The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Monday, December 3, 2018 — 5A

By Kurt Krauss
©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
12/03/18

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

12/03/18

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Monday, December 3, 2018

ACROSS
1 “Agreed!”
5 Rose from a 
chair
10 Free ticket
14 Sicilian resort city
15 Houston 
baseballer
16 Salon coloring
17 Passenger train’s 
suitcase carrier
19 “Otello” solo
20 Single-celled 
creature
21 “Platoon” setting, 
briefly
23 Texter’s soul 
mate
24 Former Yankee 
manager Joe
25 Turned down an 
invitation
28 Victorian, for one
29 Puerto Rico, to 
the U.S.
31 Harlem 
Renaissance 
author Zora __ 
Hurston
32 Hissing sound
33 Jets or Sharks, 
in “West Side 
Story”
35 Filled completely
36 Guy acting more 
maturely
39 Some corporate 
jets
42 Japan is in it
43 Actress Ryan
46 Prenatal test, for 
short
47 U. of Maryland 
athlete
49 Affirmative vote
50 Cross between 
a Boston terrier 
or boxer and a 
beagle
53 In one’s stomach
55 French summer
56 Pub pint filler
57 America’s has 
100 seats
58 Euros replaced 
them in Italy
60 Carriage outings
63 Tied, as a game
64 Continental 
divide?
65 Jazzman Allison
66 Cincinnati team
67 Golfer’s “pitching” 
iron
68 Art Deco icon

DOWN
1 Arguments with 
teams
2 Captivates
3 Some woolen 
sweaters
4 Bar beer
5 Story spanning 
generations
6 Mao __-tung
7 Like stocks not 
sold on an exch.
8 Sumatran ape
9 Hip-hop 
headgear
10 “Everychild.
onevoice” org.
11 Everglades 
transport
12 Nasal cold 
symptom
13 Supplied with 
personnel
18 Assist with a 
heist
22 Brainy bunch
25 Sonia of “Moon 
Over Parador”
26 Che Guevara’s 
first name
27 Campus bigwig
30 It’s often broken 
at breakfast
34 “Peer Gynt Suite” 
composer

36 Naval hoosegow
37 Sicily, to 
Sicilians
38 Scratch or dent
39 Shipping 
department 
gizmo
40 Like tearjerkers
41 Made irate
43 Fighter with a 
cape
44 Exam that 
involves reading 
letters

45 Rochester 
brewery or its 
river
48 Jury member
51 Curved macaroni 
shape
52 A trey beats it
54 Cartoon genre
57 “Auld Lang __”
59 “Star Trek” rank: 
Abbr.
61 H.S. equivalency 
exam
62 Prank

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Leave it to the Italians to 

produce some of the kitschiest 
yet, dare I say it, classiest pop 
music ever made. In my opinion, 
music in general peaked in the era 
of new wave, whose Anglophone 
faces such as Elvis Costello and 
the Talking Heads were brilliant, 
but overshadowed by an Italian 
named Franco Battiato.

Battiato’s 1981 album La Voce 

del Padrone was a return to pop 
for the artist who had been 
on an experimental streak for 
nearly a decade. Thankfully, it 
was a return to his strengths, 
including an innate genius when 
it comes to creating hooks and 
an infectious playfulness similar 
to that of the aforementioned 
Costello 
and 
Talking 
Heads 

frontman David Byrne. It departs 
from much of the popular music 
of the previous decades in Italy, 
which (although a guilty pleasure 
of mine) exhausted all the 
frontiers of crooners singing over 
overtly melodramatic orchestral 
accompaniments. La Voce del 
Padrone is not the familiar 

collection of sappy love songs, but 
one filled with a healthy dose of 
equal parts irony and whimsy.

“Bandiera Bianca” (“White 

Flag”), the album’s most popular 
track, is a dizzying mix of 
references and a healthy dose 

of cynicism. He starts off by 
referencing Bob Dylan before 
transitioning 
to 
old 
Italian 

poetry 
and 
even 
German 

philosopher Theodor Adorno. 
Battiato’s voice is nowhere near 
conventionally pleasing. It lacks 
both technical quality and the 
rough edge and expressiveness 
of most of the genre’s singers. 
Instead, it is rather wavery and 

nasal, yet it somehow works 
with its earnestness and self-
assuredness.

Battiato’s 
unconventional 

voice is a perfect accompaniment 
to the synth-heavy, but simple 
instrumentation. 
However, 

tracks like “Gli Uccelli” also 
feature 
gorgeous 
orchestral 

backings. Battiato often double 
tracks his own vocals, which 
offsets his limitations rather well.

Other standout tracks include 

“Centro di Gravità Permanente” 
and “Cuccurucucù.” The latter is 
inspired by a Mexican standard 
that has been covered by artists 
for decades including Joan Baez 
and Caetano Veloso. He uses the 
refrain, but fills his verses with 
The Beatles and The Rolling 
Stones references from “With A 
Little Help From My Friends” 
to “Ruby Tuesday.” Hell, it even 
takes from the Iliad.

La Voce Del Padrone could be 

every poptimist’s first and last 
piece of evidence to convince 
the naysayers that pop can be 
as innovative and unique as any 
form of music out there. Running 
at just over half an hour, it is an 
easy, impecably produced and 
ridiculously fun listen.

Franco Battiato is an 
overshadowed pop hero

DAILY WORLD MUSIC COLUMN

There’s nothing the newest 

iteration of “Robin Hood” — a 
film which dares to ask, “What 
if England’s most enduring folk 
hero was one Four Loko short of 
a dudebro?” — hates more than 
Robin 
Hood 
(Taron 
Egerton, 

“Billionaire Boys Club”) himself, 

or rather, the preconceived idea of 
Robin Hood you’ve been carrying 
around with you since the fox-
starring Disney film introduced 
you to the character. Everything 
about this film is geared to impress 
one idea upon you: This is not your 
father’s Robin Hood. The opening 
narration all but says that out loud 
in between groanworthy clichés 
like, “Forget everything you know.”

This is a Robin Hood who 

doesn’t go by Robin Hood until 
the very end of the movie, more a 
superhero than a common thief. It’s 
a Robin Hood who uses a bow and 
arrow like John Wick uses a pistol, 
who seduces Marian — not a maid 
in this version, but a thief played 
by Eve Hewson (“Bridge of Spies”) 
— by the end of their first scene 
together and banters with Jamie 
Foxx (“Baby Driver”) like the two 
have known each other for years 
instead of days. This Robin Hood 

is basically Batman, and that might 
have been cool if everything about 
the film didn’t speak to a complete 
uninterest in telling the story at 
hand.

From beginning to end, it’s clear 

the last thing “Robin Hood” wants 
to be is a Robin Hood movie set 
in medieval England. During an 
early Crusade sequence, in which 
arrows fly with the speed, strength 
and frequency of a bullet fired 
from an assault rifle, it’s clear it 
wants to be a war movie set in the 
contemporary Middle East. The 
Nottingham set design features the 
kind of massive industrial mines 
and inexplicable jets of fire and 
showers of sparks that recall bad 
steampunk movies. During the 
hand-to-hand scenes, it somewhat 
resembles an “Arkham” game, with 
free-flowing combat that could 
have worked if it weren’t cut to the 
point of incomprehensibility and 
shot in sludgy slow-motion that 
Zack Snyder would call “a little 
much.”

Yet for all the hoods it wears, the 

one thing “Robin Hood” never feels 
like is a Robin Hood movie. Sure, 
Taron Egerton might be playing a 
character named Robin, but it’s just 
his character from “Kingsman” 
awkwardly crowbarred into a 
12th-century story. The problem 
isn’t just that it doesn’t in any 
way resemble the legend, though 
— if the finished product was in 
any way acceptable, it may have 
offered an opportunity for growth 
in how stories about the character 
are told — it’s that, apart from the 
performances by Foxx and Ben 
Mendelson (“Ready Player One”), 
the creative decisions made were 
the wrong ones regardless of the 

title character.

On top of the unintelligible 

editing 
and 
nonsensical 
set 

design, the film is simply ugly on 
every level. The costumes are so 
noticeably awful that the best that 
can be said about them is that none 
of the armor features nipples. The 
cinematography fares no better, 
with one shot during a dialogue 
scene bafflingly focusing on the ear 
of the speaker and a late-film chase 
scene rendered with effects worthy 
of an early 2000s made-for-TV 
movie. The story might be uneven 
and the characters sketched just 
enough 
to 
become 
annoying 

— there’s a forced love triangle 
between Robin, Will Scarlet (Jamie 
Dornan, “A Private War”) and 
Marian that I simply don’t have 
the resolve to recount — but it’s 
the visuals that ultimately make 
“Robin Hood” nearly unwatchable.

Then there’s the ending, which 

tries with all the nuance of a 
toddler throwing a temper tantrum 
to set up a sequel, because if there’s 
one thing this sort of bad movie 
is always sure of, it’s that its own 
Marvel-style cinematic universe 
is one cliffhanger away. In its own 
way, that really puts into focus what 
went wrong with “Robin Hood.” 
This was never about telling a 
story that could accurately capture 
the legend of its lead. It was about 
using a recognizable public domain 
property to jumpstart a franchise 
that would be hip and cool and 
down with the kids. Based on how 
badly “King Arthur: Legend of the 
Sword” tried and failed at doing 
that same thing just last year, I can 
only wish the makers of “Robin 
Hood” a half-hearted “good luck 
with that.”

Newest nonsensical ‘Robin 
Hood’ hates Robin Hood

JEREMIAH VANDERHELM

Daily Arts Writer

LIONSGATE

FILM REVIEW

FLICKR

SAYAN GHOSH

Daily World Music Columnist

“Robin Hood”

Ann Arbor 20 + 
IMAX, Goodrich 

Quality 16

Lionsgate

Pop can be as 

innovative and 

unique as any 

form of music out 

there

MUSIC PLAYLIST

Unless you are social media 

avoidant, 
you’ve 
probably 

noticed that The 1975 have finally 
released 
their 
long 
awaited 

A Brief Inquiry into Online 
Relationships, 
another 
banal, 

inflated attempt at aesthetically 
goth indie-rock. It’s tragic, really, 
because The 1975 have written 
some 
incredible 
songs 
that 

drown in filler like “Love It If We 
Made It,” a desperate track that 
seeks to shed light on the absurd 
resilience that pulls us through 
the crushingly fast-paced world 
we live in. Frankly, it really is 
that good.

And this is how I feel about 

winter — there’s beauty to be 
found in the filler of the seemingly 
endless monotone cold. Music 
truly is often seasonal, and while 
I love getting down to “Cut 
to the Feeling” at almost any 
given moment, it’s undeniably 
best enjoyed driving with all 
the windows down on a warm 
summer evening than huddled in 
three blankets. So, I’ve compiled 
a few songs to get us all through 
what is often considered the 
bleakest season; whether you 

want to get your mind off the 
cold or embrace the gray that has 
befallen us is entirely up to you.

Once 
snow 
first 
starts 

hitting the ground, my brain 
instinctively 
craves 
the 

detachment of Seahaven’s Winter 
Forever, whose opening track 
“Goodnight” sends shivers up 
the spine in the same way a sharp 
winter breeze would. If we’re 
being honest, the entire album 
is (obviously) perfect for when 
it feels like warmth will never 
return, but total submission 
to the cold has never been my 
style. Other standouts include 
“It’s 
Over,” 
“Understanding” 

and “Honeybee” when you want 
to revel in nostalgia for some 
sunlight.

Yaeji’s 
self-titled 
debut 

EP features one of her most 
criminally 
overlooked 
tracks 

“Feel It Out,” overshadowed 
by the domineering popularity 
of “raingurl.” “Feel It Out” 
embraces empty spaces, unafraid 
to create space in its sonic 
landscape. Yaeji’s minimalism 
reigns here, her synth oscillates 
in and out, sometimes entirely 
absent 
and 
other 
times 

dominating the melody. Her 
monotone is one of detachment, 
perfect for dissociating on early 

morning walks to class or work 
when the cold is at its worst.

But winter is certainly not a 

time for eternal sadness: The 
end of the semester is in sight, 
time with family finally becomes 
a reality and we can mentally 
reset in preparation for the new 
year. Although every following 
year seems to be at least as awful 
as the last, optimism is essential 
to pull through. The new Kim 
Petras single “Feeling of Falling” 
(featuring Cheat Codes) is a 
wonderful techno-pop fusion, 
her 
sugary 
vocals 
elevating 

above the stagnant quiet of 
an overcast world covered in 
snow. Sometimes you need to 
dance some warmth into your 
bones, and few artists are better 
equipped to get you moving than 
Kim Petras.

There’s no use pretending that 

winter is easy in the Midwest. 
With overwhelming amounts 
of snow and minimal sunlight, 
positivity 
must 
be 
derived 

elsewhere. I hope this playlist 
offers some comfort to those who 
suffer the most from this time, or 
at least gives some perspective 
into battling or embracing the 
season with music.

Listen to the playlist online at 

www.michigandaily.com.

Playlist to battle the sad 
start to an early winter

DOMINIC POLSINELLI

Senior Arts Editor

