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.

Irish alt-singer Hozier is at Revention Music Center on Saturday, March 30.

Photo by Rachael Wright

Irish alt-singer Hozier is at Revention Music Center on Saturday, March 30.

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Movie Review

Glen Powell stumbles in remake of sci-fi classic The Running Man

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Glen Powell in The Running Man.

For all its cheesy ‘80s greatness, the original version of The Running Man starring Arnold Schwarzenegger was a very loose adaptation of the novel by Stephen King. For the new remake, writer/director Edgar Wright has tried to hue much closer to the story laid out in the book, a decision that has both its positive and negative aspects.

Glen Powell takes over for Schwarzenegger as Ben Richards, a family man/hothead who can’t seem to hold a job in the dystopian America in which he lives. Desperate to take care of his family, he applies to be on one of the many game shows fed to the masses that promise riches in exchange for humiliation or worse. Thanks to his temper, Ben is chosen for the most popular one of all, The Running Man, in which contestants must survive 30 days while hunters, as well as the general population, track them down.

Given a 12-hour head start, Ben earns money for every day he survives, as well as every hunter he eliminates. Since he only has a relatively small amount of money to use as he pleases, Ben must rely on friendly citizens who are willing to put their own lives on the line to help him. That’s a task made even more difficult as the gamemakers, led by Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), use advanced AI to manipulate footage of Ben to make him seem like a guy for which no one should root.

Co-written by Michael Bacall, the film is shockingly uninteresting, working neither as an exciting action film, a fun quippy comedy, or social commentary. The biggest problem is that Wright seems to have no interest in developing any of his characters, starting with Ben. Our introduction to the protagonist is him trying to get his job back, a situation for which there is little context even after we’re beaten over the head with exposition.

The situation in which Ben finds himself should be easy to make sympathetic, but Wright and Bacall speed through scenes that might have emphasized that aspect in favor of ones that make the story less personal. The filmmakers really want to showcase the supposed antagonistic relationship between Ben and Dan (and the system which Dan represents), but all that effort results in little drama.

Ben has a number of close calls, and while those scenes are full of action and violence, almost every one of them feels emotionally inert, as if there was nothing at stake. It doesn’t help that Wright doesn’t set the scene well, making it unclear how far Ben has traveled or who/what he’s up against. There are times when Ben feels surrounded and others when he can walk freely, weird for a society that’s supposed to be under almost complete surveillance.

Powell has been touted as a movie star in the making for several years following his turn in Top Gun: Maverick, but he does little here to make that label stick. With no consistent co-star thanks to the structure of the story, he’s required to carry the film, and he just doesn’t have the juice that a true movie star is supposed to have. Nobody else is served well by the scattershot film, including normally reliable people like Brolin, Colman Domingo, Michael Cera, and Lee Pace.

The Running Man is a big misfire by Wright and a blow to Powell’s star power. On the surface, it has all the hallmarks of an action thriller with a side of social commentary, but nothing it does or says lands in any meaningful way. Schwarzenegger’s one-liners in the original film may have been goofy and over-the-top, but at least they made the movie memorable, which is way more than can be said of the remake.

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The Running Man opens in theaters on November 14.

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