The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Monday, February 8, 2016 — 5A

ACROSS
1 Basil sauce
6 Pops, to baby
10 Sacred
assurance
13 Sound from a lily
pad
14 88 or 98
automaker
15 Give a ticket to
16 Birds on United
States seals
18 Longing feeling
19 Old photo hue
20 Started the poker
kitty
21 Explosion noise
24 Commonly multi-
paned patio
entrances
27 Hop out of bed
29 More like a cad
30 Send a racy
phone message
to
31 Changed into
34 Apt anagram of
“aye”
37 Reptiles known
for their strong
jaws
40 Actor McKellen
41 Briefs, informally
42 50-and-over
organization
43 Somber melody
45 Red-nosed
“Sesame Street”
character
46 Bank transport
vehicles
51 Poetic nightfall
52 Quicken
offerings
53 Reebok rival
55 __ Spumante
56 Musicians found
at the ends of
16-, 24-, 37- and
46-Across
61 Costa __
62 Word for the
calorie-conscious
63 Fertile desert
spots
64 “I’m not
impressed”
65 Arrived at second
base headfirst,
perhaps
66 Little songbirds

DOWN
1 Banned chem.
pollutant
2 Pitching stat

3 South-of-the-
border sun
4 Youngsters
5 Michael of
“Caddyshack”
6 “Git along” little
critter
7 Edgar __ Poe
8 Pres. before JFK
9 Stubborn animal
10 Post-race place
for a NASCAR
winner
11 Catchall check
box
12 Dandelions, e.g.
15 Kayak kin
17 Earth Day mo.
20 Poisonous snake
21 Low operatic
voices
22 Sports venue
with tiered
seating
23 Versatile, as a
wardrobe
25 Shipping
container
26 Organic fertilizer
28 Fuel additive
brand
31 __-watching: TV
viewing spree
32 Put the kibosh on
33 Movie SFX
35 Tremble-inducing

36 Trembling tree
38 Good vibrations,
in the cat world
39 Sticky road stuff
44 Ancient Aegean
region
45 Real-estate
holding account
46 Smartphone
wake-up feature
47 Riveting icon
48 Desert plants
49 Patronized a help
desk

50 Big truck
54 Zoom up
56 Dr. Jekyll
creator’s
monogram
57 Saudi Arabian
export
58 “__ the Force,
Luke”
59 Confident
crossword
solver’s tool
60 Escaping-air
sound

By David Steinberg
©2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/08/16

02/08/16

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Monday, February 8, 2016

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

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T

he day after Rihanna’s 
ANTI dropped, I was 
annoyed with myself. I 

was so hype to listen to the record, 
downloaded it as soon as I saw it had 
been released 
and got left 
feeling empty 
after a couple 
of listens, 
because I had 
bought into the 
year-long hype 
and had started 
to believe that 
Rihanna’s 
eighth record 
really would be 
a classic.

But why would I think that? 

Rihanna has a collection of singles 
that rivals any artist ever, but she 
has never made a great album, so it 
shouldn’t be surprising that ANTI 
fell short of high expectations. Even 
with some interesting tracks and 
charismatic performances, it’s mostly 
a directionless record devoid of big 
highs or intriguing moves.

And I don’t think I was alone in 

my disappointment. It’s hard to gauge 
exactly how excited people were by 
ANTI — by traditional metrics, the 
album is a relative flop, only because 
Tidal decided to give it away for 
free to everyone — but regardless 
it doesn’t feel like it really captured 
massive enthusiasm. Lead single 
“Work” has performed solidly but 
remains far from ubiquitous, and 
nothing else on the album feels like 
it has hit potential. Given the massive 
build-up, it’s hard to truly call ANTI 
a success.

So now I’m wondering, how 

exactly did we get here? What made 
Rihanna one of the biggest stars in 
the world, and how can she keep it 
up? ANTI won’t drop Rihanna from 
the A-List, and I’m sure tons of 
people will still enjoy the album, but 
Rihanna might have to step it up next 
time if she wants to continue domi-
nating the world. Let’s take a look 
back through Rihanna’s career to see 
if we can predict her future.

Phase One: Turn the music up
Rihanna’s first two albums are 

almost entirely nonessential. You can 
literally stop both of them after track 
one and barely miss a thing. Both 
Music of the Sun and A Girl Like Me 
lead off with enormous singles and 
then drag on through filler song after 
filler song, as if Rihanna only had 
enough budget and industry clout 
to score one big hit for each record. 
(We can talk about “Unfaithful” 
as also being an important part of 
A Girl Like Me, but strip away the 
nostalgia and it’s little more than a 
cheesy young singer’s heartbreak bal-
lad that’s way too Rob Thomas to be 
good Rihanna.)

But two very strong songs is an 

OK showing for the beginning of 
a career for unknown artist from 
Barbados. “Pon de Replay” is a 
fast-paced dancehall track that 
does exactly what it’s focused on 
doing (making people dance), while 
“S.O.S.” takes a catchy “Tainted 
Love” sample and makes it prettier 
with Rihanna’s voice, her lilting hook 
sticking in your head pretty much 
forever. Sure, both of these songs 
would likely be entirely forgotten by 
now if not for the rest of Rihanna’s 
career, but they remain catchy and 
fun today and they’ll easily make the 
cut when Rihanna’s Greatest Hits 
finally comes out (no small feat.)

Phase Two: That Rihanna rain 

just won’t let up

2007’s Good Girl Gone Bad was 

the start of my personal favorite 
Rihanna phase, one she perfected 
two years later on Rated R: the “You 
should be terrified of me, because I 
will slit your throat if you even look 
at me wrong.” persona. Plenty of 
people will mark “Umbrella” as the 
turning point where Rihanna became 
more than just a generic radio pres-
ence, and that song is obviously a 
huge career highlight, but give me the 
Jay-Z-less “Disturbia,” an irresistibly 
produced track that gels perfectly 
with Rihanna’s newfound swag. 
Here, she haunts the sticky synths 
and relentless bass drum, suffocating 
the track by inserting her voice in 
every crack she can find and disori-
enting the whole dancefloor by layer-
ing hooks on top of hooks until every 
microsecond is catchy as fuck. With 
its lack of features and darker, more 
unique production, it’s the first track 
of Rihanna’s career that a lesser star 
wouldn’t have been able to pull off.

Rated R is still one of the most 

badass Rihanna albums. While it’s 
another Rihanna record mostly nota-
ble for its singles, those singles just 
keep getting better, and her run of 

hits just keeps getting more impres-
sive. “Hard” is a radio song that, 
despite its near-meaninglessness, is 
still awesome for taking Young Jeezy 
and barely smoothing over his jag-
ged edges (compare with Juicy J on 
“Dark Horse” or Kendrick on “Bad 
Blood.”) And “Rude Boy” … well, 
I love “Rude Boy” and I can barely 
explain why. It’s just a great hook 
overflowing with attitude — what 
more do you want from a Rihanna 
song?

Throughout the next few years, 

Rihanna sang hooks on festival-ready 
rap tracks like “Run This Town” and 
“All of the Lights” while also releas-
ing Loud, which for my money is 
front-to-back her best record. Loud 
is the most blatantly radio-ready 
album in Rihanna’s catalog, but it 
came at a point when she had com-
pletely perfected the art of the single. 
The big songs here are the relaxed 
“What’s My Name,” where Rihanna 
and Drake get drinks and smile at 
each other over a mid-tempo snare 
and synth beat, and “Only Girl in the 
World” — still probably the heavi-
est shout-a-long chorus of Rihanna’s 
whole career.

At this point, Rihanna is a huge 

star — someone with the guts and 
power to pull a hit out of something 
as ridiculous as “S&M” and make 
listenable otherwise awful tracks like 
“California King Bed.” But she gets 
even bigger from here.

Phase Three: One perfect song
I want to talk about the phrase 

“lightning in a bottle” for a moment. 
It’s a phrase used so much that it’s 
basically meaningless, but let’s actu-
ally imagine what I’d get if I actually 
captured the power of lightning. I’d 
have a blast of nearly unfathomable 
energy, a pure destructive force of 
nature contained within a tiny space, 
ready to level any room, any area it 
gets released in.

Basically, I’d have “We Found 

Love,” a song that transcends all 
cultures with its easily translatable 
refrain, synths that hit directly to 
your pleasure centers and a build-up 
and release that is physiologically 
impossible to resist. It is one of the 
greatest moments of the decade, 
simply two professional escapists 
(Calvin Harris and Rihanna) creating 
the most blissful release and chaotic 
fun that could possibly be made and 
packing it within a three-minute mp3, 
giving all of us all a tool that could 
bring an entire room to a frenzy.

Phase Four: ANTI
I could never understand the 

success of 2012’s Unapologetic. 
Released a year after Beyoncé’s 4, it 
was a similarly confused, toothless 
move toward adulthood, filled with 
boring ballads and terrible deci-
sions. “Diamonds” is easily one of 
Rihanna’s weakest singles, devoid of 
either fun or innovation, “Pour It Up” 
never hits a payoff and the filler feels 
like a 50-year-old ad exec’s idea of 
trap. And also, there’s a Chris Brown 
duet on here?

But somehow from that we all 

decided that ANTI was poised to be 
a classic. That’s slightly understand-
able, though, since the supposed 
previews we got were “FourFiveSec-
onds,” which blew all our minds 
because there hasn’t been more star 
power on one song since the first 
“We Are the World,” and “Bitch Bet-
ter Have My Money,” a single/video 
combination that set the record for 
least fucks ever given, ever.

But neither of those songs even 

ended up on the album. ANTI is a 
banger-free work with a focus on 
vibes and grooves over choruses, and 
that style doesn’t play to Rihanna’s 
strengths. It’s entirely possible that 
the record is a grower, or even a cult 
curiosity, but after “Work” fades 
away there won’t be anything from 
ANTI left in the national conscious-
ness.

Phase Five …
There’s a line from “Work” that 

I’ve been rolling around in my head 
the past week: “Nobody texts me in 
a crisis.” Is it too much to call that 
one line the perfect encapsulation of 
Rihanna’s entire career in the spot-
light? We’ve seen Beyoncé and Nicki 
Minaj hang out and eat hamburgers, 
we’ve seen Kanye with the Kardashi-
ans on E!, but nobody can imagine 
what it would actually be like to hang 
out with Rihanna. She’s the Kobe 
Bryant of pop music — an immense-
ly talented machine whose closest 
thing to a public persona is “winner 
with no time for human concerns.”

Of course, that’s not always a great 

place to be, and when you’re off your 
game, fans will be less forgiving if 
they don’t feel personally invested 
in what you do. While Taylor Swift 
has built an entire brand out of being 

close and open with her fans and 
Kanye has seemingly taken us along 
on every personal crisis he’s ever 
had, with Rihanna, we only really 
see her final product — polished 
hits or mediocre filler. If that hit well 
dries up, there’s little for her to fall 
back on.

Going back through Rihanna’s 

work, there’s a very obvious com-
mon thread: a few huge songs on 
every album and almost nothing else. 
Can an artist build a legacy off that? 
Do tremendous flashes of greatness 
make up for a lack of consistency? If 
the only Rihanna album I’d advise 
anyone to buy is her future Greatest 
Hits compilation, what does that say 
about her as an artist?

So I have an honest proposal 

for the future: Rihanna should stop 
releasing albums.

One of the few things I can say for 

certain about Rihanna’s personality 
is that she doesn’t give a shit about 
the expectations of others. So why 
should she tie herself to the out-of-
date traditional album cycle? We all 
saw what just happened with Beyon-
cé’s “Formation” video —everyone 
I know is talking about it, and it’s 
the only few minutes of work she’s 
put out in many months. If Rihanna 
can pull off a new singles-only strat-
egy, she can be the subject of these 
national conversations multiple times 
each year while only giving us what’s 
she always been singularly interested 
in — the best possible hit songs. With 
just a few killer tracks divorced from 
any mediocrity Rihanna can break 
the Internet every six months, have 
the song of the summer annually and 
leave us constantly wanting more.

Nobody e-mails Theisen in 

a crisis. To be the first, send a 

note to ajtheis@umich.edu. 

MUSIC COLUMN

Where ANTI fails

ADAM 
THEISEN

Coen’s ‘Hail, Caesar!’ 
peak for director duo

By MADELEINE GAUDIN

Daily Arts Writer

The Coen brothers (“Inside 

Llewyn 
Davis”) 
return 
to 

Hollywood with their latest 
film 
“Hail, 

Caesar!” 
The 

film 
follows 

studio 
fixer 

Eddie Mannix 
(Josh 
Brolin, 

“Sicario”) 
through 
a 

day in the life 
in which he 
chases 
down 

a 
kidnapped 

lead, negotiates the marriage 
of a pregnant starlet and keeps 
the cameras rolling at Capital 
Pictures (the same studio from 
the brothers’ 1991 film “Barton 
Fink”). With the humor of “The 
Big Lebowski” and the anti-
climatic aimlessness of “Inside 
Llewyn Davis,” this is Joel and 
Ethan operating at peak Coen.

No clear plot emerges until 

the studio’s mega star, Baird 
Whitlock (George Clooney, “The 
Descendants”), 
is 
kidnapped 

and held for ransom by a group 
of 
communist 
screenwriters. 

Spinning around this central 
plot are a series of overlapping, 
interwoven side stories used to 
illustrate the constant action of 
Hollywood and to cast Mannix 
as a point of sanity in the midst 
of pure chaos.

These side stories include a 

hilarious scene in which cowboy 
character actor Hobie Doyle 
(played charmingly by Alden 

Ehrenreich of “Blue Jasmine”) 
has been unfittingly cast as an 
urban socialite and is coached 
by 
his 
director, 
Laurence 

Laurenz (Ralph Fiennes, “The 
Grand 
Budapest 
Hotel”), 

through the lines “would that it 
were so simple.” It’s one of the 
funniest scenes of the movie 
and proves the staying power 
of a more developed joke over 
a slew of one-liners. Likewise, 
while trying to make sure 
his depiction of Jesus in the 
studio’s latest big budget epic 
“Hail, Caesar!” is respectful, 
Mannix sparks some hilarious 
banter between an Orthodox 
priest who is concerned about 
the realism of the chariots, 
a disinterested rabbi and a 
pastor who wants to discuss 
the metaphorical tangibility of 
Christ.

The humor is varied in “Hail, 

Caesar!” from pure goofiness 
(Tilda Swinton of “The Grand 
Budapest Hotel” plays twin rival 
tabloid journalists) to absurdist 
commentary on faith (Mannix’s 
priest tells him he confesses 
too much and sends him away). 
With an overwhelming pace and 
sometimes 
overdone 
humor, 

every moment of the film is 
an opportunity to make fun of 
a new part of the Hollywood 
machine. At the heart of much 
of that humor is, surprisingly, 
Channing Tatum (“22 Jump 
Street”). All grown up from 
the 
days 
of 
“Dear 
John,” 

Tatum shines as a tap-dancing 
communist 
who 
finishes 
a 

homoerotic dance number and 

then boards a submarine headed 
to the USSR. It’s hilariously 
absurd and proof of Tatum’s 
refined comedic abilities.

Relative 
newcomer 

Ehrenreich 
is 
absolutely 

wonderful as a singing cowboy-
turned-Hollywood-big-shot. 
He brings an out-of-place, yet 
much needed, earnestness to 
the flashy, calculated world of 
Capital Pictures. A scene in 
which he twirls his spaghetti 
like a lasso, trying to wrangle 
his date’s fingers, is one of the 
only times the film allows itself 
to be nothing more than sweet 
— a much-needed break from 
the onslaught of satire and social 
commentary.

“Hail, Caesar!” is bursting at 

the seams with talent, so much 
so that powerhouse actors like 
Jonah Hill (“True Story”) and 
Frances McDormand (“Moonrise 
Kingdom”) are given one scene 
apiece. Everything about it is 
over the top, from the characters 
to the plot to the homoerotic 
tap dance number. And while 
it’s entertaining every step of 
the way, it sometimes feels like 
the Coens are trying to cram 
too much into an hour and 
40 minutes. The film opens a 
hundred doors and can’t find 
the time to close them all.

“Hail, Caesar!” ends exactly 

where 
it 
begins, 
with 
the 

immediate crises taken care of 
and similar disasters looming 
on the horizon. The anticlimax 
manages to still be satisfying 
— a feat that few besides the 
Coens have mastered.

A-

Hail, 
Caesar! 

Rave & 
Quality 16

Universal Pictures

FILM REVIEW

