AN EVENING WITH SAFA AL AHMAD
NOVEMBER 19, 2019 | 7:30 P.M. | RACKHAM AUDITORIUM
FREE | NO REGISTRATION | WALLENBERG.UMICH.EDU
By Joe Deeney
©2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/15/19
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
11/15/19
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Friday, November 15, 2019
ACROSS
1 River past the
Museo Galileo
5 Wipe out
10 “Antiques
Roadshow” airer
13 Half of rock’s ’60s
“it” couple, per
Time
14 “I’ve got this”
15 Chipotle serving,
casually
16 Clothes line?
18 Approximately
19 County bordering
London
20 Ingredient in
arròs negre, a
squid-and-rice
dish
21 Pursuit
22 Solidified
24 Tag line?
26 Able-bodied
28 Green of “Casino
Royale”
30 Iraq War danger:
Abbr.
31 “The Wire”
antihero __ Little
32 Think back to
34 Gym surface
37 Border line?
40 Vague ending
41 Bilingual Muppet
42 MD’s diagnostic
tools
43 Big bird
44 Relative of Da
and De
45 Leaning
46 Pick-up line?
50 Rte. with a Lake
Michigan ferry
crossing
52 Times New __
53 Health care
provider: Abbr.
55 “Set Fire to the
Rain” singer
58 Beyond
regulation play,
briefly
59 Defensive line?
61 WWII Axis
general
62 Kansas Army fort
63 Slaughter on the
diamond
64 Asian honorific
65 Neglected
66 Grant’s opposite
DOWN
1 Overexertion
symptom
2 Frat letters
3 Ironic “This
should come as
no surprise ... ”
4 Ones stocking up
5 Lilly of drugs
6 Bullpen staff
7 Loads
8 Like the air
around a
campfire
9 “What’s THAT?”
10 Applesauce, e.g.
11 Low singers
12 “Waverley”
novelist
15 Squash, for one
17 Big name in
spatulas
21 Put down
23 Reset
25 Crankcase
reservoirs
26 Kachina carver
27 Reddit Q&A
sessions
29 When Prospero
says, “We are
such stuff as
dreams are
made on”
33 Blew away
34 Ford carrier in
the mid-’70s
35 Tibet’s place
36 Julia’s
“Ocean’s
Twelve” role
38 Guys who spin
39 Like some war
correspondents
43 Poetry Muse
46 Court directives
47 Esteem
48 Heart Eyes or OK
Hand
49 “Yesterday,”
today
51 Bit of body art
54 Stack
56 Safari sight
57 Online
marketplace
59 Returns home?
60 Big Apple
team, on
crawl lines
Classifieds
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Email: dailydisplay@gmail.com
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FOR RENT
“Playing with Fire” is a movie that does exactly
what it’s supposed to do: entertain. Directed by
Andy Fickman (“Race to Witch Mountain”), it
may not be a cinematic masterpiece with a heart
wrenching plot or clever camerawork, but it
succeeds in capturing your attention and making
you laugh (despite admittedly cheesy stunts and
dialogue).
As a Nickelodeon movie, I expected it to be a
short, feel-good, family-friendly movie, which
at first concerned me. I’d thought that since
the target demographic was primarily kids, it’d
be predictable and not worth watching. It was
predictable, but in the end, it was also worth
watching. It’s another movie with a tough guy
with a “manly” job, Jake Carson (John Cena,
“Bumblebee”), who is forced to take care of some
kids and eventually learns to love them and to
open himself up to vulnerability. We’ve all seen
that movie before. It was never the plot that was
going to make the movie worthwhile, though.
That will always be the job of humor.
“Playing with Fire” may have been a movie
with humor made for 12-year-old boys, but I will
admit with no shame that there was at least one
18-year-old girl in the theater laughing harder
than probably all the other kids in the audience.
For me, the best part of the movie was hands down
Keegan-Michael Key’s portrayal of Mark. I’m
not sure if it was the hilarious kissing-up nature
of his character towards Cena’s character or the
exaggerated exasperation he had towards the kids
in the movie, but nearly all of his lines had me
laughing. Sidenote — there are bloopers at the end
of the movie, most of which feature Key’s natural
hilarity and unfortunate (but priceless) tendency
for slapstick humor.
There were low points in the film, too. Jake and
Amy’s (Judy Greer, “13 Going on 30”) relationship
is unnecessary and forced. The three kids do a
mostly great job of balancing being funny and
being slightly annoying (like all kids), but Brynn
(Brianna Hildebrand, “Deadpool”), left something
to be desired. Her character got on my nerves
more often than not, and her warming up to Jake
was not as gradual as it should have been to make
it believable. The first two days she did everything
she could to get on his nerves, and then the
next two she made a complete 180. It didn’t feel
realistic.
Despite those flaws, though, the movie is worth
seeing. However, I’m not sure if the movie theater
is a necessary component of its viewing experience.
Frankly, this is the kind of movie that you want to
watch with your wife and kids. There’s something
about the overused, cheesy moral of the story that
makes you want to see it in your pajamas on your
sofa and with your family, even though you may
want to roll your eyes at it and claim that you’re
too old for a movie like this. You can say whatever
you want to preserve your reputation, but chances
are, “Playing with Fire” will make you laugh a lot
and will have you turning the television off with a
genuine, satisfied smile.
‘Playing With Fire’ is fun
FILM REVIEW
SABRIYA IMAMI
Daily Arts Writer
At my public high school everything around
me attempted to dissuade me from becoming the
quintessential “theatre kid.” My school left our arts
programs severely underfunded and, as collateral,
underespected. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to
transfer some of the athletic funds to the drama club, but
I often stood in the athletic director’s office pleading for
help. Would money remedy the problematic treatment
of theatre kids? No. Would it help foster the respect
needed from the administration to make theatre kids
feel worthy of our choice to participate in drama club?
Yes.
High school students who participate in arts
programs are sometimes considered inferior by peers,
and it isn’t so easy to rise above the stereotype when the
school system itself doesn’t want to aid in promoting
success for choir, drama club, band and other arts
groups. Football players are rendered god-like and have
their successes announced on the loudspeaker in the
morning, inflating their ever-growing egos. They take
rides in plush buses to travel to games comfortably and
have fully-packed stadiums of fans. The school drama
club fights for enough money for a single bus to attend
competitions. Our mothers held bake sales because they
felt as though it was our only choice to cover the cost
of new microphones. Overall, high school drama clubs
feel a consistent lack of support from school activity
coordinators and the larger community.
In the social ladder of high schools, the theatre kids
are often on the bottom, just above the chess players
or the band geeks. At the top rest the lacrosse players,
below the “popular for no good reason” girls who
are just beat out by the football players. It never made
much sense to me why, in the world of high school,
my desire to participate in the musical over the soccer
team automatically made me a loser — someone who
shouldn’t be invited to cool parties and didn’t attend
football games or have as worthy a presence as someone
who played a sport. Just because I’d opted for rehearsal
and showtunes over pasta parties and practice, I was an
outsider.
Given that I was involved in both cross country and
theatre, I saw the immense benefits of both institutions.
Ever since I was young, despite my desire to be athletic,
I’d always been more drawn to the arts. I loved my cross
country team in high school. I craved the sweat and the
competition, the sense of unwavering teamwork and
ultimate thrill we felt upon winning. But often times I
felt like I didn’t belong. Sports teams at my school were
cliquey and always looked toward the win, not the
journey it had taken to get to that final game or match.
Something about athletics seemed too serious and
grave when to me it wasn’t that deep. A loss was a loss, a
win was a win. In theatre, I didn’t have to deal with the
crippling anxiety that we wouldn’t win or that we had
to. We were just making art, we were coming together
to stretch our minds and ourselves. And it was beautiful.
As someone who split her time between artistic
and athletic pursuits, I can’t quite understand how in
American high schools the latter automatically makes
you hot and the former makes you lame. Sports games
will always be sports games. They will always be
American pastimes, they will always add entertainment
to our lives. I will always enjoy football and basketball.
But will these events and groups provide culture? Will
they provide wider understanding and open the door to
communicating on the basis of art? Will they provoke
people to change their minds, to think? Will they
inspire?
Upon graduating from high school I attended a Big
10 university in the midwest to study theatre and was
hit with a massive realization: The theatre kids aren’t
losers. The artists aren’t unworthy. The musicians
aren’t geeks. Here at the University of Michigan there
is talent pouring from the walls of our drama building,
our music building, our dance building, and the high
level of creative excellence produced by student
artists is simply unmatched. The community respects
theatre kids, acknowledges their hard work, applauds
them. The vapid high school notion that my choice of
extracurricular made me ultimately less likeable, less
“cool,” less worthy of friendship had subsided. I was
now among a cohort of people who, for doing the arts,
were cool, trendy, fascinating and unique. Constantly,
though, I wonder how many students from my high
school (and ones like it) decided not to pursue drama
club because of the downtrodden social status that
comes along with it. I wonder how many students give
up on their artistic dreams because high school is a time
when, for the most part, we hope to blend in and not
make ourselves known.
The theatre kids will stick together, always. We
will be a united front, we will push past the 16-year-
old bullies of our high school hallways and continue to
create. We will continue to wonder, to inspire, to write
and direct and perform. Because in the deep of the
night, it has nothing to do with who will fund us, who
will support us, who won’t laugh at us — it has to do with
the impact we make when we make art, something that
is and always will be a win.
Theatre kids are alright
COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK
ELI RALLO
Daily Arts Writer
PARAMOUNT PICTURES
Playing with Fire
Paramount Pictures
Ann Arbor 20+ IMAX
Upon graduating from high school
I attended a Big 10 university in the
midwest to study theatre and was hit
with a massive realization: The theatre
kids aren’t losers.
6A — Friday, November 15, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com