MAN, there's tons of theme material in this one! Eight film titles are made by putting the gray-shaded (in the online version, anyway) words before the word "MAN." I've only seen half of them, and I'm not sure I've heard of "Dead Man," but the rest are all well known.
And perhaps because the "first words" are all pretty normal, the fill doesn't really suffer at all. I did not know SDS (27D: Radical '60s org.) (Students for a Democratic Society), and there are a few partials (FORI & ONA), but overall, it's pretty clean.
Once again, the long Down material is quite good. ALIENATES (35D: Estranges), ARCADIAN (40D: Peaceful, as the simple rural life), and DIMENOVELS (29D: Old pulp reading) were my favorites, but I also enjoyed DONEDEAL (3D: Fait accompli) up top. I'm not familiar with the POLOLOUNGE (8D: Noted watering hole in Beverly Hills), but that is something that will surprise few people who know me. I did, however, know the other California-related clue - 33A: Mexican city across the border from San Diego (TIJUANA). If only my brother lived in Beverly Hills instead of San Diego, this paragraph might have gone a different way…
Overall, I enjoyed this one quite a bit.
- Horace
6:23
ReplyDeleteNice time, Horace! I forgot that I was going to try using just the acrosses or downs for a potentially better time, myself. I haven't heard of two of the eight theme answers: "DEAD Man" and "DEMOLITION Man". Originally I entered AgrArIAN instead of ARCADIAN, which led to obvious problems, but the rest of the puzzle was a SNAP. I wonder how many individuals under thirty would have known 70A Windows forerunner (MSDOS) without any crosses.
4:40
ReplyDeleteI would have been faster but I entered MeRle for MARTY. Very confidently, I might add. Anyway, that slowed that section down, and I had to work my way around to it from the bottom. Pretty straightforward theme, and not badly carried out. The grid feels like it's sideways, with all the longest answers running down. Funny that you can't turn a grid sideways and still have all the words work...