By Kristian House
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
09/05/19

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

09/05/19

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Thursday, September 5, 2019

ACROSS
1 Isla surrounder
5 Real cutup
10 Italian volcano
14 TV series that 
had flashbacks, 
flash-forwards 
and multiple 
timelines
15 Kemper of “The 
Office”
16 Truant GI
17 *Brain trust 
member
19 Meander
20 Afflicted with 
illness, say
21 Gastric woe
22 *Nixon’s cocker 
spaniel
25 PC key
26 Reel Big Fish 
music genre
29 Pigs out (on)
30 Flying frenemy of 
Godzilla
32 “Beaten” ways
34 One who is rotten 
to the core?
37 Quartet member
38 *Influential record 
company named 
for co-founding 
brothers Leonard 
and Phil
40 Serb or Croat
41 Went over again 
and again
43 Razz
44 Geometric given
45 Ox tail?
47 Hankering
48 Toward the stern
50 *Playful question 
spoiled by caller 
ID
53 2010 Supreme 
Court appointee
55 Shows derision 
for
59 Boast
60 *The USS Iowa, 
e.g.
62 Toon mail-order 
company
63 Be of use to
64 Sty sound
65 Swamp stalk
66 “Aw, fudge!”
67 Corddry of TV’s 
“Mom”

DOWN
1 Help for the needy
2 Animal on the 
Cubs’ 2016 World 
Series rings

3 Space Race 
inits.
4 Room often with 
a slanted ceiling
5 Pulled quickly
6 Early Mexicans
7 “Hogan’s 
Heroes” colonel
8 German article
9 Crimson, e.g.
10 Bluegrass legend 
Scruggs
11 With 28-Down, 
words to a 
cheater ... or an 
honest hint to 
the answers to 
starred clues
12 Original
13 At the ready
18 Heart 
sonograms, 
familiarly
21 Food safety 
agcy.
23 Paleozoic and 
Cenozoic
24 Retina cells
26 Exchange barbs
27 Curly cabbage
28 See 11-Down
31 Church area
33 The Cardiff 
Giant, notably
34 __ Bath & 
Beyond

35 Zap with a 
beam
36 Equally 
matched
38 __ En-lai
39 Iron-rich blood 
pigment
42 Portent
43 Giggly sound
45 “Don’t you 
agree?”
46 Resides
48 1556-1605 Mogul 
emperor

49 Screwball 
comedy
51 Celestial red 
giant
52 Director Welles
54 Like good Scotch
56 LaBeouf of 
“Transformers” 
films
57 Informal 
contraction
58 Toll rd.
60 Prohibition
61 “__ Maria”

Since 
1969, 
the 
nation’s 
most popular blues and jazz 
musicians have made a stop in 
Ann Arbor to take part in the 
now-historic Ann Arbor Blues 
Festival. B.B. King, Buddy Guy 
and Muddy Waters, among 
others, introduced the Ann 
Arbor population to true blues: 
the blues of Chicago and the 
Mississippi Delta.
As a dedicated blues fanatic 
myself, I was thrilled to be able 
to attend the 2019 Ann Arbor 
Blues 
Festival, 
which 
took 
place Aug. 16 through Aug. 18 at 
the Washtenaw Farm Council 
Fairgrounds.
After finishing up at work, 
I made the short drive to the 
Fairgrounds, going against the 
flow of the congested traffic 
eager to leave Ann Arbor for the 
weekend. With the windows 
down, listening to “Lightnin’ 
Hopkins”and “Otis Rush” live 
in Ann Arbor in 1969, my Camry 
hopped onto a gravel road 
leading into the Fairgrounds.
It does not require a deep 
study of music to understand 
that the blues are not as 
popular as the genre once was. 
The biggest names in present-
day blues are some of the 
smallest names in the grandeur 
of the modern music industry. 
Whether this can be attributed 
to a change in taste or a 
systemic decline of the genre is 
difficult to understand, but the 
fact is the blues, specifically in 
the style of Chicago or Delta 
blues, is a rather niche musical 
interest.
And “niche musical interest” 
is exactly the feeling I got as I 

sat down in the matted grass 
in front of the stage. It was 
clear that outside of those 
brought unwillingly by parents 
and fellow press from other 
nearby university publications, 
I was the youngest member of 
the audience by a significant 
number of years. Somehow, 
I felt out of place, out of 
touch, as I waited for the first 
performance to take the stage.
The 
first 
performance 

was Thornetta Davis, a jazz 
and 
blues 
musician 
from 
Detroit. 
Her 
performance 
and demeanor struck me. She 
was certainly talented, but 
there was something else in 
her that injected some serum 
of liveliness and happiness 
into the veins of the seasoned 
audience. 
As 
Davis 
sang, 
audience members got up from 
their lawn chairs and shuffled 
to the stage to dance along with 
her. My jaw dropped as I saw 

80-year-old 
people 
dancing 
and singing along to the music. 
The music was loud, and this 
elderly audience was loving 
it, and I began to love it too. I 
was out of my usual place, out 
of touch with my usual life, but 
creating that environment in a 
positive and invigorating way 
is precisely where this festival 
triumphs. I was out of my 
comfort zone in a way that was 
beneficial to me.
Another performance that 
piqued my interest was that 
of Bernard Allison. As he took 
the stage, a mass of bodies 
again waded to the edge of the 
stage to sway along with his 
guitar. I learned that Allison’s 
father was a performer at the 
Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 
its early years, and Bernard 
had attended at the young 
age of seven. He continued to 
play the blues since, and upon 
returning to Ann Arbor to show 
what he had learned, Allison 
was greeted by a warm and 
welcoming Ann Arbor audience 
that indeed remembered him 
and his father.
Despite 
the 
widespread 
falling-off of the genre over the 
years, I was delighted to see 
that the blues were alive and 
well in Ann Arbor, kept afloat 
by the love of its audience. 
When one of the hosts asked 
how many original audience 
members from the 1969 festival 
were present today, I was 
shocked to see so many hands 
rise. Perhaps these lovers of the 
blues are what keep the genre 
alive. The blues artists and 
their audience trade a musical 
love that keeps the heart of the 
blues beating and the lungs of 
the blues breathing.

Ann Arbor Blues Festival
continues to invigorate

ZACHARY M.S. WAARALA
Daily Arts Writer

COMMUNITY CULTURE REVIEW

THE ALLMAN BETTS BAND

The concept of a “suburb” 
has always been a pop culture 
staple — from the cult classic 
“Heathers” 
to 
2016’s 
“Bad 
Moms,” 
these 
enclaves 
of 
society are a thing of intrigue. 
Rational 
conversations 
and 
enriching activities are thrown 
out the window only to be 
replaced by raging mothers and 
parent-teacher 
conferences 
over a child’s mild cough. Based 
on the book of the same name, 
“Where’d You Go Bernadette?” 
follows Bernadette Fox (Cate 
Blanchett, “Ocean’s 8”) as she, 
and her life, seem to unravel 
underneath 
the 
artificial 
pressure of suburbia. 
As a movie, “Where’d You 
Go Bernadette?” is perfectly 
average. As a book-to-movie 
adaptation, however, it leaves 
much to be desired. Especially 
given the fact that much of 
the important plot points and 
character development occurs 
between the lines of emails 
and messages sent between 
characters. The kind of nuance 
that sets apart “Where’d You 
Go Bernadette?” as a book 
doesn’t lend itself to an easy 
transition to the big screen. 
Bernadette 
herself 
is 
a 
well-developed character — 
her long-winded monologues 
to 
Manjula 
(her 
online 
“assistant”) 
capture 
the 
manic energy of Bernadette 
in the book. Sadly, she is the 
only character that receives 
this kind of treatment. Her 
daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson, 
“Margaret and the Moon”), 
is left to occupy the movie 
solely 
as 
the 
stereotypical 

“nerd” at her school, with 
little exploration into how her 
childhood heart issues might 
have affected her or even 
the lengths to which her life 
was affected by her mother’s 
disappearance. 
What 
little 
emotion that came from Bee 
was the result of Nelson’s 
acting — no credit can be given 
to 
the 
less-than-impressive 
screenplay. 
The “Galer Street Gnats,” 
as Bernadette so lovingly calls 
the other mothers at Bee’s 
school, fail to incite the kind of 

strong hatred these characters 
should garner in any situation, 
fictional or otherwise. Audrey 
(Kristen Wiig, “Bridesmaids”) 
and 
Soo-Lin 
(Zoe 
Chao, 
“God Particles”) are pivotal 
characters in the book, with 
each woman going through 
some intense changes in their 
relationship and their personal 
lives. Yet we see none of that in 
the movie. On top of that, their 
relationship with Bernadette 
changes 
dramatically 
as 
well. There seemed to be an 

attempt at showcasing this 
change between Bernadette 
and Audrey. However, without 
many of the details from the 
book, it seems far-fetched that 
in a moment of vulnerability 
Bernadette would go to one of 
her sworn enemies for help. 
If we recognize that there 
is a difference between the 
kinds of details included in a 
movie compared to those in a 
book, this abrupt change could 
potentially be warranted, but 
that would be a hard argument 
to make. 
Within every average movie, 
though, there are always a 
few good moments. Take Cate 
Blanchett, for example. Fox is 
a force to be reckoned with and 
Blanchett was the best person 
to do it. Her rough bangs and 
sharp features come together to 
create the kind of intimidating 
woman who really doesn’t 
belong in a Seattle suburb. 
Add to that a slight edge to her 
American accent (Blanchett is 
Australian, after all), and the 
effect is complete. 
“Where’d 
You 
Go 
Bernadette?” is not a bad 
movie, per se. It simply serves 
as a reminder that not all 
books need to be turned into 
movies. Maybe this let-down 
is my own fault because I 
prefer to read the book before 
I see the movie or because I 
continue to see adaptations no 
matter how many times I am 
disappointed. All I really know 
is, despite how fun it might be 
to think about what my favorite 
characters would look like on 
the silver screen, some of their 
stories are better suited to the 
detail-oriented environment of 
a book.

‘Bernadette’ needs to do
some real soul searching

EMMA CHANG
Senior Arts Editor

FILM REVIEW

ANNAPURNA PICTURES

I had not done any research 
about Showtime’s “On Becoming 
a God in Central Florida” before 
sitting down to watch it, and 
perhaps for that reason, I spent 
the first half of the pilot trying 
to figure out what exactly was 
bothering me about it all. We 
follow Travis Stubbs (Alexander 
Skarsgard, “The Little Drummer 
Girl”), a typical Orlando area 
middle 
class 
working 
man 
whose life is consumed by the 
insidious, omnipresent multi-level 
marketing company FAM. In a 
thoroughly engaging, bizarre and 
surprisingly dark (yet charming) 
pilot, the show sets up a world 
in which rhetoric straight from 
the playbook of capitalism-on-
steroids consumes and leads a 
man to his end. But what really 
bothered me for the first half or 
so was the fact that I couldn’t 
pin down why I recognized who 
was 
playing 
Travis, 
because 
Alexander Skarsgard was wearing 
a beautiful, glorious mullet.
But the real star of the show is 
one if its own executive producers, 
Kirsten Dunst (“Fargo”). She 
plays Travis’s wife, Krystal, a 

firm yet supportive woman who 
works a minimum wage job at 
the local water park. Travis’s 
relentless ambition and desire to 
become a millionaire leads him 
to sacrifice nearly every waking 
moment of his life to recruiting 
for the FAM pyramid scheme, 
leading to a simmering and rising 
tension between him and Krystal, 
as well as an unexpected, absurd 
demise.
Travis 
is 
ultimately 
an 
endearing yet sad, pathetic fool. 
Unlike the usual roles he gets, 
Skarsgard plays one which is 
dumpy and weak rather than 
charismatic and godlike. His 
full devotion to FAM takes on 
the character of a cult member 
or a religious zealot, leading 
him to eventually quite his full 
time J-O-B (FAM doesn’t permit 
saying the cursed word out loud) 
and submit fully to the company’s 
cause. 
However 
creepy 
and 
dystopian FAM seems, it’s an 
even creepier reality out there, 
considering that about 100 miles 
west of Ann Arbor lies the town 
of Ada, headquarters of Amway, 
one of the biggest multilevel 
marketers 
out 
there 
(created 
by a DeVos, perhaps a familiar 
name). Many struggling working 

people are seduced in the same 
way Travis Stubbs is, and while 
Stubbs’s persona is hilarious, it 
doesn’t completely mask how 
pitiable it is. 
Meanwhile 
Dunst, 
who 
is 
poised to be the main protagonist 
after 
the 
pilot, 
is 
equally 
stunning. Dunst season is indeed 
in full swing, and her range is as 
well in the pilot. Equipped with a 
charming Floridian accent, braces 
and rather delightful outfits, she 
is nearly the polar opposite of her 
husband: steely, firm and a long-

term thinker and planner. While 
she is supportive of her husband 
and even tries to help him in his 
FAM ventures at one point, she 
is rightfully exasperated by his 
sheer stupidity and the danger it 
poses to their young family.
“On Becoming a God in 
Central Florida”’s pilot is a 
promising 
springboard 
into 
future explorations of capitalism 
and the rehabilitating effects of 
MLM companies. Oh, and maybe 
Kirsten Dunst’s performance of a 
lifetime.

Skarsgard and his mullet shine in
‘On Becoming a God in Central Fla.’

TV REVIEW

‘On Becoming a God

in Central Florida’

Series Premiere

Showtime

Sundays at 10 p.m.

“Where’d 

Y
ou Go 
Bernadette?”

Annapurna Pictures

The Michigan 
Theater

The music was 
loud, and this 
elderly audience 
was loving it, and 
I began to love it 
too.

SAYAN GHOSH
Daily New Media Editor

6 — Thursday, September 5, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

