in the days before MLB streaming packages). "America's Game" is about as convincing as "America's Team," is what I'm saying. You can say it, but ... 

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Fusion pastry made with glutinous rice flour / FRI 4-3-26 / Brown on the outside / Hit HBO series inspired by a post-apocalyptic video game / Coy response to "Why do you ask?"

Constructor: Carolyn Davies Lynch and Brian Callahan

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: fillip (28A: Writer's fillip = SERIF) —

1

a

: a blow or gesture made by the sudden forcible straightening
of a finger curled up against the thumb

b

: a short sharp blow : buffet

2

: something tending to arouse or excite: such as

a

: stimulus

just the fillip my confidence needed

lent a fillip of danger to the sport

b

: a trivial addition : embellishment

showy fillips of language

c

: a significant and often unexpected development : wrinkle

plot twists and fillips

• • •

Pretty tepid fare, on the whole. There are only a few worthy marquee answers, and the only one I really liked was "OH, NO REASON" (17A: Coy response to "Why do you ask?"). I can see how solvers might like THE LAST OF US (37A: Hit HBO series inspired by a post-apocalyptic video game) and/or MOCHI DONUT (Fusion pastry made with glutinous rice flour), and they deserve points for originality for sure. It's just that neither one did much for me (no interest in watching the former or eating the latter—in fact, I've never even heard of the latter; I've heard of MOCHI, and I've heard of DONUT, but together, shrug, if you say so). So even if you were jazzed by those last two, that's still only three real standouts. There are some others that are solid (GREEN ENERGY, FREE ADVICE, READY SET GO), but nothing I can imagine wanting to build a grid around. TASTETESTER is just a string of 1-pt Scrabble tiles—very blah. And the NE and SW corners aren't doing much of anything. They're not bad, they're just not popping the way a Friday grid should be popping. The relative blahness of the grid may have been exacerbated by the extreme easiness. It was bizarre how little resistance the NW put up—felt like a Monday/Tuesday themeless there for a bit. If I'd been able to remember my crosswordese, i.e. if I'd been able to find the handle on the awful but never-dying ELEA (35D: Zeno of ___, Greek philosopher who rejected the existence of space, time and motion), the center might have been nearly as easy, but between my fumbling ELEA (as ELIA), and my total inability to see PAN SEAR for a long time, as well as my writing in FEAR NOT instead of the strangely quaint FRET NOT (29D: "It'll all be OK!"), things got briefly toughish about midway through the solve. But after that, it was back to extreme easiness. So there's three or four answers here that seem worth their marquee status, and then a lot of placeholders, with most of the grid clued at an early-week difficulty level. Just didn't have that Friday zing.

Oh, as for marquee answers, there's also HEARTBEATS, which is fine, if not thrilling. I enjoy drinking clues but I don't really enjoy drunkenness clues, so while GET SLOSHED probably deserves the same credit for originality that I gave to THE LAST OF US and MOCHI DONUT, above, it left me a little cold. I can see that the puzzle is basically well made, but it just wasn't entertaining to me. I liked PAN SEAR a lot, actually, and would've loved more answers like it—colorful but everyday answers with toughish, ambiguous clues (26D: Brown on the outside) (I figured "Brown" was an adjective). The only truly WTF answer for me today was ALDEN Ehrenreich. I saw Oppenheimer (not as big a fan as most of you) (#TeamBarbie), but I don't know which character this actor played. Hang on ... wow, I have seen so many movies he's been in and cannot remember him in any of them. Cocaine Bear! Weapons! Anyway, he plays a senate aide in Oppenheimer. He's 17th on the cast list on wikipedia. But he starred in Hail, Caesar!, which I saw, so ... why he is leaving zero impression on me, I have no idea. I'm sure it's a me problem. Looks like he was in the puzzle once before, in 2023, but I was either on vacation or sick because I didn't do the write-up that day. ALDEN has been in the puzzle a lot over the years, but almost always as John ALDEN ([Mayflower compact signer]). Anyway, it was like I was seeing ALDEN Ehrenreich's name for the first time today. Which I might have been ... except for, you know, all the times I saw it in the opening and closing credits of all the movies I've seen him in. My god he even did a Criterion closet video! I love those! I thought I'd seen all of them, or at least all the recentish ones. Maybe I saw his and just forgot that too!

Bullets:

• 1A: ___ Hoffman, member of the Chicago Seven (ABBIE) — this was a gimme, except ... I wrote in GABBY (possibly because of Gaby Hoffman, who I loved in last year's The Mastermind and have thought a lot about since). After I realized it wasn't GABBY, I was like, "oh, right ... ABBEY" (["incorrect" game show buzzer sound!])

• 20A: Corn whole? (EAR) — so not just a kernel but the "whole" EAR
• 21A: Hymn's finale? (SILENT "N") — a "letteral" clue, one that acts not as a definition in the traditional sense, but that points to itself, to a specific letter in one of the clue's words: today, the letter "n" at the end ("finale") of "Hymn."
• 28A: Writer's fillip (SERIF) — I got this easily, but only because I already had the "SER-" in place before I saw the clue. This is the 2b definition of "fillip (n.)" (see "Word of the Day," above): "a trivial addition" or "embellishment."
• 22D: What autopay helps avoid (LATE FEE) — read it as "autoplay" so was, naturally, baffled. Really helps to read the clues correctly.
• 37D: International fast-food chain without a location in Mexico, interestingly (TACO BELL) — is it? interesting? It's not surprising. Maybe it's supposed to be ... ironic? Since tacos are "Mexican food"? My reaction to this fact is not "hmmm, interesting," but "duh, why would Mexicans eat that when they have the real deal? Are there Panda Expresses in China?" (looks like one appeared to open in 2020, with the same logo and everything, but it was an unauthorized fraud).
• 51D: Bands together? (AM/FM) — "Together" like ... near each other on the radio itself, on the button? On the dial? OK. I guess that's OK. Not exactly a winner of a clue, but defensible, at least.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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