Sunday's New York Times puzzle solved: January 28, 2018

Today's time: 22:12, not bad!

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Priscilla Clark and Jeff Chen rewrote some film scripts to give us "plot twists."  Several entries are movie titles, the last letter of which has been changed to make a new plot.  For example, "retired pool shark returns... to win French impressionist painting!" is THE COLOR OF MONET.  "Guy makes a new best friend... who turns out to be a communist!" is I LOVE YOU, MAO.  "Big monster emerges... with a new line of snack crackers!" is SWAMP THINS.  And "West Coast officers track wisecracking detective... to a bovine!" is BEVERLY HILLS COW.  The funniest one is THE BIG CHILI.

As a capper, the changed final letters, from top clue to bottom, spell out "plot twist."  What a shocker!

AVOCETS are colorful North American wading birds.

I did not know that POP is called "tonic" in Boston.  Don't they speak English over there?  Of course, the Internet, television, and monolithic corporate branding combine to snuff out these regionalisms over time.

"One side of college football's Big Game" is CAL, as in the University of California.  Apparently, the Big Game is a rivalry game played by the University of California, Berkeley's California Golden Bears and Stanford's Cardinals.  It began in 1892.  And here I thought the Big Game was Army-Navy.  No, but that rivalry started in 1890.

Old-timey card players and other cool cats call ACES, especially pocket aces, "bullets."

"Norman!  Listen! Can you hear the LOONs calling?  They're welcoming us back to On Golden Pond!"

"Force on earth" is O-NEG.  Wait, no, that's a blood type!  It's actually ONE-G, as in gravity.  One g is the acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface and is the standard unit of gravity.

I didn't really understand why "two plus two equaling five" is an example of SYNERGY.  But I guess its literal definition is the interaction of two or more agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

EVIE Sands is a singer who had some success in the 1960s and '70s.  I don't think I've ever heard of her.  One of her minor hits was "Any Way That You Want Me."

USO appears in crosswords a lot but I didn't know their motto was "Until every one comes home."  Well, that'll be never, then.

I've never heard of the cable channel ION, but their tagline is "Positively Entertaining," ha ha!  Its programming schedule seems to consist entirely of syndicated crime procedurals.

SKIL is a brand of tools, mostly saws and drills and sanders and grinders and like that.

Clever clues: "something coming off the shelf?" is BERG.  "Man, for one" is ISLE.  "Casualty of a crash?" is DATA LOSS.  "Bussing on a bus" is PDA. "Gift on a string" is a new way to prompt LEI.  "Mix and match?" is SPEED DATE.  "Org. that's found by accident?" is OSHA.  "Backtalk?" is ECHO.  "Sworn statement" is I DO.

Well, this was a fun puzzle, and that's NO LIE.  It had A FEW rough patches, but nothing to DRED.