WHISPER

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By Andrew Linzer
©2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
02/07/20

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

02/07/20

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Friday, February 7, 2020

ACROSS
1 Component of an 
Olympic bronze 
medal
5 Off-road vehicle 
maker?
10 Peddle
14 Brand in a studio, 
maybe
15 Chooser’s choice
16 Onetime capital 
of the Mughal 
Empire
17 Seats facing the 
altar
18 Alley button
19 Genesis problem
20 Soiree for 
woodchip 
manufacturers?
23 Energized
25 Inspection
26 Soiree for certain 
divers?
30 Govt. stipend
31 Angel dust letters
32 Neural transmitter
34 Powerful 2017 
hurricane
37 Soiree for 
spreadsheet 
creators?
41 Solo number
42 Gear for Lindsey 
Vonn
43 Service reward
45 PETA concern
47 Soiree for fake 
coin makers?
50 Need for big dos
54 Spherical 
extremities
55 Soiree for army 
enlistees?
59 Green hue
60 Louvre Pyramid 
architect
61 Chatroom 
spammers
64 Manipulates
65 Really funny 
ones
66 City-
circumventing 
road
67 Hot message
68 American in 
Paris, perhaps
69 One of 11 for 
Julia Louis-
Dreyfus

DOWN
1 12345, for 
Schenectady, NY

2 Turner on a 
turntable
3 Times, at times
4 Spirited toon?
5 Actress Hatcher
6 “Top Chef” set 
piece
7 Building project 
for cranes?
8 Get down to 
earth?
9 First pro team to 
play on artificial 
turf
10 Samurai ritual
11 Lab gelatins
12 Pen
13 GOOD Music 
record label 
founder
21 Cholesterol 
letters
22 Presume
23 Common 99-cent 
purchase
24 Hajji’s destination
27 Potter’s creation
28 Plot lines
29 Imitates 
derisively
33 “American Gods” 
author Gaiman
35 Traveler’s 
overnight spot
36 Seasoning seed

38 Buoyant 
protection
39 Actress Dern of 
“Twin Peaks”
40 Sch. with a 
Harrisburg 
campus
44 NBA stat
46 Hang up the 
spikes
48 2.3, perhaps: 
Abbr.
49 Slight character 
flaw

50 2.3, roughly
51 Come up
52 Big name in 
stopwatches
53 Compilation 
album add-on
56 Per item
57 Spanakopita 
cheese
58 Solidarity 
symbol
62 First of a generic 
trio
63 Expert on bugs?

SUDOKU

“60 characters. 
Bare your soul.

 Get featured in the Daily!”

WHISPER

Introducing the

“I be farting on people’s 
desks.”

SUNDANCE FILM REVIEW
Sundance 2020: ‘Minari’ is brilliant

TRINAL PAL
Daily Arts Writer

The opening scene of “Minari” is simple yet 
telling. The Yi family drives their moving truck 
through rural Arkansas, hesitant disgust on the 
mother’s face, eager expectation on her husband’s. 
They stop in the middle of a grassy enclosure and 
the camera pans to what the family sees — a mobile 
home, covered in drab gray and brown paint. The 
children run out, exclaiming, “Look! Our house 
has wheels!”
What better symbol of false hope, the American 
Dream thrown into disarray, than a shabbily 
painted mobile home in the middle of nowhere? 
As the children frantically jump into the house 
to start exploring, their mother hides her face 
with her hands, wisps of her black hair barely 
concealing the tears in her eyes. This wasn’t what 
she was promised. Dull resignation settling over 
her face, she clumsily climbs inside.
“Minari” — directed by Lee Isaac Chung 
(“Munyurangabo”) — follows the Yi family, 

Korean immigrants who move from California 
to Arkansas for hopes of better pay for their 
profession, chicken sexing (sorting female 
chicks from male chicks for 
egg production). Jacob (Steven 
Yeun, 
“Burning”) 
dreams 
of 
starting a farm, and convinces 
his wife Monica (Han Yeri, 
“Worst Woman”) to come along, 
disguising his grand schemes 
under the pretense of a “garden.” 
Their children, David (Alan S. 
Kim in his debut film) and Anne 
(Noel Cho in her debut film) are 
enthusiastic about moving, but 
bored out of their minds when they finally reach 
Arkansas. Monica’s mother Soonja (Yuh Jung 
Youn, “Woman of Fire”) moves from South Korea 
to stay with them, and the tale of the chaotic and 
hilarious Yi family kicks off.
“Minari” may have a conventional plot — 
immigrant stories of chasing the American 
dream are plentiful in film — but this one is 

executed to perfection. Dark, somber scenes 
are complemented (often times immediately) by 
heartwarming family shots, so much so that I felt 
I was living right alongside the 
Yi’s, watching everything play out 
in real time. I walked out of the 
theater knowing that “Minari” 
would make it big, and it did, 
winning the arguable top accolade 
of Sundance, the U.S. Dramatic 
grand jury prize and the Audience 
Award. A24 plans to release the 
film in theaters later this year, 
where I’m confident it will win 
over the hearts of many. 
After a whole weekend of watching Sundance 
films, the animated performances of the cast of 
“Minari” set it apart from its competitors. Kim 
may be one of the most talented child actors I’ve 
seen.

‘Telsa’ is postmodern boredom

It was a full house at the screening of “Tesla” 
I attended in Salt Lake City. Sundance attendees 
filled up a magnificent theatre with a capacity of 
well over a thousand. I wasn’t closely following 
which films were the ones to look out for at 
Sundance 2020, so I had no idea it would draw 
such a huge audience. Bystanders clamored 
outside the theatre for someone to give up their 
tickets. But the excitement didn’t surprise me. 
Everyone loves an underdog story, and festival 
goers were appropriately amped to see a biopic on 
the internet’s darling martyr of scientific history.
I’m not sure what I expected from a biopic 
about Nikola Tesla, but the movie turned my 
undefined expectation on its head. It is a wholly 
weird, fourth-wall-breaking work of avant-garde 
artistry. The film is narrated by J.P. Morgan’s 
daughter Anne (Eve Hewson, “Robin Hood”), who 
sets the scenes with a MacBook and a projector. 

Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke, “The Kid”) and 
Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan, “The House 
with a Clock in Its Walls”) have a historically 
inaccurate ice cream fight. Ethan 
Hawke sings a karaoke rendition 
of Tears For Fears’s 1985 hit 
“Everybody Wants To Rule The 
World,” all while in-character as 
Tesla. I shit you not.
While “Tesla” is sometimes 
hilarious — even if its intent is 
sometimes ambiguous — it’s 
mostly terrible. It is a genuinely 
boring film through and through, 
trading the constraints of logical 
narrative for Aesthetic™. Much 
of the film focuses on a rivalry between Edison 
and Tesla that more accurately existed between 
Edison and Westinghouse. There’s a lot of history 
tied to the late-19th-century war of the currents 
depicted in the film, including Westinghouse 
powering a world’s fair in Chicago, New York’s 
first electric chair execution and Tesla’s neurotic 

experiments in Colorado. But, all of this layered 
with artistic surrealism makes the whole thing 
difficult to follow. It grasps at so many threads of 
Tesla’s life, but fails to get anything 
meaningful across about the man 
himself.
The film acknowledges its 
lack of historical accuracy about 
Edison and Tesla’s relationship — 
Anne Morgan chimes in with a 
“it didn’t really happen like that” 
after the aforementioned ice 
cream fight — but it’s still overly 
misleading. Especially in what all 
my research indicates is a largely 
speculative construction of Tesla’s 
relationship with Anne Morgan and infatuation 
with French actress Sarah Bernhardt. The film 
does give a truthful depiction of Tesla’s insanity 
toward the end of his life...

ENTERTAINMENT COLUMN

The 2019 Oscars: 
I’m not watching

This Sunday will be the first 
time I haven’t watched the 
Academy 
Awards 
ceremony 
live since I was a little kid. 
Growing up as a film lover and 
now pursuing film as my major, 
the Oscars have always been 
required reading in order to 
understand and partake in the 
discourse surrounding media 
this time of year. This weekend is 
also regionals for the Michigan 
Mock Trial team, of which I 
am a member. Consequently, 
I will be driving home from 
Northwestern University when 
the Oscars air. I’ll have to check 
Twitter or something to find out 
the results. The Oscars used to 
be like the Super Bowl for film 
majors; I assume for many they 
still are. But this year when I 
realized the Oscars were the 
same weekend as regionals, I 
barely shrugged my shoulders.
Much has been said about how 
out of touch the Oscars are with 
the general public, how uniform 
both the films and people 
nominated are and how much 
they fail to represent the growing 
diversity in the film industry and 
in the world at large. I agree with 
all of these criticisms and don’t 
believe I could add anything in 
these pages on that front that 
hasn’t been said by others in a 
better and more compelling way. 
But I will say that I don’t think 
the Oscars really provide much 
compelling 
drama 
anymore. 
That is to say, they’re super 
boring, both as an event and as 
a subject for discussion. The age 
of the “movie star” is more or 
less over. Are there any actors 
or actresses today who can 
guarantee a film will not flop 
simply because they are in it? 
I honestly do not think so. The 
rivalries and personalities that 
used to capture the attention of 
the nation just no longer interest 

me. Turns out a lot of the people 
promoting these things were 
ReallyBadPeopleTM.
Which movie should win 
Best Picture? What do I care? 
I haven’t liked a Best Picture 
winner in years. The best movie 
I saw was certainly Greta 
Gerwig’s “Little Women,” but 
I honestly haven’t seen many 
of the other nominees. There 
was much ado about “Joker” 
back in October, but the movie 
never interested me from the 
start and post-controversy it 
interested me even less. I liked 
“Parasite” a lot but still thought 
“Little Women” was something 
I’m more likely to revisit in the 
future. Either way, what does 
it matter what I, or anyone else 
really thinks? Did “The Shape 
of Water” win last year, or two 
years ago? I can hardly recall 
what happened in it. All the 
Oscars’prestige 
pictures 
 
— 
the World War psychological 
dramas and intimate character 
studies — have blended together. 
They’ve become as banal to me as 
the endless stream of superhero 
films that permeate cinemas. 
And no, I don’t think they should 
nominate 
more 
blockbusters 
just to get more people to watch. 
“Avengers: Endgame” is no more 
deserving of Best Picture than 
an Egg McMuffin is deserving of 
a best breakfast sandwich award. 
It’s good for what it is for sure — 
maybe the best version of what it 
can be — but it’s still covered in 
grease and you’re pretty sure it’s 
not good for you. 
For a while now people 
have been talking about how 
TV has begun to outdo film 
as 
the 
preeminent 
visual 
entertainment medium and it’s 
pretty hard to disagree with that 
when you look at the state of both 
industries. The Oscars sadly are 
another example of a problem 
that has become systemic.

COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer

IAN HARRIS
Daily Entertainment Columnist

A 24-step guide 
to breaking up

Each 
month, 
we 
invite 
Community Culture writers to 
respond to a themed prompt in a 
creative writing notebook. This 
month, February, is the month of 
love! But searching for valentines 
is SO last year… this month’s theme 
is breakups, bad dates and broken 
hearts. — Zoe Phillips, Senior Arts 
Editor

Realize. Something has shifted. 
Tectonic plates in your heart grind 
against each other ever so slowly 
until, one day, you notice a crack 
where there wasn’t one before. 
The landscape has shifted. 
Ignore the fuck out of it. The 
shift is almost imperceptible, 
so if you don’t focus too hard on 
it, perhaps it’s not there. It was 
probably just some stray hair 
caught in your glasses. God knows 
you never clean them enough. You 
stay quiet, you keep your eyes wide 
and unfocused. 
Realize again. Before it was 
a shift in tectonic plates, it was 
massive ancient rock sitting far 
below the crust of the earth. Now, 
it’s closer to the surface. Now, it’s 
a rumbling that’s rattling your 
teacups in their saucers, toppling 
over your cup of pencils and the 
papers on your desk, waking you 
from a sleep you weren’t even 
unconscious for anyway. You have 
to get up. 
Seek council. There is a 
moment of suspense before you 
hit the call button below your 
roommate’s contact info. Your 
finger lingers over the blue-green 
glow of your cell phone screen as 
you realize that words have far 
more power than they should. 
Once you confide in someone, 
you bring the problem into an 
unignorable existence. Abstract 
fears are now spun into audible 
words, braided with tears and 
“I don’t know’s.” You now have 

a witness. The landscape has 
changed. 
Avoid him. 
Become 
incredibly 

productive. 
Fling 
yourself 
towards distractions because the 
road ahead of you is thick with fog 
and it’s safer to stay with what you 
know. 
Realize again. Fog doesn’t 
clear without the scalding heat of 
the sun to cut through it. Neither 
will this. You have to do it. 
Plan it. Now this part makes 
you feel the dirtiest. You decide 
on a walk because that’s what they 
do in movies and you don’t want 
to ruin anywhere for him. You do 
it at night so there’s even less of a 
chance he’ll attach this memory to 
a specific spot. 
Oh God, there’s gonna be a 
memory.
Answer the door when he 
rings. 
Walk. 
Walk.
Chuckle half heartedly as he 
tells you a funny story from his 
day. 
Walk.
Stop walking. 
… 
...
It’s hard. Your words have 
blown away and faded back into 
abstract concepts and you’re just 
starting to formulate them again 
until you look up and—oh my god 
his eyes, he knows he knows, he’s 
known this whole walk (how long 
has he known and hurt for this, 
you don’t want to know) and his 
eyes are the last silent plea before 
you move into the world of words. 
He asks you to please, please stop 
what he knows is coming. 
You speak. 
He speaks. 
You leave. 
He stays.
You know his eyes are blue, but 
you’re already forgetting if they’re 
more blue or blue-green.
The landscape has shifted.

STEPHANIE GURALNICK
Daily Arts Writer

Read more online at 
michigandaily.com

Read more online at 
michigandaily.com

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

“Tesla”

Dir. Michael 
Almereyda

Sundance 2020

“Minari”

Dir. Lee Isaac 
Chung

Sundance 2020

6 — Friday, February 7, 2020
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

