Hello It's Me

Rocker Todd Rundgren brings long-awaited Utopia reunion to Houston

Utopia has arrived for Todd Rundgren fans.

Todd Rundgren/Facebook

For fans of rock star Todd Rundgren, Utopia has arrived. Rundgren and his original band Utopia — consisting of members Kasim Sulton, Willie Wilcox, and Ralph Schuckett — are reuniting for their first North American tour in 32 years, with a date in Houston at House of Blues on April 22.

The tour launches in Pennsylvania on April 18 and hits most major North America cities. Tickets go on sale February 23 at 10 am; pre-sales begin February 20 at 9 am.

As a companion to the reunion tour, Friday Music will release a 7-disc box set called The Road to Utopia: The Complete Recordings (1974-82). A limited-edition collection, it includes the band's seven classic albums, for the first time with CD digipak gatefold covers featuring original album artwork elements; rare inner sleeve art; and 2018 written commentary from the band.

Todd Rundgren's Utopia formed in 1974 after four years of making solo albums, including the seminal Something/Anything?, which included hits such as "Hello It's Me" and "I Saw The Light."

The band began as a prog-rock-progenitor septet featuring Moogy Klingman, Ralph Schuckett, "M. Frog Labat" on keyboards, John Siegler on bass, Kevin Ellman on drums, and Rundgren on guitar. Their music ranged from extended synth experiments to four-song albums. Their live shows were distinguished by video backdrops and computer-generated music that was ahead of the curve.

By 1976, the group had become the power-pop rock quartet Utopia, with Willie Wilcox on drums, Roger Powell on keyboards, and Kasim Sulton on bass — the best-known and most commercially successful Utopian incarnation.

In 1986, after 10 years of nonstop recording and arena touring, the band took a sabbatical. Rundgren went on to produce albums by Patti Smith, Cheap Trick, Psychedelic Furs, XTC, Grand Funk Railroad, Hall And Oates, and Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell.

The "sabbatical" is now over.

The tour even has an official pre-sale credit card, Citi, whose holders can purchase pre-sale tickets beginning February 20 at 10 am until February 22 at 10 pm through Citi's www.citiprivatepass.com program.

Tour dates are as follows:

April 18 – Penn's Peak, Jim Thorpe, PA
April 20 – Bergen Performing Arts Center, Englewood, NJ
April 22 – House Of Blues, Houston
April 23 – Majestic Theatre, Dallas
April 25 – Broward Center For The Performing Arts, Broward, FL
April 27 – Mahaffey Theater, St. Petersburg
April 28 – Tabernacle, Atlanta
April 29 – Carolina Theater, Durham, NC
May 1 – Paramount Theater, Huntington, NY
May 2 – Warner Theater, Washington, DC
May 3 – Town Hall, New York, NY
May 5 – Tower Theater, Philadelphia
May 6 – Orpheum Theater, Boston
May 7 – Ridgefield Theater, Ridgefield, CT
May 9 – Peabody Opera House, St. Louis
May 10 – Taft Theater, Cincinnati
May 12 – Pabst Theater, Milwaukee
May 13 – State Theater, Minneapolis
May 15 – 20 Monroe Live, Grand Rapids, MI
May 16 – Massey Hall, Toronto
May 17 – The Fillmore, Detroit
May 19 – Hard Rock Live, Cleveland
May 22 – Chicago Theater, Chicago
May 24 – Paramount Theater, Denver
May 26 – The Joint At Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas
May 27 – Comerica Theater, Phoenix
May 29 – The Wiltern, Los Angeles
May 30 – The Masonic, San Francisco
June 1 – Moore Theater, Seattle
June 2 – Revolution Theater, Portland
June 4 – Crest Theater, Sacramento
June 5 – Fox Performing Arts Center, Riverside, CA

music concerts

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.

movies film