The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, January 6, 2016 — 5A

ACROSS
1 Big initials in
tobacco
4 Devices with
scroll wheels
8 Many an old-
movie criminal
mastermind
14 Perrier, par
exemple
15 Sick as __
16 Jittery
17 Visitor’s first
attempt
19 Emphatic type
20 Training group
21 Like milligrams
and kilograms
23 Baseball family
name
24 Actress
Thompson of
“Family”
25 “My bad!”
29 Queen-to-be,
maybe
30 Visitor’s second
attempt
33 Hum a lullaby for
35 Common starting
time
36 Justice Dept.
division
37 Sean’s mom
39 Unlikely
Monopoly
outcomes
41 Student carrier
44 Peeled-off item
46 “Big crunch”
pickle brand
50 Visitor’s third
attempt
53 Asti export
54 Kids’ __:
restaurant
offering
55 “The Dukes of
Hazzard” deputy
56 Indigo source
57 Ottoman shelter
60 Playing marble
61 Nixes
64 Visitor’s last
words
66 How megastores
buy goods
67 Boo-boo
68 Snitch
69 Assumes to be
true
70 Ring units: Abbr.
71 Porter kin

DOWN
1 Baggage
handlers
2 Game with cestas
and pelotas
3 Seedy
4 Good way to
have it?
5 Knot-tying words
6 One with a racket
7 Stirred up
8 Conservationist
John
9 Against
10 Church official
11 Start to practice?
12 “__ live and
breathe!”
13 B’way setting
18 Seedy
22 Unspoken
24 Chicago suburb
26 Stomach-punch
response
27 Banned chem.
contaminant
28 Snow glider
31 Sushi chef’s array
32 Ship’s spine
34 Unable to choose
38 “Rings __
Fingers”: 1942
Fonda/Tierney
film
40 Wild and fierce

41 Emeril
exclamation
42 Le Mans article
43 Peek, for peep:
Abbr.
45 Toast, so to
speak
47 Ol’ Blue Eyes
48 Monogram
component
49 “Gigi” author
51 “Right away,
madame!”

52 Four Tops’
record label
58 Get all mushy
59 Invites
60 Long stretches
61 Bigwig
62 Brian of Roxy
Music
63 Airer of some
MLB 
postseason
games
65 Clear (of)

By Matt Skoczen
©2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
01/06/16

01/06/16

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

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Masterful ‘Eight’

FILM REVIEW

By JACOB RICH

Senior Arts Editor

Somewhere, Quentin Taran-

tino is sipping a glass of wine, 
refreshing 
Rotten 
Tomatoes 

and laughing as 
he watches the 
critics squirm.

You 
can’t 

apply 
a 
one-

sentence thesis 
to a Tarantino 
film. You just 
can’t. But with 
the consistency 
of the chang-
ing of the sea-
sons, 
people 

are 
going 
to 

try. Critics have said that “The 
Hateful Eight” is about race in 
America or the cyclical nature of 
war. It’s not. It’s also not a “bad” 
or “evil” film. I’ve even seen a 
popular, intelligent critic pon-
tificate on Tarantino’s “moral 
compass.” To me, that’s awful, 
and making a broad statement 
on what a Tarantino film is 
about is maybe even worse. Say-
ing that people are missing the 
point is terribly elitist, I know, 
but I can’t think of a better way 
of putting it. 

“The Hateful Eight,” Taran-

tino’s funniest film, is the worst 

date movie of all time. Where 
“Django Unchained” was crowd 
pleasing even in its brutality, this 
is truly, gratuitously dark stuff. 
It’s marketed to the Applebee’s-
chowing, “Pulp Fiction”-loving 
crowd, but this one’s really for 
the weird kids: the trash cinema 
lovers, the art room goths, the 
Russ Meyer fans, the bitter, god-
less millennials.

Comprised entirely of won-

derful shots and even more 
wonderful performances, “The 
Hateful Eight” paints with the 
ultra-confident brush of a writ-
er/director who has known that 
he can do whatever the fuck he 
wants for his last five movies. 
When two bullets leave a giant 
smoldering crater where a man’s 
face would be, you know Taran-
tino’s crew did it precisely the 
way they meant to. Come on, 
you’ve known that since “Kill 
Bill.”

Okay, okay — I’ll try to get to 

some kind of a point. “The Hate-
ful Eight” is not like any western 
I’ve seen (besides its aesthetic, 
of course). It’s more like what 
I imagine the real life implica-
tions of the board game “Clue” 
would be like. We have expres-
sive, engaging characters with 
murder on the brain, and the 
fun is figuring out whodunit and 

why. The filmmakers employ 
Hitchcockian 
suspense 
with 

frightening ability: we’re shown 
the puzzle pieces and we shriek 
with pleasure as it all gets pieced 
together in front of us, one move 
at a time.

Wait, there’s a “Clue” movie 

already? Shit.

But even though the pieces 

are all together, the cardboard 
doesn’t form a sensible picture, 
or at least one that you would 
traditionally expect. Maybe the 
final moments of “The Hateful 
Eight” are like a puzzle picturing 
a huge, veiny penis. That might 
piss some people off, especially 
since the box the puzzle came in 
had a photo of a nice little John 
Ford vista on the front. Going 
again 
by 
Rotten 
Tomatoes, 

approximately 24 percent of you 
are going to be pissed off. Try 
not to be pissed off by the best 
film of 2015. Enjoy the masterful 
gratuity. It’s all a bit too much, 
and if you’re anything like me, 
you’re going to love every second 
of it.

Much like life itself, “The 

Hateful Eight” is a big beauti-
ful question without an answer, 
and it ends abruptly. I get that 
that’s frustrating, but, much 
like life itself, I wouldn’t want 
any of us to miss out on it. 

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

Fur is so in for Fall/Winter post-Civil War.

Comedy queens 
shine in ‘Sisters’ 
 

FILM REVIEW

Fey and Poehler 
cut loose in new 

comedy

By MADELEINE GAUDIN

Daily Arts Writer

“Superbad” is all grown 

up in “Sisters,” a party movie 
starring 
comedy’s 
female 

dynamic 
duo: 
Tina 

Fey 
(“Date 

Night”) 
and 

Amy 
Poehler 

(“Inside 
Out”). Fey and 
Poehler 
play, 

as 
the 
title 

would suggest, 
sisters who return to their 
childhood home one last time 
before their parents sell it. Of 
course, they decide to throw a 
party to celebrate the symbolic 
end of their childhood. And, 
as is party movie standard, 
it all ends in mass, drunken 
destruction including phallic 
wall art and a sinkhole that 
eats half of the backyard.

In a role reversal of “Baby 

Mama,” Poehler plays Maura, 
an uptight nurse with chipper, 
neurotic 
tendencies. 
Fey 

unconvincingly plays her foil 
as a drunk slacker who can’t 
seem to “get it together.” But, 
the movie isn’t really about 
Maura and Kate, it’s about 
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. 
Both characters, as well as 
the 
supporting 
cast, 
seem 

quite aware of the actors who 
play them. The movie is funny 
because Tina Fey and Amy 
Poehler are funny, not because 
Maura and Kate are funny.

The party movie has emerged 

as a common, if not overused, 
formulaic subgenre of comedy. 
Most of the humor comes 
from the misadventures of 

the movies’ drunkest, highest, 
and stupidest characters and 
the fact that none of them 
would be friends if they were 
sober. “Sisters” follows the 
party movie formula perfectly, 
but while it loses points on 
originality, it gains them on 
scientifically proven funniness.

The party is exactly as one 

might hope a “Saturday Night 
Live” reunion party would be. 
With a cast of full of late night 

alums, the jokes are absurd and 
plentiful. At times the movie 
feels like a 2-hour sketch, in 
which “SNL” ’s usual formula 
of non-stop one-liners begins 
to feel tiresome. “Sisters” never 
stops to take a breath, cutting 
frantically between Poehler’s 
sexual misadventures, Fey’s 
booze-fueled 
rage 
and 
a 

coked-out Bobby Moynihan 
(“Saturday Night Live”) doing 
“Scarface” 
impersonations. 

That’s why the sudden jump 
to poignancy in the last 15 
minutes feels so unnecessary 
— it’s too abrupt a stop in the 
flow of humor to feel like 
a proper ending. We should 
have just left Kate and Maura 
hugging next to a sinkhole and 
gone home.

The problem with “Sisters” 

isn’t that it’s not funny; it’s 
that it’s not clever. Headed by 
two of the smartest, quickest 
women in Hollywood with a 
script written by a longtime 
SNL writer, it is easy to be 
disappointed 
by 
the 
film’s 

reliance on pure raunchiness 
alone to carry its humor. 
Every spare second is filled 
with 
swearing 
and 
sex 

jokes — many of which seem 
surprisingly retrograde for a 
movie about women written by 
a woman. And nothing screams 
retrograde like a girl fight, so 
it’s always disappointing when 

a movie that passes the Bechdel 
test decides to pit its leading 
ladies against each other in a 
mud brawl.

What saves “Sisters” is its 

longer, more developed gags. 
A scene in which Maura’s love 
interest, played by “The Mindy 
Project” ’s Ike Barinholtz, gets 
a music box stuck up his butt 
and an ongoing joke where 
Tina Fey tries to woo a drug 
dealer played by John Cena 
(“Trainwreck”) 
ground 
the 

movie in some well-developed 
humor. It’s a nice break from 
constant 
one-liners 
and 

provides the opportunity for 
Fey and Poehler to flex their 
comedic muscles without being 
out-shouted by the supporting 
cast. 

“Sisters” is a 2-hour assault 

of irreverence. It’s not the best 
work from comedy’s girl power 
dynamic duo, but it’s funny and 
finds moments of cleverness. 
It’s the perfect movie to see if 
you need a mindless break from 
talking to relatives this holiday.

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

“I got this dress for four dollars at Forever 21!!!”

B-

Sister

Universal 
Pictures

Rave & Quality 16

A

The 
Hateful 
Eight

The Weinstein 

Company

Rave & Quality 16

It all ends in 
mass, drunken 

destruction.

“Sisters” is 
a 2-hour 
assault of 

irreverence. 

DO YOU LIKE IRREVERENCE AND 

ARTSY THINGS?

WELL IF YOU DO, 
JOIN DAILY ARTS.

Email katjacqu@umich.edu or 

ajtheis@umich.edu for an application

