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Free Heat. $2395/mos. keysmanagement.net SERVICES HELP WANTED FOR RENT Classifieds Call: #734-418-4115 Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com By Mark McClain ©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC 12/05/18 Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis 12/05/18 ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE: Release Date: Wednesday, December 5, 2018 ACROSS 1 Insurance submission 6 Spars on the briny 11 Spanish I verb 14 Vital body vessel 15 Choristers who are usually women 16 Young bloke 17 Get increasingly steamed 19 “Diary of a Wimpy __”: Jeff Kinney book series 20 Home of the NHL’s Blues 21 Scrape off 22 Radio hobbyists 23 Rickie Fowler’s org. 24 One way to travel 26 Provocative social media tactic 32 Old Italian bread? 34 Jai __ 35 Forearm-related 36 Wee hr. 38 Approves 39 Disciple’s query 40 “Am not!” retort 41 Spa treatment 43 Bullet __: list highlight 44 Battlefield order 47 __ Mode, designer voiced by Brad Bird in “Incredibles 2” 48 Strive 49 Skinny 51 Sleeping bag closer 55 Getting stuff done, initially 58 “Who, me?” 59 Striking white stripe between a horse’s eyes 61 From A to Z 62 Venue with skyboxes 63 Expected 64 Animation frame 65 Venomous snake 66 Hindu spiritual writing DOWN 1 Despicable dudes 2 Ransack 3 Depleted sea 4 “__ Quiet Uptown”: “Hamilton” song 5 Spanish dessert wine 6 Bryn __ College 7 Goya’s “Duchess of __” 8 It may be ear- piercing 9 Bullfight figure 10 ID gradually being omitted from Medicare cards 11 Water’s capability to neutralize acid 12 Injure badly 13 Track ratios 18 President who appointed two women to the Supreme Court 22 Sledding spot 23 “Yes, fine by me” 25 Pierre’s “his” 26 Second cup at a diner, e.g. 27 Unite on the sly 28 Spoken for 29 Stairway element 30 Statistician Silver 31 Dire 32 Bakery unit 33 Cross inscription 37 Like harvested hay 42 Video game stage 45 Black ice, e.g. 46 Boeing rival 49 All-in-one Apple 50 Florida State player, familiarly 52 Secured, as a win 53 Source of cones 54 Early late-night TV host 55 Lacking slack 56 Business magnate 57 Olympics coach Karolyi 59 Tower authority: Abbr. 60 The SEC’s Tigers More than almost any movie released this year, “Instant Family” wears its heart on its sleeve. Early on, as Mark Wahlberg’s (“Mile 22”) Pete and Rose Byrne’s (“Peter Rabbit”) Ellie walk through a foster care center, the camera lingers on a poster announcing “November is National Adoption Month!” Throughout the movie, characters work to make clear the plight of youth in the system and the importance of finding them loving homes. Before the credits roll, websites are given for viewers to find out more about fostering adopting children. “Instant Family” is a message movie, and it’s not a terribly subtle one. There’s a cynical side of me that’s driven to criticize the film for this ham-fistedness — it’s the same side that’s led to my cementing a reputation as someone who likes to, or at least has a knack for, writing negative reviews — but if it’s cool with you, I’d like to do something different. Instead of lambasting “Instant Family” for its cheesiness, I’d like to focus on how fundamentally good-hearted it is, and how genuine emotion driven by strong performances and a terrific sense of humor earn it every ounce of its schmaltz. So many films try and fail for this sort of touching story. They go their entire runtimes tossing out cheap, predictable emotional moments sandwiched between equally dull jokes. “Instant Family” director Sean Anders is no stranger to this, having helmed “Daddy’s Home 2” — a truly sad attempt at a Christmas comedy — but here he strikes gold. Where “Daddy’s Home 2” seemed nearly incapable of landing a punchline, “Instant Family” establishes early on that it knows how to set up a great joke and how to follow through with it. It may be too early to say that Anders learned from the mistakes of his earlier films, but at the very least, he’s clearly learned to let the jokes breathe and allow the chemistry between his performers to speak for itself. Wahlberg and Byrne head up the cast and play off each other well. The relationship between them that forms the core of the movie is easy to believe as a result. There’s little time spent establishing them; we’re just thrown into their marriage and expected to follow along. The stand-out of the cast is Isabela Moner (“Sicario: Day of the Soldado”) as Lizzy, the oldest of the foster siblings Pete and Ellie adopt. Moner already proved that she can partially salvage even a flat script with her work in the “Sicario” sequel, and with the stronger script present in “Instant Family,” she shines in a role that finds her perfectly portraying a teenager who has been in the system long enough to become jaded by it. The young actress’s work in the past year alone has proven her to be a talent to watch as her career continues. For all the well-deserved praise there is to be heaped upon the main cast, a word must be spared for the supporting players. Octavia Spencer (“The Shape of Water”) and Tig Notaro (“Dog Days”) play Karen and Sharon, the two social workers who help Pete and Ellie as they enter the world of foster parenting, and they both lend vibrant performances to characters that another script may have left devoid of personality. Here, they become comedic highlights of the film, an odd couple that never fails to get a laugh. As Pete’s mother Sandy, perpetual scene-stealer (and University alum!) Margo Martindale (“Sneaky Pete”) gets perhaps the most emotionally resonant moment of a film chock- full of them. Everyone, onscreen and off, gives their all, and the finished product reflects that over and over again. “Instant Family” is a film with a goal, gooey edges and all; it’s a rousing, funny and deeply moving success. JEREMIAH VANDERHELM Daily Arts Writer PARAMOUNT PICTURES FILM REVIEW ‘Instant Family’ is a fun and wholesome delight In a recent interview with Vulture, rapper Earl Sweatshirt reflected on the sound of his most recent third studio album Some Rap Songs, stating that, “(the album) is infinitum. It’s the snake eating its tail.” As the quote suggests, Some Rap Songs brings to mind an image of the ouroboros. Each song is built solely off of loops — segments of endlessly repeating warped beats, stripped-down instrumentals and muffled audio clips. Each track’s end eats the beginning of the next, creating a sort of timeless vacuum both within the songs themselves and within the album as a whole. In this nebula, Earl Sweatshirt floats, allowing his verses to unravel, free-form and purposefully off-beat. The resulting sound is markedly different from the sharp technical perfection of any of Earl’s past projects, yet to produce something polished doesn’t seem to be the point. Within the hypnotism of intense loops, Some Rap Songs constantly redefines itself, creating a layered meditation on where Earl Sweatshirt has been, on how he is now and on where he could go in the future. In the ouroboros, it is impossible to arrive at the end without simultaneously stumbling upon the beginning. In the same sense, it is impossible to appraise this album without first looking back. Earl Sweatshirt made his official debut in 2010 with the release of the “EARL” music video. “I got nuts to bust, and butts to fuck, and ups to shut / And sluts to fucking uppercut / It’s O-F, buttercup, go head, fuck with us,” he raps over scenes of him and other members of Odd Future (see: OFWGKTA) loitering around various locations in Los Angeles. Under a fisheye lens, they drink a suspiciously brown concoction that is equal parts prescription drugs, cough syrup, malt liquor and marijuana. They end up convulsing on the ground, foaming at the mouth and spitting up various bodily fluids. This offensively grotesque parody of body horror matches the insolence of the self-titled mixtape “EARL” emerged from. Here, verses barbed with hostility and cartoonish rowdiness land like punches to the gut. Earl is aimlessly angry, pushing the boundary of social acceptability without any substance behind the drive. Yet, there was no denying Earl Sweatshirt’s skill — heavy-handed wordplay unpacking neatly, precise yet still unpredictable — and he soon caught attention, especially after disappearing shortly (spending a hiatus at a boarding school in Samoa) after Earl’s release, as the rest of Odd Future adopted “Free Earl!” into a rallying cry. In this absence, Earl Sweatshirt became a symbol that Odd Future used in part to catapult themselves further into the public sphere, an anarchic representation that was discordant to the Earl who ended up returning two years later to L.A. Within his time apart from Odd Future’s chaotic world, he found space to turn his attention inward, changing perspectives as he changed physical locations. Perhaps a result of this isolated period of discovery, or perhaps not, in between every single project Earl Sweatshirt has released — from Earl to 2013’s Doris to 2015’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt to this year’s Some Rap Songs — there has been a progression: of technical skill, of self, of forms of expression. This growth is evident within Earl’s music. Doris dismantles Earl’s juvenile foundations and builds them anew, grounding songs in more personal subject matter and showcasing a greater variation in sound while still maintaining the dense, twisting, MF DOOM- esque lyricism he became infamous for in 2010. I Don’t Like Shit takes Doris’s eclecticism and flattens it, focusing inward. Sweeping samples and bright jazz-infused chords are made murky, transformed into fragmented instrumentation and muddled melodies — a dark backdrop that Earl cuts right through. Oftentimes rapping at a slower pace than he did on Doris or Earl, his words seem to be the biggest focus of I Don’t Like Shit, diving into his own psyche with a heaviness that was never quite as apparent before. If this was rock bottom, then Some Rap Songs arrives like the first breath of air after emerging from the waves. It cuts all the previous deadweight to effortlessly hang suspended: a masterwork of efficiency. In the grand scheme of Earl Sweatshirt’s entire discography (save for 2015’s loosie “solace”), Some Rap Songs stands out as a kind of anomaly. Rather than the clean organization of bars delivered one on top of the next in staccato bursts, this album is more organic. It glitches; it hisses; it loops relentlessly over bars that aimlessly drift off into a multitude of directions. Take opener “Shattered Dreams” — the loop begins with a sample from author James Baldwin. “Imprecise words,” Baldwin states and the beat haltingly picks up, stumbling under the drawn-out fuzzy repetition of “dreams.” Beneath it all, Earl ambles into nonsequiturs, “Mask off, mask on, we trick- or-treatin’ / Back off, stand- offish and anemic / Yeah, my n***a Ish, told him it’s a feelin’ / Blast off, buckshot into my ceilin’.” The result is a track that sinks into an introspective haze, and within its garbled notes, Earl taps into a nearly uncharacterizable sentiment: a yearning, a searching and a wistfulness for something just beyond reach. This strange abstraction of mood and sound is due in part to Some Rap Songs’s collaborators. The crew of young artists who worked on the album with Earl — NYC rappers MIKE and Medhane, alongside rapper/producer Sixpress and innovative collective Standing on the Corner, among others — are all known for pushing experimental boundaries within their own music, splintering apart traditional aspects of jazz and hip hop in order to create a more unorthodox form of soul- searching. “I be with Mike and Med / Nowadays I be with Sage and with Sixpress, ya dig?” Earl says on “Nowhere2Go,” and it’s easy to see the effect of these new relationships through the album’s preference for feeling over structure. Most of the tracks on Some Rap Songs hold some kind of technical malfunction — Earl Sweatshirt’s raps don’t sit quite right on the looped sample of Soul Superiors’s 1970 song “Trust In Me Baby” on “Ontheway!” and his verses in “Peanut” are chopped and layered so roughly it becomes difficult to discern the words — yet it is these very cracks in the album’s musical landscape that allows the underlying emotion to be so easily perceived. Much like J Dilla brought a human aspect to the mechanics of his programming, incorporating aspects of swing and groove into his hip-hop beats, the flaws on Some Rap Songs make the album feel more personable as the unfocused looping samples give Earl Sweatshirt an opportunity to wander into self-reflection. Some Rap Songs is an attempt to reconceive not only what kind of music Earl Sweatshirt creates but who exactly Earl Sweatshirt is. On “Playing Possums,” Earl stitches together recordings of an old speech his mother, Cheryl Harris, gave at UCLA and his recently deceased father, Keorapestse Kgositsile, reciting an excerpt from his poem, “Anguish Longer Than Sorrow.” “To my son Thebe,” we hear Harris say. “Cultural worker and student of life, whose growth and insights inspire me,” and in the background, Kgositsile slowly echoes, “For some children / Words like home / Could not carry any possible meaning / But / Displaced / Border / Refugee.” It is an effort to reconcile two very strained familial relationships, and although Kgositsile passed away before he could hear it, the intent behind “Playing Possums” still remains strongly rooted within the framework of Some Rap Songs: a cathartic letter addressed in the form of music, bringing with it the belief that there is always a chance to rebuild anew again. COLUMBIA RECORDS ALBUM REVIEW Thoughts on ‘Some Songs’ SHIMA SADAGHIYANI Daily Music Editor “Instant Family” Ann Arbor 20 + IMAX, Goodrich Quality 16 Paramount Pictures Some Rap Songs Earl Sweatshirt Tan Cressida Some Rap Songs is an attempt to reconceive not only what kind of music Earl Sweatshirt creates but who exactly Earl Sweatshirt is 6A — Wednesday, December 5, 2018 Arts The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com