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
Classifieds
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Call mgr 860‑355‑9665.
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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.