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Relative difficulty: Easy
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| 35D: Princess who says "Governor Tarkin! I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board"] |
Word of the Day: WONG Kar-wai (36A: ___ Kar-wai, acclaimed Hong Kong filmmaker behind 1994's "Chungking Express") —
Wong Kar-wai BBS (born 17 July 1958) is a Hong Kong filmmaker. His films are characterised by nonlinear narratives, atmospheric music, and vivid cinematography with bold, saturated colours. An auteur of Hong Kong cinema, Wong frequently appears at international film festivals. [...] Exhausted by the time-consuming production of Ashes of Time, Wong directed Chungking Express (1994), a smaller film that he hoped would rekindle his love of cinema during a two-month sabbatical while waiting for post-production equipment to arrive for Ashes of Time. The film, with its more lighthearted atmosphere, catapulted Wong to international prominence, and won Best Film and Best Director at the 1995 Hong Kong Film Awards. Wong followed up with the crime thriller Fallen Angels (1995), which has since become a cult classic of the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema and is considered especially representative of Wong's style. Wong consolidated his reputation with the 1997 drama Happy Together, for which he won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. // The 2000 drama In the Mood for Love, revered for its lush visuals and subtle storytelling, concretely established Wong's trademark filmmaking style. Among his other works are 2046 (2004), a romantic drama and science fiction film, and The Grandmaster (2013), a biopic of Ip Man, both of which received awards and nominations worldwide. [...] In 2000, Empire ranked [In the Mood for Love] number 42 in its list titled "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema". It was ranked 95th on 100 Best Films from 1983 to 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. In November 2009, Time Out New York ranked the film as the fifth-best of the decade, calling it the "consummate unconsummated love story of the new millennium". // In the 2022 decennial critics' poll conducted by Sight and Sound, In the Mood for Love appeared at number 5, making it the highest-ranked film from the 2000s and one of only two from the 2000s to be listed in the top 10 of all time, along with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Wong's film was also the highest-ranked film by a Chinese filmmaker. The film owed its placement to the votes of 42 critics (out of 846) who placed it in their own individual top 10 lists.
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| [37A: Hounds that can run up to 35 m.p.h.] |
Today's puzzle felt a little tepid. Solid, mostly, but without a lot of sizzle. A FORTIORI, oof, I got it easily enough, but that's too much real estate to give over to legal Latin on a Friday (17A: By an even stronger argument, at law). TOP PAIR, shrug, I get it, but it's not an interesting answer (41A: Two aces, say). No active complaints about most of the rest of the long stuff, but it never gave me a thrill. Except SISYPHEAN, that one I loved (58A: Extremely difficult and ultimately futile). I've had Camus's phrase "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" on my brain a lot lately, I'm not sure why. Maybe it's something to do with seeing Coyote v. Acme. Or maybe it was a video from We Rate Dogs of a lab fetching a ball from the water, dropping it on the shore, watching it roll back into the water, fetching the ball from the water, dropping it on the shore, watching it roll back into the water, fetching the ball etc. (I can't find a proper copy of the video or I'd show you) (It's here, at Facebook Reels). I also liked SIREN SONG (4D: What Odysseus' crew waxed on about?—because they put wax on (that is, "in") their ears so as not to hear the tempting tunes). And I thought the 8s dancing through the middle of the grid (SCROOGES CORONARY WHIPPETS "FRESH AIR") formed a nice set. Also thrilled to see WONG Kar-wei (though I spelled it WANG at first); kinda stunned they used Chungking Express instead of the much more famous In the Mood For Love in the clue, but always happy to see international cinema in the grid. Still waiting on VARDA and OZU, but ... some day ...
- 10A: "Super Dry" brewer (ASAHI) — if you can manage to remember just one Japanese beer, make it ASAHI. If you can manage two, throw KIRIN in there as well. Five-letter beers. Very useful.
- 52A: Drawing on another's life (PARASITIC) — took me longer than it should have because the clue seemed so innocuous and vague. I actually wanted PARASOCIAL but it wouldn't fit. "Drawing on" is accurate but doesn't really get at all the (potential) blood-sucking and disease-causing etc. The depletion, I guess, is what I was looking for. Something even slightly negative. But as I say, the clue is fair.
- 28D: Near failure, colloquially (ON THE ROPES) — was reading this as a noun, i.e. a "near-failure," so the prepositional phrase surprised me a little.
- 42D: Student of Socrates (PLATO) — maybe I didn't notice at first because they were mostly easy, but man there are a lot of names here at the bottom of the grid. Six of the last ten Down answers are names, plus ORCS, which are fictional and therefore name-ish. PLATO SATIE ERICA DALI ALY. Meanwhile, there are only a small handful of names scattered around the rest of the grid. I'm realizing now that this is not a very interesting observation. APOLOGIES (12D: "My mistake").
- 33D: One who regularly takes a best friend out? (DOG OWNER) — I understood the canine implications here pretty quickly (dog = "Man's best friend"), but OWNER, yeesh, that was not clear. I figured walking the dog would be part of the answer. Like DOG WALKER or DOG SITTER or something. But no, just the OWNER. Anticlimactic.
- 51D: ___ team (AS A) — bad fill should not get confusing clues. This thing I believe. If the OWNER part of DOG OWNER was anticlimactic, I don't know what to call discovering the answer here was AS A—disappointing? Sad? Horrifying? Probably "disappointing" will do.
- 9D: Device geared to draw rotationally symmetrical shapes (SPIROGRAPH) — is "geared" a pun? Because I believe literal "gears" are involved—at least they were on whatever childhood toy version of this device that I had...
That's all for today. See you next time.
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Enjoyed this one a lot but really struggled last night to finish because I had a typo.... which I missed when I surveyed the grid the 1st time. So I was playing around with ELCLASICO and with LEFAY to see which letter was wrong when I had just spelled ORINOCO with all "Os" (???ALIBO???). So that was dumb. Finally saw it. still only 16 minutes so agree it was easy for a Friday. Enjoyed learning about Wong Kar-wai! Looks like an interesting filmmaker. I would have though SISYPHEAN would have needed a 2nd S in there somewhere.... Agree that the central 8s are the highlight--SCROOGE is having a CORONARY while the WHIPPETS are out racing in the FRESH AIR! Thanks, Nam Jin Yoon! Great puzzle : ).
ReplyDeleteRex, if you buy Marmite here (it’s available in my regular old grocery store) it’s the same as New Zealand Vegemite. New Zealand “marmite” is something different; similar but definitely not the same (or as good IMO) as what you know as Vegemite and the UK (US, Canada,…) know as Marmite
ReplyDeleteYou had me at SISYPHEAN. Happy to learn the meaning of AFORTIORI. Quite nice.
ReplyDeleteSolid late week puzzle. Attractive grid layout that allowed access to all areas. I loved SPIROGRAPH and that opened up the entire center.
ReplyDeleteC’’MON Everybody
HELLCATS, SIREN SONG, ON THE ROPES are fantastic. Agree that it did tend towards the easy side but there was enough juice here and there.
I Will DARE
There was some obscure trivia - Rex summarizes nicely. EL CLASICO, PAK, WONG needed all the crosses to fill. I love the river trivia though - ORINOCO is straight off the Enya camp.
Watch That Man
Enjoyable Friday morning solve.
FRESH AIR
More medium for me than easy for but enjoyable. Labored for the last three minutes of my solve looking for my error in the completed grid; finally realized that the gymnast at 53D was ALY not ALI, because SISIPHEAN is spelled with a Y.
ReplyDeleteON THE ROckS rather than ROPES slowed me down. Also confidently wrote in ORoNOCO and had to hunt down that typo at the end.
ReplyDeleteHey All !
ReplyDeleteTough puz for me. Ultimately a DNF in SE, (and one letter in NW.) Couldn't get WELLTODO, even after having the WELLT__O in. The silly brain wouldn't come off the meaning of "Comfortable" as cozy, safe. Ah, Financially stable. Maybe because I'm not?
Had SISYPHEANs I and Y reversed, because of course. Also, my composer of Gymnopédies was SATrE. Wasn't he a painter, maybe?
The NW one was LEmAY/AmORTIORI, happy to change to an F, at least.
So a hard FriPuz here. Hopefully the reversing of Fri and SatPuzs continues, and tomorrows isn't quite this tough.
Hope y'all have a great Friday!
Four F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
Sartre was the existentialist French philosopher. Maybe you're thinking of him?
DeleteUnlike @Roo, we had the I and Y in the right spots for the start of 58A, confirmed by DALI and ALY (Raisman different from both Muhammad and daughter Laila).
DeleteBut we did initially spell it SISYPHiAN, thinking SATIi might be right. Had to look it up to finish with SATIE. Cruel to get the name essentially correct, only to misspell its adjective.
It’s been more than four years since we’ve seen Nam in the Times, and he’s continued where he left off without losing a step.
ReplyDeleteNam’s cleverness in clue and beauty in answer in the past -- such as [Needle exchange?] for FRIENDLY BANTER (2022) -- continually charmed me. And here it is again today. I especially liked the second word in [Device geared to draw rotationally symmetrical shapes] for SPIROGRAPH (a NYT debut, BTW).
Another NYT debut – today’s grid design – provided for an amazingly high 20 longs (answers of eight letters or more), and man, did Nam pack in the quality. CLASS ACTS, WHIPPETS, WELL TO DO, SISYPHEAN, SIREN SONG, ON THE ROPES, SPIROGRAPH, and more.
Beauty like that transforms the box into a gem.
The NW gave me the kind of fight my brain loves, and there were several splat-fills to provide “whee!”. I also liked DOG crossing DANE (as in Great).
But, to me, the beauty ruled today, and it greatly enriched my day, Nam. Welcome back, and thank you!
a class act is not a mensch
ReplyDeleteBut where a class act may include kindness or generosity, there is a mensch.
Deletewas I the only one tripped up by the spelling of LE FAY? I had LE Fee to begin with, then almost immediately switched to LE FeY, but I guess out of the corner of my eye SeNE probably just fooled me as if it was "serene". I was a bit stymied when I finished but didn't get the celebratory jingle.
ReplyDeleteI had La FAY, figuring she was female.
DeleteVery good puzzle overall, felt fresh, found it easy but not Wednesday level .
ReplyDeleteI learned about ELCLASICO the hard way. About 10 years ago I flew into Madrid and took a train to a provincial town to visit a friend. Unfortunately the train arrived early, about 5 local time, and I was left in an empty station . Looking out, the streets were deserted. I admit to getting a few horror film vibes. I did hear noises down the street and got up enough courage to investigate. I found the train station employees along with 50 other men crowded into a dive bar yelling at a TV and each other. When the first fight started, I beat it back to the station in time for my friend to pick me up!
Had to be the most internationally-clued puzzle I have ever seen. Much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteMixing up the placement of TSA and AFI, at first, it was an easy, enjoyable Friday puzzle. 🎈🎈🎊🎊
ReplyDeleteVery easy Friday. Fridays seem to see-saw between 'easier than Wednesday' and 'harder than Saturday'.
ReplyDeleteLoved SPIROGRAPH as a kid. I feel like it would not have the same appeal to an adult.
I feel like LEFAY crossing A FORTIORI falls squarely in Natick territory. Maybe I'm supposed to know all of the Latin legalese, but I don't, and I'm not a big King Arthur guy, so...yeah. AFI crossing A FORTIORI is mean but maybe fair? If you asked me "Does the American Film Institute exist?" I would say yes. If you asked me "What does AFI stand for?" I would say...aw fuck it.
ReplyDeleteTotally agree. I had LEmAY for the longest time. Obscure name, obscure Latin.
DeleteI was too tired for my brain to dredge up 'fortis' as Latin for 'strong' and I had no idea about LEFAY, so I stuck some other letter in there that seemed to make sense, and when I finished without happy music, I went to that spot and ran the alphabet (luckily I didn't have to go far to get to F!) until I got it.
DeleteAgree on LEFAY / AFORTIORI. One of the biggest Naticks ever for me.
DeleteBrief text from Ed Sheeran to tour manager regarding Macklemore: CANOPENER. MAGA stadium owner pissed.
ReplyDeleteMy stance is don't WHIPPETS or any other living creatures (a possible exception could be made for fruit flies, but they're hard to whip effectively).
The Organization of American States has gotten so messed up by you-know-who that it's hard these days to say what OASIS.
TOPPAIR could be a prize in a naked beauty contest.
Made it to Santa Fe, and very briefly enjoyed today's puzzle. Thanks, Nam Jin Yoon.
Oops, forgot to sign in, I'm the one who thinks it's MENSCHEn
ReplyDeleteI fumed a bit about being expected to know traditional football rivalries in Spain or which cricket side wears green (surprising to me, since normally all cricketers wear white), but they were crossed fairly. If I didn't know Pakistan was a cricket country it might have foiled me. And I would have guessed Nile for the river, but at 7 letters starting with O, it wasn't hard to guess. And, as several have said already, the cluing was beautiful.
ReplyDeleteExcept for the big four or five day matches, cricket has gone to colored uniforms to be able to see a white ball crossing in front of a player. The white ball also allows games to be played under lights. But only the pros tend to even have stadiums with lights. I miss the whites (very elegant, I always thought) and the red ball for amateur and school matches. But how many Americans would have known this?
DeleteLots of entertaining answers, without much in the way of cringe, perhaps A FORTIORI falls into that category, for some anyway.
ReplyDeleteHad the O (from SRO) and A (from OASIS) and confidently began typing in Femoral for the artery, while musing out loud how it's FemUr (noun), but FemOal (adjective). The muse was abruptly cut short when Femoral wouldn't fit. Took a few more crosses, and gulps of coffee, to get CORONARY.
Loved both answers from Greek myth, and the exploratory reminder here that Odysseus's crew's waxing was for the goo that sealed their ears (of which Odysseus did not partake). Easy answer regardless, but a first rate clue.
Loved the flashback Rex provided with the SPIROGRAPH ad. One of the spots called the device a "miracle". Laughable now, but kind of fun to recall a time when things of this nature were invented by human brains and not by modern technology including AI.
Don't know much, anything really, about La Liga. Thought the clue was pointing to a specific matchup of teams (similar to, say, Manchester-Chelsea from the English league). No; way too few letters. Then compounded the confusion by misreading the clue for 54D as Energizing (coincidentally having the opposite meaning) and writing in Pep instead of SAP. EL CLeSICO didn't ring true, but (fixing that) neither did Pap, which forced us to re-read the clue ("ohh... it's Enervate"...face palm).
Rex, there is definitely professional cricket in the United States. High quality professional cricket, too, which I'm sure comes as a surprise. It's known as Major League Cricket, and it features some of the world's best players, including Steven Smith and Faf du Plessis. It started in 2023.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason, in growing up with Jewish friends, I came to think of a “mensch” as a kind of well intentioned but foolish person. Now I am seeing it almost as an honorific, and thinking that perhaps my young friends were just being youthfully sarcastic. As an avid reader of Arthurian legends LEFAY was an easy get, but I made a hash out of spelling AFORTIORI , did not know AFI, and first entered spitBALL instead of NERFBALL, so had a hard time filling in the NE. DALI resolved my question as to where to put the “Y” in SISYPHEAN.
ReplyDeleteThis played hard, hard, hard for me today. I Liked it a lot, but at the risk of eliciting a few, "How could you not know that?!" responses, you could fill the grand canyon with all the stuff that I didn't know this morning. The beauty of the puzzle is that I mostly had fun working it all out and learned some very cool stuff.
ReplyDeleteGive me a Latin/Legalese bunch of letters and it's an almost certainty that I will have no idea, so AFORTIORI needed every cross. And not every cross in the NW was a gimme. But CLASSACT and RELIEFMAP were such great fill that that whole neighborhood was well worth the effort. Though I'm still not sure how I feel about CMON as fill, it doesn't make me wince.
Others that were unknowns or very far from front of brain were WONG, WHIPPETS, SISYPHEAN and SATIE. I'm very happy to know all of them now. So again, the hard work was worth every minute.
A lot to like today in addition to (most of) the NW stack. CANOPENER just plain looks nice, FRESHAIR and HELLCATS are also good fill. WELLTODO and ONTHEROPES were pleasing as well.. My favorite today was SIRENSONG. Something felt very fresh today, so that, along with the level of difficulty, really pepped me up this morning.
I had the same reaction as @Rex with PARASITIC. That's quite a word for such a tame clue, so I was going in some wrong directions there until it finally hit me.
Strange experience with DOGWALKER. The clue led me down the path of something a hitman might do: "Taking a best friend out" sounded like something a paid killer might have to do. Pretty dark, I know. That one also had me going down some strange, dark alleys. I was relived that the answer was way more friendly.
Nam, thank you for this. I sweated through it but had fun, and learned some interesting little nuggets along the way.
Mostly very smooth sailing through this one and finally finished by correctly guessing the I cross in AFI and AAFORTIORI. I think we've seen the legal phrase in a puzzle before but didn't remember it. Messed myself up by spelling it FRYE FIRST. Also considered BASSETS before WHIPPETS as I had the ETS but 1) it didn't fit and 2) it made no sense, although a speeding basset is a fun image.
ReplyDeleteAs for ELCLASICO, it's pretty famous if you follow European football, which I do. Note to OFL-there are no double S words in Spanish. If it sounds like an S, it's an S. Very sensible. I know outside of Spain it could be a Z or a C, which is why the th sound is sensible too.
I liked your Friday a lot, NJY. I know it's Not Just You who makes good stuff like this, but you're near the top. Thanks for all the fun.
Not easy for me! Had to chip away and finally was left with a few letters in NW. I got AFx but had no idea if it was American Film Association?Congress? whatever
ReplyDeleteOn the tough side for me with the East a tad tougher than the West.
ReplyDeleteWOEs that made this tougher - AFORTIORI, ASAHI, WONG, EL CLASICO, PAK, ORINOCO, and SPIROGRAPH.
Costly erasure - NERF dart before BALL because projectile.
Solid and crunchy with a soupçon of sparkle, liked it.
I literally just read Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus” with my students yesterday, so I’m incredibly embarrassed by how long that answer took me (I had misspelled ALY Raisman’s name, which I should also know better, so that threw me off in the crossing). And HELLCAT should have been a gimmie since my grandfather (Maurice “Wick” Wickendoll, who went on to name the Blue Angels after the war and died flying experimental aircraft in the early stages of what would become the space race) flew one, and yet I spent way too much thinking “Hmm…I know I’ve heard it…it’s something mean…maybe slightly sacrilegious…” All that to say, I suppose that I did not find this puzzle as easy as Rex did, but should have. It was a puzzle to shame me. Even SPIROGRAPH, which I had loved in my 80s childhood, took me a bit to recall!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed it. Definitely thought it was harder than did Rex, but it was doable. Both Star Wars and LOTR!
ReplyDeleteI cry foul on the LEFAY/AFORTIORI crossing. There's no way either of those words are inferable for people who haven't heard of either, which is most of us. I hate when I have to run the alphabet to solve.. The rest of the puzzle I found challenging but ultimately gettable. 24:40
ReplyDelete