The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, November 9, 2018 — 5A

ANU SOFTWARE 
CONSULTANTS, INC. 
(Ann Arbor, MI) is recruiting: Sys­
tems analysts to perform systems 
require 
ments, integration testing, 
technical and risk analysis; Sr. Sys­
tems Analysts to pro 
vide technologi­
cal support, gather require 
ments, and 
convert to functional specifica 
tions, 
and must have experience, educa­
tion or training in at least two of the 
follow 
ing: Selenium, ClearCase, 
QTP,TCM; Software Engineers to 
design, develop and test software 
solutions AC/DC Topologies, EMI/
EMC; Project Manager 
s/Leaders to 
manage multiple projects, in 
cluding 
Medicalproduct Design, CAD Tools, 
PLM, EnoviaV6, SAS Tools, and 
provide process consulting to stream­
line project mgmt and estimation 
processes. All applicants except Sr. 
System Analyst must have experi­
ence, education or train 
ing in at least 
two of the following: Embed 
ded, C/
C++, RS232, CAN, OOAD, Unix, 
MatLab, Matchcad, Matlar, SQL, 
Life Cycle, SAP/BO/ABAP, Java, 
JavaScript, J2EE, Hibernate, VB.Net, 
ASP. net and AWS. Travel/relocation 
re 
quired as jobs will be performed 
at vari 
ous locations throughout the 
US. Fax re 
sume, position, and salary 
requirements to: ASC, Inc., Attn: HR 
Department, at (734) 661­0722.

CLEANER NEEDED 
$550/WEEKLY
Working Days: Monday and Friday
Time Schedule: 8AM ­ 2PM
Email: johnlegend876@outlook.com

HELP WANTED

By Bonnie L. Gentry and Victor Fleming
©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/09/18

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

11/09/18

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Friday, November 9, 2018

ACROSS
1 Bad cut
5 And
9 __ Ababa
14 Natural skin 
soother
15 Good earth
16 Datum in a 
forensic database
17 Impediment
19 Neighborhood 
gathering
20 Outcasts
21 Boiling point?
22 “No seats” sign
23 Score after deuce
25 Beach application
28 Billion-dollar 
pharmaceuticals
34 More than 
suspect
36 Early 
20th-century 
touring cars
37 Part of a joke
38 Lingering effect
39 Not as dotty
41 Colorado tributary
42 Massey of old 
films
44 Thoroughbred’s 
dad
45 “Git!”
46 One with a lot to 
learn, perhaps
49 Obstruction
50 Pushed the 
doorbell
51 Night school subj.
53 Scandinavian bar 
exchange
57 Corrode
61 Local anesthesia 
effect
62 Device with 
pulleys
64 Words in some 
English resort 
town names
65 Major fit
66 First name in 
homespun humor
67 Word aptly 
represented 
by four black 
squares in this 
puzzle
68 Watched carefully
69 Exchange jabs

DOWN
1 [You can’t mean 
that!]
2 Wasatch 
Mountains resort

3 __ grapes
4 Some Chrysler 
engines
5 Around-the-clock
6 Half a Daily 
Planet byline
7 __ Antonio
8 Texting 
interjection
9 Tacks on
10 “Phooey!”
11 __-cheap
12 Like some JFK 
flights
13 Lid issue
18 Verbal jab
21 Cassis apéritif
23 Penitent
24 Mirage site
25 Knitter’s coil
26 Family reunion 
attendee
27 At all
29 A pass may 
cover one
30 Brief rules?
31 City in New 
York’s Mohawk 
Valley
32 Stalin-era prison
33 Dramatic 
outpouring
35 Policy __
40 Readied, as 
leftovers

43 Puncture 
consequence
47 Court figures, for 
short
48 Ensenada 
pronoun
52 Velcro 
alternative
53 Nose-in-the-air 
sort
54 __ Ration
55 Guesstimate 
phrase

56 With, on le menu
57 Do landscaping 
work
58 Dr. Johnny 
Fever’s fictional 
station
59 Soprano Gluck
60 Sommelier’s 
concern
62 “__ you out of 
your mind?”
63 “All opposed” 
reply

Classifieds

Call: #734-418-4115
Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com

The holiday movie season 
is here, and Netflix hasn’t 
forgetten. 
The 
streaming 
service’s recent release “The 
Holiday 
Calendar” 
follows 
Abby Sutton (Kat Graham, 
“The Vampire Diaries”), an 
aspiring photographer whose 
grandfather 
(Ron 
Cephas 
Jones, “This is Us”) gives 
her an advent calendar that, 
instead of chocolate, seems 
to give clues to whatever will 
happen in Abby’s love life that 
day.
Magical 
intervention, 
indirect or direct, is typical 
of any holiday movie and 
“The Holiday Calendar” is 
no different. Abby’s calendar 
influences her decisions and 
is the source of her major 
revelations, both about her life 
and her relationships. While 
the movie relies heavily on 
the reveal of what’s behind 
each little door, “The Holiday 
Calendar” makes good use of 
upbeat Christmas music and 
montages to establish Abby’s 
newfound relationship and the 
decline of her older friendship. 
 
The movie’s two eligible 
bachelors allow “The Holiday 
Calendar” 
to 
explore 
the 
tried-and-true problems that 
come when a main character 
is ignorant to the fact that 

their best friend is in love with 
them. The first half of the 
movie is spent flitting between 
shots of Abby enjoying herself 
with 
her 
childhood 
friend 
Josh (Quincy Brown, “Street”) 
and being swept off her feet 
by the too-perfect doctor Ty 

(Ethan Peck, “The Sorcerer’s 
Apprentice”). Other than the 
inner turmoil of forcing the 
audience to choose between 
two great guys, there isn’t a lot 
to “The Holiday Calendar.” But 
this lack of depth is the reason 
why people gravitate towards 
holiday movies in a time when 
family drama is high, and 
temperatures are low.
Double the love interests, 
though, 
means 
double 
the 
drama, 
and 
when 
Abby’s 
relationship 
with 
Ty 
gets 
in the way of her friendship 
with Josh, she’s forced to 
evaluate her life. The movie 
comes to a climax when Abby 
loses her job, her best friend 
and her new relationship all 
in the span of two days. The 
predictable nature of the way 

the movie ends, with Abby 
holing up in her room and 
ending up with her best friend, 
feels like leaving the Macy’s 
gift-wrapping 
station 
with 
everything neatly tied up.
One 
of 
the 
shining 
characteristics of this movie, 
though, is the cast. Typically, 
holiday 
movies 
follow 
a 
predominantly 
white 
cast 
with the occasional person 
of color thrown in to achieve 
“diversity” 
and 
please 
a 
network representative. But 
“The 
Holiday 
Calendar,” 
instead, has a mixed-race main 
character with a focus on her 
relationship with her African-
American 
grandfather. 
Her 
best friend, and one of the key 
love interests, is also African-
American, 
along 
with 
the 
comedic relief in the form of 
a Latinx third wheel in their 
relationship. The film even 
goes so far as to include a 
Latinx mayor — talk about 
diversity and gender equality.
Though 
the 
plot, 
the 
acting 
and 
the 
cast 
were 
leagues better than any of 
the Hallmark movies, “The 
Holiday Calendar” was still 
lacking in that one, unknown 
quantity that makes a movie 
a holiday classic, like “Love 
Actually” or “Home Alone.” 
Instead, it’s the kind of movie 
watched while baking holiday 
cookies, wrapping presents or 
decorating the tree.

“The Holiday 
Calendar”

Netflix

FILM REVIEW

TV REVIEW

NETFLIX
‘The Holiday Calendar’ is 
a perfectly fine romcom

EMMA CHANG
Daily Arts Writer

The first time I heard the name 
Andrew Norman was the day I 
met him. It was the summer of 
2014, and I was spending six weeks 
in rural New England studying 
composition at a music festival by 
the name of Walden. Sometime in 
the middle of the program, those of 
us students able to find the time in 
our schedules took a field trip away 
from our quaint Dublin campus 
to the MacDowell Colony, an 
artists’ retreat located just outside 
of Peterborough, N. H. In a lovely, 
wooded 
location, 
MacDowell 
supports a range of artists — from 
writers to composers to architects 
— with a space for them to live 
in creative isolation, materially 
provided for and removed from the 
quotidian troubles that can distract 
from creative work. As part of our 
visit, the composers in residence at 
the time gave short presentations 
about their work and ideas, playing 
excerpts from pieces of theirs and 
answering questions.
Now 
Norman’s 
name 
is 
everywhere. But that summer was 
the first time I encountered either 
him or his music, and it changed 
the way that I listened, opened 
my ears to musical possibilities I 
had never considered before and 
still influence me today. A blond 
30-something from California who 
seemed practically brimming over 
with exciting ideas, that summer 
Norman was standing on the 
threshold of the classical music 
stardom he would find himself 
thrust into in the intervening years 
between then and now. As far as I 
can tell, he was first quoted in The 
New York Times a few months 
later — by now he has been profiled 
and reviewed and previewed in 
its pages more times than the 
vast majority of composers active 
today. Before all this, in 2012, his 
string trio “The Companion Guide 
to Rome” had been a finalist for 
the Pulitzer Prize in music, but 
that was nothing compared to the 
acclaim that would be directed 
towards him following the wildly 
enthusiastic 
reception 
of 
his 
large-scale, rip-roaring orchestral 
composition “Play.”
This Friday and Saturday the 
Detroit Symphony Orchestra will 
take up “Play,” performing it on 
a program which also includes 
Dvorák’s “Carnival Overture” and 
Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 
1,” played by Emanuel Ax.
When I interviewed Norman 
over the phone this week, he talked 
about some of the ideas behind 
writing “Play,” which — at around 
45 minutes — was his longest 
composition at the time of its 
writing, though by now he has been 
commissioned to write numerous 
concertos, an opera and a wide 

variety of large-scale projects.
“It’s kind of unusual because, 
most of the time, when we get a 
chance to write for orchestra it’s 
usually for a very limited amount 
of time, for a short piece,” Norman 
said. “10 minutes, you know? 
12 minutes. And this was for a 
45-minute-long thing.”

Norman 
wrote 
“Play” 
in 
2013 while he was composer-in-
residence for the Boston Modern 
Orchestra Project, an ensemble 
founded and directed by Gil Rose 
in order to champion the work of 
contemporary composers and to 
explore the connections between 
their music and modern society. 
Having a professional ensemble of 
this sort — one dedicated to playing 
new music — was immensely 
liberating for Norman, as he could 
feel free to make use of a variety 
of 
non-conventional 
playing 
techniques which would give more 
traditional players pause. For his 
part, on a more conceptual level 
Norman was interested in the new 
ways that people think in our fast-
paced, interconnected world, and 
about how he could reflect that 
through the medium of music.
“I was thinking a lot of the idea 
of rupture, and interruption, and 
how in my writing I could suggest 
that an idea has been cut short, that 
it has some future or potential that 
was not reached,” Norman said.
Often, this effect was achieved by 
Norman borrowing concepts from 
other types of media. From video 
games he appropriated the notion 
that an action can directly cause 
a response somewhere else — like 
pressing a button on a video game 
controller causes your character to 
act a certain way, Norman assigned 
specific gestures in the percussion 
section to certain musical reactions 
in the rest of the orchestra.
“I’ve also been thinking about 
systems 
of 
control, 
wherein 
instruments 
control 
other 
instruments, and instruments turn 
each other on and off,” Norman 
said. “The idea that a piece can 
be a system of rules and control, 
that the piece would be about the 
exploration of that system, almost 
like a game has rules a piece can 

have rules.”
More than just that, Norman 
lifted non-linear narrative from 
film and TV, embracing a kind of 
eclecticism of plot that gives the 
piece a freewheeling intensity, an 
edge-of-your-seat type of feeling.
“It’s a little bit like thinking of 
plotlines or narratives or stories 
that all have particular goals, 
and then chopping them up and 
arranging them, sort of collage-
like,” Norman said. “But it only 
works in my mind if no one knows 
what the goal of each story is or 
where it’s headed and where it’s all 
trying to go.”
But when it works, it really 
works. Part of what makes “Play” 
such a fascinating piece is how 
it changes character on a dime, 
flashing between disparate musical 
scenes like the flipping of light 
switches to different rooms. At one 
moment ferocious chords bombard 
you with noise, the next is a tranquil 
stillness — a second later scratching 
glissandi in the strings run up 
and down at a breathtaking rate. 
Whole stretches of the piece careen 
from idea to idea, tripping over 
themselves, spinning head over 
heels as each successive moment is 
interrupted by the next in a chaotic 
display of fireworks. But it’s this 
off-kilter enjambment of identities 
that gives “Play” its sense of self. 
It’s a work that embraces both 
this ferocious complexity and, in 
later movements, gives voice to 
concentrated, passionate emotions, 
as long, straining brass lines seem 
to reach ever higher, yearning to 
break free from the gravity of the 
orchestra beneath them during the 
climax of the piece.
But for a composer whose work 
tends to exhibit such rambunctious 
eclecticism, Norman also has a 
propensity to form years-long 
fixations on musical ideas. One of 
the most fascinating things about 
listening to “Play” is how you can 
hear the evolution of ideas from 
his previous work — traces of “The 
Companion Guide” or “Music in 
Circles” or “Try” (which Norman 
called a “beta version” of “Play”) are 
all to be found here. Unlike many 
contemporary composers, Norman 
doesn’t feel the need to reinvent his 
voice with each new piece, and is 
comfortable revising and recycling 
material in order to bring it closer 
to what he is really trying to say. 
And perhaps this is why he’s one of 
the most interesting musical voices 
heard today: It would be wrong to 
call it a clarity of vision, because 
it’s constantly being reassessed 
and reformed, but Norman has 
a rare dedication to his ideas. He 
follows his thoughts as far as they 
go, returning again and again until 
he has played them out to the end.

Andrew Norman & the 
intensity of ‘Play’

DAYTON 
HARE

DAILY CLASSICAL MUSIC COLUMN

What’s in a memory? On 
television, they’re often distorted, 
impressionistic 
constructions 
of the human brain. But in 
“Homecoming,” a superb new 
drama from Amazon Prime Video, 
it’s the present that is faint and 
incomplete, desaturated and boxed 
in a squarish aspect ratio, while the 
past is rendered wholly and lucidly, 
in crisp widescreen.
It’s one of the more inventive 
ways director Sam Esmail (“Mr. 
Robot”) translates the aural tension 
of the show’s source material — 
the popular scripted podcast from 
Gimlet Media — into the year’s most 
visually striking television. He has 
also made the very wise decision 
to keep “Homecoming” roughly 
as long as its podcast predecessor 
— at 10 briskly-paced, half-hour 
episodes, it’s practically designed to 
be consumed in one long watch.
“Homecoming” 
and 
“Mr. 
Robot” share both a director and 
similar themes, namely an interest 
in the fallibility of memory and the 
extent to which corporations have 
their claws in all of us. For months, 
social worker Heidi Bergman 
(Julia Roberts, “Pretty Woman”) 

worked for Geist, a pharmaceutical 
company turned defense contractor 
operating a top-secret civilian 
re-entry program for veterans. But 
years later, when a Department 
of 
Defense 
investigator 
(Shea 
Whigham, “Boardwalk Empire”) 
tracks Heidi down with questions 
about her former job, Heidi can’t 
quite make sense of what really 
happened in her time there.
It’s a subdued role that doesn’t 

give us much of Roberts’s signature 
show-stopping smile, but she brings 
plenty of warmth to it nonetheless. 
And her foray into TV — in line 
with the addition of Meryl Streep to 
the “Big Little Lies” cast and Amy 
Adams’s turn in “Sharp Objects” 
— confirms that we’re in an age 
where prestige TV is as attractive a 
project to Hollywood megastars as 
big-budget film. Roberts is joined 
by an excellent supporting cast — 
Stephan James (“Race”) as Walter 
Cruz, a Geist test subject (ahem, 
client) who develops a rapport 
with Heidi; Sissy Spacek (“Carrie”) 
as Heidi’s concerned mother; and 

Bobby Cannavale (“Third Watch”) 
in the ultimate Cannavalian role, 
Heidi’s sleazy, fast-talking boss 
Colin, who’s in line for a promotion 
at Geist.
The elements that the podcast 
format 
requires 
— 
simple, 
character-driven 
stories 
and 
meaningful dialogue — already 
make 
for 
excellent 
television. 
What’s left for Esmail to do is 
what he seems to do best: elevate 
and 
augment 
the 
storytelling 
with stylish details and artful 
camerawork. With “Homecoming,” 
Esmail solidifies himself as one 
of the best directors working in 
television. His style here projects 
a kind of refined paranoia, evoking 
Hitchcock in hypnotic staircase 
shots, trippy zooms and spectacular 
long takes.
It sounds like a guaranteed 
recipe 
for 
indulgence: 
big 
streaming service meets noted 
TV auteur meets star-studded 
cast. But “Homecoming” is some 
of the smarter, more disciplined 
Amazon fare of late. The half-hour 
format keeps it compact and tightly 
written, watchable from the first 
episode and never a slog. It’s easily 
a model for what streaming shows 
could (and should) be: television 
that makes the most of its creative 
freedom but keeps itself grounded.

“Homecoming”

Season 1

Amazon Prime Video

‘Homecoming’ is sublime

MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN
Daily Arts Writer

