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

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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

