The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Monday, March 14, 2016 — 5A
ACROSS
1 Decorator’s asset
6 PCs made by Big
Blue
10 Casual tête-à-tête
14 Part of “Hamlet”
in which Ophelia
drowns
15 Game with cues
16 Wife of Zeus
17 Last word of “The
Star-Spangled
Banner”
18 Estimate words
19 Metrical foot, in
poetry
20 Kid’s sidewalk
business
23 Sixth sense,
briefly
24 RR stop
25 Contented sounds
26 Air traffic org.
29 Nestlé bottled
water brand
32 Director
Wertmüller
35 Young Darth’s
nickname
36 Army base
nickname
37 Amo, amas, __
38 Green energy
type
41 “The doctor __”
42 Monopoly
payments
44 Summer, in
France
45 Cancel an edit
46 Soda fountain
order
50 At least one
51 Balloon filler
52 Civil Rights
Memorial
designer Maya __
53 “Mamma __!”
56 “Applause,
applause!” ... or
what one might
do in front of the
last words of 20-,
29- and 46-
Across
60 Loads (of)
62 Saddle or sofa
63 “Wheel of
Fortune” co-host
64 Bread unit
65 Like nonfiction
66 DeGeneres of TV
talk
67 Pic, in ads
68 Skinny Olive and
family
69 Prefix with foam
DOWN
1 Place setting
setting
2 Plowing
measures
3 Post office
purchase
4 Binge-watcher’s
device
5 “That being
said ... ”
6 Apple music
player
7 Dull one
8 Israeli
intelligence
group
9 “Three-toed” leaf
eaters
10 Whiskers spot
11 Like swan dives
12 Upper limb
13 Indent key
21 Book of maps
22 Once-sacred
Egyptian snakes
27 Woman with an
online list
28 Secret __: spy
29 Singer LaBelle or
LuPone
30 Frasier’s brother
31 Pay hike
32 Immature insect
33 “Know what __?”
34 Billy’s barnyard
mate
39 Olympic
competitors
40 Adjust one’s sights
43 Czech or Serb
47 Fools with a fib
48 Blood carrier
49 Jacks in a deck
53 Masculine
54 Word before
circle or city
55 Hersey’s “A Bell
for __”
57 “Inside” dope
58 Yield from a heist
59 Stop
60 Furry TV E.T.
61 “__ many
cooks ... ”
By Ed Sessa
©2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
03/14/16
03/14/16
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
RELEASE DATE– Monday, March 14, 2016
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
xwordeditor@aol.com
Roses are red,
violets are blue,
We love the Daily
and we hope
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HELP WANTED
I
love to sing, but I’m
absolutely terrified of
anyone actually hearing
me try to sing.
One of the random things
I
really
look
forward
to
whenever
I go back
home
from Ann
Arbor for
a little bit
is
being
able
to
drive.
And it’s not the driving itself —
I’m kind of an anxious driver
— but the fact that I can queue
up on my iPod all the songs
I’ve heard and fallen in love
with since the last time I came
home. I can hear them with
a full speaker system instead
of just cheap headphones or
laptop speakers, which is cool,
but most importantly, I can
try to sing along with them for
the first time, testing my low-
pitched monotone voice over
the recordings to see if I can
deal with how it sounds.
It wasn’t long after I got my
driver’s license that I started
doing this. When I would drive
home at night, I’d put on Bob
Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”
and crank the volume up as
loud as it could go, screaming
along to the lyrics with my
scratchy,
overjoyed
voice,
making an extra turn or two
if the song was still going as I
approached my street. “Like
a Rolling Stone” isn’t a fun or
happy song, but driving around
my hometown on empty roads
illuminated
by
streetlights,
there would just be this amped-
up feeling of freedom in my
body that I could only try to
satisfy by attempting to merge
with Dylan’s music, inserting
myself into his song while
it
overwhelmed
everything
around me.
I don’t think I ever even tried
to sing at all until I was like 16.
I was in something resembling
a band that was really just three
guys in a basement playing
music and never actually doing
any gigs, and I was mainly
behind the drum kit. But we
revered punk and underground
bands from the ’70s and ’80s.
Those singers always sounded
like amateurs — a rejection
of rock star hero worship —
so I actually wasn’t much
worse than them, technically
speaking. Singers like Johnny
Rotten
of
the
Sex
Pistols
or Calvin Johnson of Beat
Happening had these imperfect
voices
that
encouraged
me
to imitate them. I’d turn the
guitar amps way up and the
microphone way down, because
I wasn’t comfortable hearing
my voice as anything more than
a kind of barely intelligible
noise mixed in with the other
instruments.
But
the
total
no-holds-barred cathartic rush
you get when you have a mic
and can make all the sounds
you want was immediately
intoxicating.
So it’s actually not very cool
to scream in public, or even in
a house when other people are
around, but there’s a weird sort
of privacy when you’re driving
by yourself. You’re surrounded
by strangers and your identity is
shrouded by rolled-up windows.
It’s like being in a dream — this
transitory zone where, as long
as you’re a good driver, nothing
you do and nothing you think
affects anyone but yourself.
It’s incredible, and now I sing
almost every single time I have
to drive solo. Occasionally I
worry about the person in front
of me seeing my performance in
their rearview, but at night or
on an empty road, it’s absolute
bliss.
I have a special place in my
heart for vocalists who really
aren’t that gifted at singing.
I already mentioned Calvin
Johnson, whose ridiculously
low and unmelodic monotone
lines up perfectly with my vocal
chords, and Johnny Rotten,
whose spitting British fury I
can do a decent impression of
under the right circumstances,
but my favorite is Craig Finn of
The Hold Steady. Their record
Separation Sunday was a huge
breakthrough for my musical
taste, and it’s still my number
one
in-the-car
CD.
Finn
screams himself hoarse over the
course of the album, ignoring
tune and melody in favor of
just yelling these hyper-literate
stories of kids in Minneapolis.
The dude doesn’t even seem
in control of his own voice, as
it cracks and takes these odd
turns throughout. He’s like
an English major at a party
trying to get your thoughts on
Nabokov, bringing his voice up
as loud as it can go just to make
himself barely heard. I’m sure
it’s ridiculous and off-putting
to some people, but I absolutely
love it. Finn’s voice is all about
passion and intensity — anyone
with a fiery belief in what he
has to say can go up to a mic and
sing, regardless of talent.
Music is really the closest
you
can
get
to
inserting
yourself into someone else’s
artistic beauty. You can’t act
unless someone casts you, and
you can’t be a basketball player
unless you make a team, but
I can try and do exactly what
Taylor Swift does whenever
I put on 1989. The illusion
doesn’t quite work, since I can
only dream of hitting most of
her notes, but if no one else
can even hear me, who cares?
Really, the ability to sing along
is just one more magical thing
about
music.
Whether
it’s
Lou Reed or Madonna or even
Young Thug if you’re feeling
super adventurous, under the
right circumstances you can
put on their songs, lose your
identity for a few minutes
and slip into someone else’s
amazing creation.
Theisen is preparing an audition
for ‘The Voice.’ To send moral
support, email ajtheis@umich.edu.
MUSIC COLUMN
Sing like no one is
listening
ADAM
THEISEN
Weird ‘Mermaid’
By DANIEL HENSEL
Daily Arts Writer
For those who watch movies as
a form of escapism, there’s perhaps
no
better
mechanism
than the Chi-
nese
block-
buster
“The
Mermaid.”
It’s a ridicu-
lous slapstick
fantasy/sci-
fi
roman-
tic
comedy,
featuring
a
mermaid (newcomer Lin Yun)
who falls in love with an environ-
mentally destructive real estate
developer (Deng Chao, “Devil and
Angel”) she’s been sent by her fel-
low merpeople to seduce and kill.
Ridiculous? Yes. Entertaining? You
betcha.
Director Stephen Chow, whose
2004 martial arts comedy “Kung
Fu Hustle” is nothing short of
a masterpiece, here attempts to
reconstruct his signature live-
action Looney Tunes style with
mild success. “Hustle” lived up to
its name, cracking unbelievably
funny jokes and visual gags seem-
ingly every second. “The Mer-
maid” is equally fast-paced and,
at a brisk 94 minutes, never slows
down from its start.
Chow has a knack for the visu-
als. From the film’s opening incon-
gruous scene, set at a clearly fake
museum for ocean life, Chow’s
camera slowly reveals the absurd.
As more and more details of the
museum are shown, the laughs
build and build toward one great
punchline at the end. This is often
how the film flows. Each scene pur-
ports to tell one major joke, and it
deliberately lets its audience in on
a small detail and widens the scope
until we’re able to get the whole
joke. It’s a tactic that works very
well, but it limits Chow. A master
of slapstick, Chow should start to
expand beyond his strengths.
Let’s start with the bad. The
effects are laughable, quite liter-
ally. In fact, it’s as easy to laugh
at the effects as the jokes. With
a budget of over $61 million, one
has to wonder where much of the
money went. And yet, to the dis-
may of visual effects engineers
everywhere, the CGI adds to the
charm. It takes real comedy skill
to sell horrible effects as a positive
attribute, but if there’s any movie
that could do it, it’s probably this
one. The jokes are pretty funny,
but often they don’t work with
each other, failing to coalesce into
one great sequence. Instead, we’re
left with fits and starts.
And yet, the jokes that do land
excel wonderfully. Whether it’s
the business executive, Liu Xuan,
trying to describe to inept police
officers what the mermaid looks
like, or our hero, Shan, spectacu-
larly failing to kill the business
executive, ludicrous comedy gold
abounds. That latter scene, set to
a rather apt track about invincibil-
ity, is a call back to the best scene
of “Kung Fu Hustle,” an irrever-
ent take on accidental injury (a
gag that Chow has developed as a
sort of trademark). And the acting,
which is over-the-top and hyper-
bolic, is just simply entertaining,
like watching a face contortion
contest.
And somehow, the film actually
has a message. A parable about the
environment, the film’s story fea-
tures merpeople taking revenge on
a capitalist entrepreneur threat-
ening their ecosystem. One truly
heart-wrenching scene, despite its
tinge of absurdity, depicts human
violence toward animals that can’t
help but serve as a warning against
whaling practices. It’s not the most
effective movie to that end — anti-
whaling advocacy is far from its
primary goal — but it’s hard to
shake the environmental baggage
from the viewing experience. And
at the end, ultimately, it’s impos-
sible to leave without a smile.
B-
The
Mermaid
State Theater
Beijing Enlight
Pictures
‘Flaked’ half-baked
By SAM ROSENBERG
Daily Arts Writer
According to the New Oxford
American Dictionary, “flake”
can be defined as “coming or
falling away from a surface in
thin pieces.”
It can also
be used in
the
phrase
“flaked out”
to
mean
“to
fall
asleep”
or
“drop
from
exhaustion.”
While Netflix’s newest dramedy,
“Flaked,” attempts to themati-
cally capture the former defini-
tion, it unfortunately makes the
mistake of embodying the latter
one.
Filled with one-dimensional
characters, clunky dialogue and
half-baked ideas, “Flaked” suf-
fers the most from one of the big-
gest fatal flaws in television: it’s
a snooze-fest. Centered around
a self-help guru named Chip
(Will Arnett, “Arrested Devel-
opment”) and his struggle to
overcome his demons, “Flaked”
searches for meaning, but comes
up empty-handed.
For a dramedy, “Flaked” is
more dour than funny. In the
opening scene of the first epi-
sode “Westminster,” we hear
Arnett’s signature gruff bari-
tone, describing his character’s
lowest point to an Alcoholics
Anonymous group. “I came to
Venice by accident,” says Chip.
“Let me reframe that — I came to
Venice because of an accident.”
While that line, coupled with
Arnett’s dry execution, sets an
engaging tone for “Flaked,” the
episode stalls the series’ devel-
opment, wandering and drifting
indefinitely.
The comically adept Arnett,
known for playing memorable,
wacky characters like Gob on
“Arrested
Development”
and
Devon Banks on “30 Rock,” has
trouble finding an edge when
playing Chip. Though Arnett’s
morose portrayal of Chip is
admirable and seems fitting in
balancing the show’s combina-
tion of comedy and drama, his
charisma and energetic pres-
ence, two of the actor’s greatest
qualities, are missing. He plays a
womanizing yet self-destructive
recovering alcoholic, an arche-
type TV has seen one too many
times. The character sounds
similar to Arnett’s other current
role as the titular anthropomor-
phic horse in “BoJack Horse-
man,” but Chip is definitely not
as nuanced as BoJack. Chip just
seems like an ordinary guy with
no
distinguishable
qualities
other than his sunglasses, five-
o’clock shadow and old-dude
malaise.
Chip’s best friend Dennis
(David Sullivan, “Primer”) is
an unlikable and insecure run-
of-the-mill douchebag — in one
scene, he’s actually wearing a
popped-up collared shirt while
riding a longboard. Dennis is
immediately smitten with an
attractive waitress named Lon-
don (Ruth Kearney, “The Follow-
ing”), but London falls for Chip
instead, causing a rift between
the two friends. While Dennis’s
jealousy of Chip is understand-
able, his mean-spirited attitude
makes it hard to sympathize with
him. Regardless, neither actor
can muster up any form of chem-
istry with Kearney, so there’s no
real winner in this fight.
“Flaked” feels like it’s try-
ing to focus on something, per-
haps Chip’s existential crisis,
but fails to delve deeper into the
many layers of that concept. The
series’ official tagline, “One step
forward. Twelve steps back,”
references the 12-step program
of sobriety, yet the only direct
mention of Chip’s alcoholism
so far is in the show’s opening
monologue. There’s a (some-
what forced) love triangle that
develops between Chip, Dennis
and London, but there’s nothing
intriguing nor tantalizing about
it. Read the rest of the review at
michigandaily.com.
C-
Flaked
Series Premiere
Netflix
TV REVIEW
FILM REVIEW