Relative difficulty:Medium (no idea ... tweeted about it while I was solving, so my time was obviously through the roof; it felt normalish)
THEME: STAR-CROSSED LOVE (34A: Relationship doomed from the start ... or asomething found in this puzzle four times?) —currently or former acting couples, who also appeared in at least one movie together, appear four different times, as crossing answers:
Theme answers:
BURTON / TAYLOR
BOGART / BACALL
JOLIE / PITT
BENING / BEATTY
Word of the Day:ENSOUL(27A: Fill with a spirit) —
To sell a Kia Soul to someone (me)
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We had it all ... just like ERIC Bana (10D) and BACALL...
This seems like it will play pretty easy if you know all the Hollywood couple involved, and if not, not. They're all pretty dang famous, so I doubt there will be many who won't know them, but maybe the movies used to clue them aren't so familiar. Actually, they're pretty seminal. "Bugsy" might've gotten by some people, and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" most certainly did, but the couples involved are all iconic, so there shouldn't have been too many proper noun wipe-outs. My main problem with this theme is the revealer. STAR-CROSSED LOVERS is the needed phrase. It's what's in the puzzle, and it's The Actual Famous Phrase. The phrase from "Romeo & Juliet." Google knows this:
"Love" alone is not an option. Also, stupid me, I always thought "star-crossed" meant "fated to be together," despite knowing full well how "Romeo & Juliet" ends (spoiler alert: badly). Not sure how that happened. What else? Well, ENSOUL is flat-out ridiculous, I had no idea the dwarves had known ages (?), and OPEN FIRE next to VENGEFUL *and* ISLAM was very, very grim. Very. Grim. Speaking of grim, gonna go check in on the convention now, bye.
THEME:FULL COUNT (63A: 3-2 ... or what's represented by the answers to this puzzle's starred clues) — DESCRIPTION
Theme answers:
BALL JOINT (17A: *Car part that works in a similar manner to the human hip)
BALL IN CUP (11D: *Children's toy that tests dexterity)
CANNON BALL (29D: *Cry just before hitting the pool)
STRIKE BACK (37A: *Retaliate)
RENT STRIKE (42A: *Tenants' protest)
Word of the Day:BODACIOUS(38D: Attractive, informally) —
Some of our readers may know "bodacious" as a word that figured prominently in the lingo of the 1989 film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Others may recall the term's frequent use in the long-running "Snuffy Smith" comic strip. Neither the creators of the comic strip nor the movie can claim to have coined "bodacious," which actually first appeared in print in 1832, but both likely contributed to its popularity. The exact origin of the word is uncertain, but it was most likely influenced by "bold" and "audacious," and it may be linked to "boldacious," a term from British dialect. (M-W)
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This puzzle really needed ... something else. Something more. What we have here feels like a first idea, a rough draft version. "Hey, what can I do with FULL COUNT ... well, I could put BALL in the grid three times and STRIKE in it twice ... nah, too straightforward, too many repeating words ... what's the fun in that?" That is how the brainstorming session ought to have gone. Then maybe you'd've considered making 3 *clues* [BALL] and 2 clues [STRIKE], or various rebus options, etc., eventually alighting on the best expression of the FULL COUNT concept. This here is remedial. No one answer in the puzzle is offensive or bad. It's just blah, stem to stern. BODACIOUS is almost good, but it feels pretty dated. And the fill: inoffensive and bland. The one thing that the grid has going for it, which no one is going to notice because the puzzle has no way of indicating it very directly, is that the strikes are (like many strikes in baseball) right down the middle, whereas the balls are high and inside, high and outside, low and outside. The word PLATE might've helped here, not sure. [NOTE: just woke up to find out that you can actually *see* the outline of the strike zone in the print version ... so something *was* missing]
I was faster on this puzzle than on yesterday's. Fastest Tuesday in a long time. It's astonishing how a. familiar and b. easily clued all these answers are. Besides the themers, the only place I had any hesitation was 22D: Ruth, for one (YANKEE), because I was thinking Bible, then pity. Oh, and I somehow had either TIDDLE or TITTLE in there for a while at 32D: Amuse (TICKLE). That was weird. Everything else was read clue / write answer, bam bam, fast as I could go (pretty much). So fast that, until a friend pointed it out just now, I didn't even see 55D: Spherical locks. Let's all just be grateful for that.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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