mmm

@Sarah It was a hard puzzle to be sure. (Took me much longer than usual to complete!) But my view is that the "not-quite-right" clues are deliberately meant to misdirect, requiring one to reread them and rethink what they could mean. The ambiguities of language come to the fore, which I find to be a good thing.

@BamBam Good points, though you will hear the phrase "an Armani suit" quite frequently in casual conversation, so ....

@Mike Sure! Don't you know the children's round song, "Oar, oar, oar you're boat"?

@RozzieGrandma "Whoa" makes sense to me because it follows the conventional spelling of many other words ... e.g., WHAT WHERE WHEN WHY etc. If I have ever seen "woah" anywhere but in this puzzle, I cannot recall it. I'd be curious to know what NYT editors would do with the word if they saw it in an article.

@Steve L Thank you. I sit corrected!

@jf Agreed. And how about "AAAs"?!

@Barry Ancona Quite so! And after all, Jonathan, it's a Saturday puzzle! Admittedly this one took me the longest time I can remember. (And I had to use Google for some fact-retrieval -- which I try to avoid doing as much as possible. In this case, I rationalize, getting unstuck outranks blank-stare frustration.)

@mmm Sorry -- not a debut at all! But really good!

@Rob D Yes, clever in a way. But in another way (seen from another angle), a desperation entry that would very rarely be uttered by anyone. Sigh. I guess I'm a curmudgeon.

@Paul Did you mean that the theme is NE--noying?

@jp inframan Huh? You think ALL the NYT puzzles are getting worse? Thursday puzzles are almost invariably enriched by some gimmick or another. That's the challenge, which many of us prize. This one was as tricky as they come, but the construction was admirable. (Or so it seemed to me.)

@Glizzy Gobbler True, it's not a movie. But it is a dark fantasy! (Fantasy being a genre of fiction.)

@Bill I'm with you on the nitpick. Older folks like me were taught that the fifth scale degree was "SOL"—not "SO." The ambiguity made the puzzle's theme harder for me to embrace 100%. I guess this is a "two-fer": I just remembered that in the song "DO-RE-MI" from "The Sound of Music," the syllable is treated as a homophone for "Sew." And now that I think about it, I see that the elision between "SOL" and "LA" (the next solfege syllable) makes its pronunciation work both ways! Oh well, summon Roseanne Roseannadanna: NEVER MIND!

@Jeanie K I suppose the can be seen as arcs if you think of them as parts of a circle that have been cut out. But I agree that this is forced.

@Keaton The answer plays with the common phrase (an) "emotional wreck." Hope this helps.

@Stephen, Totally agree about TCM vs. TMC. The Movie Channel has no real following, while Turner Classic Movies is an indispensable component of high-quality cable for film buffs!

@Xword Junkie I hesitate to call"Empaling" a "variant." OED tells us that that alternate spelling of the word is now obsolete. (And so it certainly seems to me.)

@Mimi Why not keep one's options open? Thursday puzzles can be fun, if you want a bit of a brain-teasing challenge. Just being aware of that going in can help a lot !

@David Pearce Please go easy on capital letters ... they're tough on the eyes so early in the morning!

@Keaton Oops! I guess it ought to be "emotional wrecks"? (Kind of a stretch, but ....)

@Keaton You're most welcome. (BTW, I'm an scholar of silent films and their music, and you have one of the immortal names of that era!)

@Mean Old Lady Could be clued as "Jane Austen's character"!

@dutchiris I am sure I have never heard nor seen that sentence! The common construction would be "The people rose up ..."

@Ken ?

@angel I don't understand the ... acronym?