Modern H.R. initiative / SUN 10-20-24 / Futuristic microscopic machine / Hasten, old-style / 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 experienced 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.

The one other outlier was GIANT, in that it's the only pre-1979 movie in the puzzle. Well, that and GODZILLA, but GODZILLA, as a creature, is iconic, whereas GIANT ... if you didn't know the plot of that movie, you could easily think it was about a giant. It's not. It's a 1956 western/drama, famous in large part for being James Dean's last film. MONSTER is that movie about the female serial killer, right? [looks it up] Yes. I think I've actually seen only about a quarter of these movies, but that didn't matter. Even if the theme answers were the hardest part of the puzzle (hard because wacky and strange), the puzzle overall was still remarkably easy. Maybe the idea was that, with so many movie titles, the crosses needed to be very easy. And they were. I've never heard the term "Tri-Plex" before. Looks like there's one in Great Barrington, MA (wherever that is). But I can infer that it's a place that has three screens, shows three movies—hence today's hypothetical marquees. Oh, last movie observation—I had no idea Sex & The City was a movie. It is, first and foremost and most famously, a TV show. So that was weird. But it looks like, yes, there was a reasonably successful 2008 movie adaptation, so OK, it's a movie. 

The rest of the grid was largely forgettable and occasionally awkward. AZURE BLUE? (76D: Sky shade). Is AZURE BLUE here to keep BIG GIANT company? AZURE BLUE ... what else is AZURE gonna be? Is there an AZURE ORANGE I'm unaware of? Bizarre. That next to MEMOIRE (?!) crossing the awkward EMAILER crossing the ungainly and overly wordy SOLD AS IS ... that was definitely my least favorite part of the grid. I don't like BAES in the plural. I don't like OBE ever, but especially in the plural (29A: Honors for David Beckham and Leona Lewis: Abbr. = OBES). NYETS, truly terrible in the plural (104A: Overseas refusals). I do not like the idea of cluing ORCA as a "menace" (38D: Marine menace). The ORCA's just living its life, man, too bad your yacht got in its way. Or maybe the idea is that ORCAs menace ... seals? Penguins? Apex predators have to eat! "Menace," bah. Just 'cause you can alliterate ([Marine menace]) doesn't mean you should. 

The hardest part of the puzzle today was ... nowhere, really. I had some very minor trouble picking up the SPLIT (in SPLIT VOTE (16D: Cause of a hung jury)). Beyond that, I didn't have any significant hesitation until the very (and I mean very) last square of the puzzle. I sincerely stared at SPA-/ADA- for a while. Well, a few seconds, at any rate. I have never heard of the novelist ADAM Johnson, but ADAM seemed like the only viable answer (he won the Pulitzer in 2013 for his novel The Orphan Master's Son). As for SPAM ... er ... that's not a good clue (107D: Overcommunicate, say). First, I don't think of boner pill ads as a form of "communication." Second, the spammer is "communicating" just the right amount for the spammer, I presume. Yes, spam involves mass mailing / texting / whatever, but the "over" in "Overcommunicate" implies there is some good or right amount of advertising that I want to be subjected to, and I assure you there is not. 

Bullets:

• 5A: Italian sauce whose name sounds like a French stew (RAGÚ) — the French stew is "ragout"
• 71A: Suitor of Christine in "The Phantom of the Opera" (RAOUL) — no idea. Just waited for a name to appear. Phantom was a tremendously popular Broadway production and like most tremendously popular Broadway productions not named Hamilton, I never saw it.
• 85A: Modern H.R. initiative (DEI) — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It's a concept that drives racists crazy. They have appropriated it as a racial slur; it's how a certain class of losers insults Black success now. See also their obsession with being "anti-woke." Dear god these people are boring. Bitter and boring. Can't decide which is worse.
• 38D: Actor-turned-policeman Estrada (ERIK) — wait, he didn't actually become a cop IRL, did he? ... OMG he did! And here I thought he was just a fictional cop on CHiPs. 

Estrada became a reserve police officer for the Muncie, Indiana Police Department, depicted on Armed & Famous. From there, Estrada moved to Virginia, where he was an I.C.A.C. (Internet Crimes Against Children) investigator for eight years in Bedford County, Virginia. As of July 1, 2016, he was a reserve police officer in St. Anthony, Idaho. In the course of his duties, Estrada has been filmed patrolling on a police motorcycle.

• 101A: ___ Sidle, longtime role on "C.S.I." (SARA) — no idea. Less than no idea. I couldn't name any "roles" on any of the C.S.I.s or N.C.I.S.s or JAGs or whatever. Network dramas of the 21st century ... nothing. I got nothing.
• 14A: It can bust one's bracket (UPSET) — "bracket" is part of a multi-round single elimination tournament. If you have filled your "brackets" with predicted winners, as many do for the NCAA basketball tournament, then an UPSET can "bust" your bracket (unless you predicted it, then you're good!)
• 28A: Something seen framed in a Zoom background, perhaps (AWARD) — ew, who does this? I've got a framed signature of Muhammad Ali here that my dad got when he was an Army doctor in the early '70s. I've got a framed movie poster for a schlocky Mickey Rooney / Mamie Van Doren film. Seems a little self-important to make an AWARD part of your Zoom background. 

• 31A: Bandmate of Keith for 60+ years (MICK) — Keith Richards, MICK Jagger, The Rolling Stones...
• 81D: Shooting marble (TAW) — ugh, marble types. This is gonna throw some people, especially considering it abuts TALI (kinda difficult anatomy clue) (75D: Ankle bones) and crosses WIRED, which, as we've established, was not a big hit.
• 39D: Jazz singer Cleo (LAINE) — I know Cleo LAINE only from crosswords. LAINE crossing RAIMI might prove tricky for some, though RAIMI is a very successful director who has appeared in the NYTXW a lot, so this cross is probably "fair." Not great, though.
• 63A: Liturgical vestment (STOLE) — lol I had no idea. Sounds pretty fancy. My "liturgical vestment" vocabulary begins and ends with ALB (a common answer in crosswords of yore)

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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