More Music Madness

Maroon 5 thrills gigantic Madness crowd, but even those who didn't get in had a lot fun

Maybe it was all of the media hype from Saturday’s March Madness Musical Festival with Kendrick Lamar, the lack of NCAA basketball, or just the picture-perfect Houston weather, but downtown Houston was absolutely electric with energy on Sunday.

The schedule for the free Capital One Jam Fest at Discovery Green started at 3:45 pm and I arrived around 2:45, but the line to get inside was already at a two-hour wait. The fire marshal declared the grounds to be at capacity around 5, so if I would have waited it out in line with my non-press credentialed cohort, there’s a chance we wouldn’t have made it in at all.

Knowing a gate closure following a long wait in line was a very real possibility, I decided the afternoon would be better spent meeting as many visitors as I could find around some of my favorite downtown hangouts. The popular idea in this situation was to quickly cut losses and head on foot to EaDo or travel the METRO rail along Main Street where a row of spacious bars await, and that’s exactly what a lot of people did.

It didn’t take long to find North Carolina and Villanova fans out and about celebrating Saturday's wins around downtown, and more than a few Syracuse and Oklahoma supporters came out to play as well. If these fans were expecting a party, they certainly didn’t need to be inside the music festival to find it, although Maroon 5 did put on quite the show. (More about that later.)

At Lucky’s Pub, I spoke to a handful of OU fans who were staying in hotels as far away as Galveston. At Neil’s Bahr I witnesses a heartwarming exchange of camaraderie on the patio between UNC and Villanova fans over a round of Shiner Bocks. At Frank’s Pizza I saw some fans in Syracuse shirts cheering on the Mets, who opened up the 2016 MLB season against The Royals. I guess those Syracuse fans needed a little baseball optimism to take their mind off of last night’s loss.

Those who did decide to wait out the lines and get into the March Madness Music Festival before the gates closed surely weren’t disappointed once they got in. How could anyone care about a long wait when Pitbull and Flo Rida, two energetic acts who have had Houston’s number for a while now, are giving it all they’ve got on a sunny afternoon?

Thankfully, the powers that be at the entrance gate turned a blind eye to my partner-in-crime when I flashed my media credential around 8 pm to catch Maroon 5’s festival-closing set.

What a set full of hits it was.

Embed from Getty Images

Singer Adam Levine wasted no time giving his fans what they came for, opening with “Animal,” which was broadcast live on TBS as part of the iHeart Radio Music Awards. He then spent the rest of the set delivering hit after hit while the crowd sang along to every word. If it’s a Maroon 5 song and you can name it, Levine sang it.

“Moves Like Jagger,” “Harder to Breathe,” “Payphone” and many more were as danceable as ever, giving the crowd ample opportunity to take advantage of the opportunity to move, even though they there was hardly any room. Levine was having a lot of fun with the crowd throughout the show. “We’re on the Internet right now!,” he exclaimed (referencing the live streaming of the show via the March Madness website), “Don’t do anything stupid.”

The crowd happily abided, even the hundreds listening in the streets far away from center stage. How’s that for a good time?

Charles Barkley joined the fun.

Charles Barkley March Madness Music Festival

Photo by Killy

Charles Barkley joined the fun.

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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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