1973 marital drama co-starring Elizabeth Taylor / MON 5-26-25 / 1999 sports drama co-starring Al Pacino / 2003 fantasy comedy co-starring Lindsay Lohan / Hot breakfast bowlful / Bone connecting the cerebrum to the spinal cord / Melodious yellow bird

Constructor: Ari Halpern

Relative difficulty: Easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: MOVIE OF THE WEEK (53A: 1970s-'80s TV staple ... or a hint to 16-, 25- and 42-Across) — movies with days of the week in their titles:

Theme answers:

• ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (16A: 1999 sports drama co-starring Al Pacino)
• ASH WEDNESDAY (25A: 1973 marital drama co-starring Elizabeth Taylor)
• FREAKY FRIDAY (42A: 2003 fantasy comedy co-starring Lindsay Lohan)

Word of the Day: ASH WEDNESDAY (25A) —

Ash Wednesday is a 1973 American drama film directed by Larry Peerce and starring Elizabeth Taylor. It was produced by Dominick Dunne. The screenplay by Jean-Claude Tramont focuses on the effect that extensive cosmetic surgery has on the life of a middle-aged married woman. // In a desperate attempt to save her faltering marriage, 55-year-old Barbara Sawyer submits to full-body plastic surgery in a Swiss clinic, then checks into an exclusive ski resort, Cortina d'Ampezzo, to await the arrival of her attorney-husband Mark. Reveling in her considerably younger and tauter appearance, she allows playboy Erich to seduce her. When Mark finally arrives, he makes an announcement that changes Barbara's initial plans forever. [...] In a critique that spoils the plot, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, "The movie's story is not really very interesting, but we're intrigued because the star is Taylor. She's 40 or 41 now, and yet she looks great. [ed: !!!!!?] There's a kind of voyeuristic sensuality in watching her look at herself in the mirror (which she spends no end of time doing)...Maybe the fundamental problem with the movie is that we can't quite believe any man would leave Elizabeth Taylor. It's a good thing we never see Henry Fonda's bimbo [ed: !!!!!?], because if we did, we wouldn't be convinced." (wikipedia)

• • •

They're more "Movies of the Day," aren't they? Where's the rest of the week? Maybe this should've been a Sunday-sized puzzle. Though as you can tell, they're already stretching the limits of movie familiarity pretty thin with ASH WEDNESDAY, what the hell is that? I did not know that movie existed until I solved this puzzle. Luckily, since I was Downs-only, it didn't matter at all that I hadn't heard of the movie, because I had heard of ASH WEDNESDAY as a concept, obviously, so inferring it was (eventually) pretty easy. My point is that this is a short and completely arbitrary set of movies, wildly divergent in terms of their general fame. So it's kind of a shrug, themewise. But as a Downs-only solve, it was pretty exciting, as I had to navigate treacherous-seeming long Downs right away, in the NW, and again in the SE (symmetry!). Side-by-side long Downs are always potentially terrible trouble spots in a Downs-only solve. You can easily blank on both, leaving you with a gaping chasm that you just have to hope you'll be able to work your way into via inferred crosses. But today, I plopped down BRAIN STEM immediately and ... it fit ... and ... it was right! Of course I plopped down ELONGATES right next to it, and that was wrong, but it was pretty easy to see which of the first four Downs was wrong when they were all laid out beside one another (BRAIN STEM, ELONGATES, EDY'S, DOG), and so I yanked ELONGATES, inferred the first two letters ("L" in BLED, "E" in REDO), and bam, there it was, the correct answer: LENGTHENS.

Super easy throughout the rest of the Downs-only solve. Got to the end and braced myself to deal with the second pair of long Downs, but I had two theme answers running through both of them before I ever looked at their clues, and that was enough: "NERD ALERT" instantly, ESCAPE KEY instantly. So this ended up one of the easier Downs-only solves I've ever done—and yet somehow not boring. Those long Downs in the NW and SE give this puzzle a little zing, a little sauce, and keep it from being somewhat of a snooze. Such is the power of Downs-only solve. Overall, I wish the theme had been tighter today, somehow, but all in all this is a decent and suitably easy Monday puzzle. 

Not sure why this puzzle wasn't just shrunk to 14 wide. The revealer's a 14, just push the grid in by one column. It's not unheard of. Instead we get this weird block of black squares in the NW/SE. Perhaps the fill just turned out better this way. It's possible the 14-wide grid was just too constraining. No matter. The puzzle's standard 15-square width is not a fault, but it is a decision. 14s are the rarest length of answer. They're just clumsy to deal with in most circumstances (in a standard-sized puzzle), but the way the situation is handled here, with the resulting black-square blocks tucked neatly into the corners, is very unobtrusive. The only answer that I had the slightest bit of trouble with, beyond that brief tussle with LENGTHENS, was FARINA ... do people really say "mmm, can't wait for my morning bowlful of FARINA?" The only reason I know the word FARINA is because that's what Cream O' Wheat is, and I used to eat that all the time as a kid. Oh, and there's Dennis FARINA, of course. Word association-wise, if you give me FARINA I'm probably gonna give you "Dennis." When it comes to [Hot breakfast bowlful]s, though, the only things I could think of were OATMEAL and PORRIDGE and GRITS, and obviously none of those fit, so I just had to wait around for some help from inferred crosses. Luckily, that wasn't too long in coming. 

[warning: profanity & violence]

Bullet points:

• 9D: Melodious yellow bird (CANARY) — before I started really paying attention to birds (during the pandemic), CANARY would probably have been the only bird that occurred to me here. I'd've thrown it down immediately and moved on. But just yesterday I saw multitudes of "melodious" yellow warblers, and looked at a gorgeous little yellow goldfinch through binoculars, so those were the first two birds that came to mind. A few beats later, I was like "oh, right, CANARY ... that is the yellow singing bird of greatest fame." I think of the CANARY as a captive bird, which is possibly why I don't think of it at all (can't imagine wanting to keep a bird in a cage).
• 26D: Bunch of dollar bills, say (WAD) — OK, sure, physically that would make a WAD, but I think of WAD also at least implying a lot of money, i.e. high value, not just physical fatness. "Dollar bills" are not what I think of as the primary components of a WAD. It's hard for me to keep those at all these days. They just go straight into tip jars. 
• 42A: 2003 fantasy comedy co-starring Lindsay Lohan (FREAKY FRIDAY) — just wanna put in a good word for the original 1976 version of this movie, starring the great Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris, both of whom were nominated for Best Actress Golden Globes for their performances. I just learned that the Lohan / Jamie Lee Curtis remake was one of three (!) remakes of this movie, and that the first remake was a 1995 made-for-TV movie starring Shelley Long (!?!?). Hey, it was directed by Melanie Mayron, of Girlfriends / thirtysomething fame! Fun facts for your Memorial Day.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]