ACROSS
1 Audio problem
4 Finish paying a
bill, perhaps
10 Controlled
14 Radio host
Glass
15 Ethically
indifferent
16 Adidas rival
17 *Motown
Records founder
19 Baptismal basin
20 Spanish royalty
21 Oceanic reflux
23 Jessica of “Dark
Angel”
24 *Cubs
broadcaster
known for singing
along with “Take
Me Out to the
Ball Game”
during the
seventh-inning
stretch
27 Mental grasp
29 McCain or
McCaskill: Abbr.
30 Tummy muscles
32 Circular gasket
34 Time at the inn
38 Shad eggs
39 Biblical trio ... and
a homophonic
hint to the
answers to
starred clues
42 Have a
mortgage, e.g.
43 Send to the
canvas
45 Graceful
swimmers
46 Pull down
47 Dorm monitors,
briefly
50 Windpipe, e.g.
52 *“That’ll Be the
Day” singer
56 Grand Forks
locale: Abbr.
59 “It’s finally clear
to me”
60 Accustom
61 Sushi option
62 *Longtime “60
Minutes” closer
66 Follow, or
follower
67 Listen to, as a
podcast
68 Bearded beast
69 Suburban street
liners
70 Physical jerks
71 Blather

DOWN
1 Heavenly scales
2 Spinning
3 *“The [52-Across]
Story” Oscar
nominee
4 Big name in
chips
5 Texter’s
“Unbelievable!”
6 Icky stuff
7 Rink legend
Bobby
8 Sound system
control
9 Spacecraft data-
collection passes
10 Lounging robes
11 To have, in Le
Havre
12 Lavin or Blair
13 Swabby’s chum
18 Gather
22 Abbr. in ancient
dates
24 Mata __
25 Words before
and after “is still”
in “As Time Goes
By”
26 Time extension?
28 Garage service
30 Storied vessel
31 Flapper’s wrap
33 Google Apps
component

35 *“Football Night
in America”
analyst
36 Knock the socks
off
37 Still
40 Professor ‘iggins
41 Sydney is its
cap.
44 Tough times
48 Writer Rand
49 Young pigs
51 Latin word on a
cornerstone

52 Please, in
Potsdam
53 Same as always
54 Jeans material
55 Come clean
57 Place for
matches
58 Light a fire 
under
60 Charged atoms
63 Genes material
64 “I’m listening”
65 Grand Canyon
viewing spot

By Peter A. Collins
©2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/11/15

02/11/15

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

xwordeditor@aol.com

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6A — Wednesday, February 11, 2015
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

JIVE

“Oops, she wore that hat.”
What Britney taught 
me about being a fan

By GIBSON JOHNS

Daily Arts Writer

It’s the spring of 1999, and 

I’m at a party to celebrate our 
family friend’s daughter’s Con-
firmation. There’s an ornate 
buffet and open bar situated 
around the family’s beautifully 
tented backyard, and there are 
a lot of people dressed in white. 
That’s essentially all I remem-
ber about this party — after 
all, I’m six and probably bored 
mad. There’s just one excep-
tion, one moment that would 
open up my eyes and ears to a 
fascination, an obsession, an 
addiction. Just as I follow my 
family out of the party to head 
home, I hear those three piano 
chords 
that 
would 
launch 

an instantly iconic career of 
extreme peaks and valleys, of 
red leather jumpsuits and pink 
wigs, of awards shows and 
rehab, of someone who was not 
a girl but not yet a woman.

The high-pitched, delighted 

scream that follows forces me to 
turn around, intrigued, to look 
at the dancefloor. The 13-year-
old belle of the ball has her 

hands up surrounded by all of 
her BFFs, and they’re dancing 
and singing their hearts out.

Oh baby, baby / How was I 

supposed to know?

This is the first time I heard 

Britney Spears’s “... Baby One 
More Time,” and, as I leave the 
party before the song’s end, 
I’m instantly hooked. With her 
pleading, innocently distinct 
voice, and her weird way of pro-
nouncing the word “baby,” Brit-
ney instantly has my heart.

You think you know, but you 

have no idea.

In the years that followed, I 

exhibited an infatuation with 
Britney Spears that proved to 
be unrivaled by my feelings 
for anything else in my life. I 
listened to ... Baby One More 
Time — my first ever CD — every 
single day on my Walkman, and 
danced to it alone in my room. 
I had my mom buy me a new 
copy when my original one got 
too scratched, and watched the 
music videos built into the disc 
(remember “enhanced CDs”?) 
on my family’s bulky desktop 
PC.

My room was covered in 

foldable posters of a midriff-
bearing Britney from J-14 mag-
azines. I watched “TRL” every 
day after elementary school, 
hoping that Carson Daly would 
announce Britney’s latest video 
in that day’s top spot. “Making 
The Video” specials and “MTV 
Diary” were must-watch tele-
vision events. On the day her 
second album, Oops! I Did It 
Again, came out, I left a note 
in the morning before school 
for my babysitter, urging her 
to pick me up a copy before she 
came to get me from school. My 
brother and I dragged that same 
babysitter (I’m sorry, Cheryl!) 
to a matinee showing of “Cross-
roads” the day it was released. 
(I immediately dubbed it a cin-
ematic masterpiece upon leav-
ing the theater, and I still view 
it as such.) When Britney and 
*NSYNC teamed up to release 
a joint CD and VHS exclusively 
through McDonald’s, I made 
my dad drive 45 minutes across 
Long Island to the nearest loca-
tion so I could have copies of 
both. I was crazy.

Over the years, I’ve calmed 

down — with age, with an 
expansion of my horizons, with 
the trauma of Britney’s melt-
down — but there’s a part of 
me that holds onto those years 
of insatiable devotion to The 
Holy Spear-it. There’s a certain 
naiveté that comes with being 
such a diehard fan — of an art-
ist, of a sports team, of a book 
series — that prevents it from 
turning toxic or problematic. 
I’d argue that it’s actually quite 
beneficial to follow something 
so closely. My love for Britney 
taught me to channel my emo-

tions, showed me what it means 
for an artist to grow and evolve, 
allowed me to understand the 
perils of celebrity and planted 
the seed for one of my greatest 
interests: pop music.

It’s unfortunate that the 

same can’t really be said these 
days, when kids get Twitter 
accounts at age eight so they 
can join their fellow Beliebers 
in sending anonymous death 
threats to anyone who dis-
agrees with their dubious idol. 
Though I’m sure those types of 
extremes existed in the days of 
peak Britney, they weren’t near-
ly as accessible or widespread. 
In those days, my biggest use 
of the internet came through 
online games and listening to 
Britney’s ode to the World Wide 
Web, “E-mail My Heart.”

That doesn’t mean that my 

Britney-complex 
didn’t 
fuel 

any intense negative feelings 
towards other competing art-
ists and her fans. I lived in a 
household that was very much 
divided — as Britney was to 
me, Christina Aguilera was to 
my oldest brother — and we 
became genuinely heated in our 
arguments over who was the 
best. When Christina won the 
Best New Artist Grammy over 
Britney in 2000, I don’t think 
I could look my brother in the 
eyes for a few days. Of course, 
I secretly loved Christina, too, 
but I could never admit that. 
I told myself that I had to be 
100 percent Team Britney and 
anything else would count as 
betrayal.

Being a fan is a learning 

experience, and, as much as you 
don’t want to, you begin to rec-
ognize flaws in the person you 
idolize. In my case, I began to 
see the cracks in the perfectly 
spray-tanned, lip-syncing Miss 
American Dream since she was 
17. From the annulment of her 
shotgun wedding, to the “Cha-
otic” K-Fed era and the head 
shaving incident, it was impos-
sible not to admit that things 
had turned sour, to put it light-
ly. But instead of moving on to 
the next best thing, I held onto 
a glimmer of hope that, just 
maybe, she’d be back. And, as 
we all know, she would be.

The Britney of recent years 

has been occasionally hard 
to watch. She shows less of 
her gum-snapping, golly gee 
personality, her dancing isn’t 
nearly as electrifying as it once 
was and her most recent album, 
Britney Jean is unquestionably 
her worst ever — but she’s try-
ing. She’s happy. She has two 
adorable children. She’s per-
forming multiple times a week 
in Las Vegas to sold-out, ador-
ing crowds. As a fan, it’s hard 
to ask for more from someone 
who taught you so much and 
remains the source of so many 
fond memories.

Britney’s 
life 
and 
career 

have been like a circus – there’s 
always a lot going on, some acts 
are thrilling and some you’d 
rather forget. But what remains 
constant is that she’s always in 
the center, keeping your atten-
tion, whether you’re six or 22. 
Britney’s like the ringleader. 
She calls the shots. If I said I’ll 
always be a fan, would you hold 
it against me?

FILM REVIEW
Cotillard humbly 
drives ‘Two Days’

Dardenne brothers’ 
latest is an intimate 

proletarian story

By ANDREW MCCLURE

Daily Arts Writer

The Dardenne brothers, Bel-

gium’s filmmaking duo with a 
thematic itch for the proletarian 
struggle, 
don’t 

strive for any-
thing 
foreign 

to their oeuvre 
in “Two Days, 
One 
Night,” 

save 
that 
it 

revolves around 
a real movie star: 
Marion 
Cotil-

lard. With most of their previous 
works populated by non-actors, 
the high-profile Cotillard (“The 
Immigrant”) assignment presents 
both hope and despair. Stars will, 
as astronomy contends, illumi-
nate – but will they overextend? 
Will they consequently outshine 
their neighbors or overact to the 
point of bursting? Cotillard, eyes 
cast downward and as aestheti-
cally unremarkable as we’ll ever 
see her, doesn’t illuminate the 
screen. She does something bet-
ter — she consumes all the light, all 
the optimism in the film, making 
each smize all the more impactful. 
Poignantly so, she lends back light 
in subtle palmfuls.

In 2012 the director broth-

ers won the Grand Jury Prize at 
Cannes for their heart-wrencher, 
“The Kid with a Bike.” Not unlike 
“Two Days,” this film finds its 
center in an already complex 
character, too pitiful to be called 
a protagonist, but also further 
complicated by a periphery that 
plants the world as the antagonist. 
The difference of note here is that 
a kid, at first blush, is supposed to 
be complex and fractious – but a 
mother of two? There’s something 
quite unnerving about an adult 
behaving like a child, whether in 
gait or in tears or in a lack of con-
fidence. The Dardenne brothers, 

with Cotillard at the forefront, 
have done just that — confidently 
portraying the unconfidence we 
all dread.

Cotillard plays Sandra, a mar-

ried mother trying to make ends 
meet at her solar panel factory. 
This goes on until her cowork-
ers vote for a 1,000 euro ($1,200) 
bonus, and consequently have to 
let her go. Sandra doesn’t handle 
it well, as the film opens with her 
asleep in the middle of the day, only 
awoken by that phone call. The 
first impression captures her sob-
bing without restraint, and then, 
as per tradition, popping six tabs 
of Xanax. The antidepressants dry 
her ducts, but only until they don’t 
anymore, prompting another dose. 
Her friend, not pinched for cash or 
cowardly like Sandra, drags her to 
the factory to plead her boss for a 
revote, suggesting the initial bal-
lot was “influenced” by an unjust 
power. The boss, unhappy about 
it, agrees, giving her, two days and 
one night to flip a landslide 16-2 
rout against her into an in-favor 
majority.

An aloof Sandra awkwardly 

asks each of her coworkers for 
occupational — not vocational — 
CPR. Most of them either don’t 
know her well or have money 
issues of their own. What makes 
each of these home trips so naked, 
though, is how, under it all, all par-
ties involved don’t just want the 

job, they need it – giving way to 
the Dardennean ecosystem, where 
people work to live. As each epi-
sode unveils, these people, wheth-
er with Sandra or not, don’t seem 
to be living all that much anyway. 
It’s not just a money problem; it’s 
a familial problem. It’s a whatev-
er-stems-from-money 
problem, 

which is everything in these Bel-
gian neighborhoods.

Some of Sandra’s trips go well, 

and some don’t. Some are belli-
cose, some emotive and some even 
fall flaccid. What’s more is San-
dra’s peripatetic-ness, the literal 
trips and her emotional careen-
ing. We are never sure if her fickle 
smile will fleet for good or make 
a hoped-for return. There’s a 
minute in the car when her lov-
ing husband (Fabrizio Rongione, 
“Lorna’s Silence”) drives with her 
in the passenger side, and the lens, 
seated in the back, pans back and 
forth between the two. Sandra 
breaks a long-overdue suppressed 
smile, her eyes meeting his as 
a French pop song plays loudly, 
transporting Sandra’s potential 
for grace and joy without any 
guaranteed permanence.

As much as all of its ingredi-

ents mix this film into oversweet, 
it’s not. Cotillard doesn’t look like 
Cotillard, nor does she possess 
her usual onscreen aplomb. I’m 
confident that’s precisely what the 
Dardennes wanted.

A -

‘Two Days, 
One Night’

Michigan 
Theater

Sundance Selects

SUNDANCE SELECTS

“But why are these ice creams so small?”

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

She’s always 
in the center, 
whether you’re 

six or 22.

