Live Music Now

These are the top 5 concerts in Houston this week

Spring is here, meaning it's a great time to be outside, enjoying the sun, suds, and music before the hellacious time that is summer in the Bayou City arrives.

This week sees the return of one of the city's best outdoor music series (see below) in addition to the regular round-up of touring acts worthy of your time. May we suggest checking out one of our Top 10 best restaurants of the year before a show?

Shameless plug aside, CultureMap's best, biggest, and most notable shows of the week are as follows:

CultureMap recommends: Guster
If Guster came around 10 years later than their '90s heyday, they'd be stars. Their mix of quirky acoustic folk, hooky licks, and widescreen grandeur (see "Amsterdam" and "Do You Love Me") drew from many of the best acts at the time, but they were unfortunately relegated to cult status. But this Massachusetts band never really went anywhere and continued to pump out good-to-decent albums, playing acclaimed live sets. If you want to see and hear what the better side of the late-'90s to early-aughts alternative music was like, make plans to be at this show. The band is touring behind its 2019 release, Look Alive.

Guster at Heights Theatre, located at 339 W. 19th St., on Wednesday, March 27. Saintseneca opens. Tickets start at $32.50 plus a $7 service fee. Doors open at 7 pm.

CultureMap free show alert: Party on the Plaza
The best free party of the year, Party on the Plaza, returns downtown to the Avenida Houston grounds. Latin Night is the flavor for the kick-off week of this seasonal event, headlined by Los Angeles Mexican-American band, La Santa Cecilia, joined by local Selena cover band, Siempre Selena. Other themes throughout this season include Art Car Parade Sneak Peek (April 11), Jazz Appreciation Night (April 25), and Asian Pacific American Heritage Night (May 23).

La Santa Cecilia and Siempre Selena perform at Party on the Plaza at Avenida Houston, located at 1001 Avenida de las Americas, on Thursday, March 28. Admission is free. Show starts at 6 pm.

Mike Doughty plays Soul Coughing
God bless, Soul Coughing. A band definitely of its coffeehouse and baggy jeans era when it received major airplay on '90s alternative and college radio, the group simply couldn't change with the times when guitars and synths became darker, edgier, and more experimental. But make no mistake, Soul Coughing was a great, underrated band, taking elements of hip-hop, slam poetry, and funk to produce some of the most unique songs found left-of-dial. Mike Doughty, the band's lead singer, has been touring these songs and will perform the critically acclaimed Soul Coughing 1994 debut, Ruby Vroom, in full.

Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing is at White Oak Music Hall, located at 2915 N. Main St., on Friday, March 29. Wheatus opens. Tickets start at $22 plus fees. Doors open at 8 pm.

Hozier at Revention
The "Take Me to Church" Irish singer Hozier is back with the similarly dark and echo-effected Wasteland, Baby! following his world-beating debut single and subsequent self-titled 2014 album. While the new album doesn't capture the zeitgeist much like that monster tune, it hasn't stopped this show from selling out, with ticket prices reaching over $100 on the resale market. Only spiritual devotees to the pop star need shell out that kind of money.

Hozier performs at Revention Music Center, located at 520 Texas Ave., on Saturday, March 30. Jade Bird opens. Tickets start at $102 via the resale market plus fees. Doors open at 8 pm.

The Beach Boys in Sugar Land
Purists will say it's not the original Beach Boys — Brian Wilson rarely performs with his former bandmates — but those who love the sound of the '60s, surf rock, and memories of fun in the sun, will be out in force for this family-friendly event. It's hard not to love a group that produced some of the best songs of all time in "Good Vibrations," "I Get Around," and "California Girls."

The Beach Boys are at Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land, located at 18111 Lexington Blvd. in Sugar Land, on Saturday, March 30. Tickets start at $59.50 plus fees. Doors open at 7:30 pm.

La Santa Cecilia headline the kick-off date for the fourth annual Party on the Plaza this Thursday, March 27.

Courtesy Party on the Plaza

La Santa Cecilia headline the kick-off date for the fourth annual Party on the Plaza this Thursday, March 27.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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