RodeoHouston 2018

He said what about The Astrodome? Garth Brooks talks Rodeo and Houston

Garth Brooks poses for selfie with fans to announce RodeoHouston appearances

Garth Brooks is a master of warming up the crowd before a RodeoHouston show.

Photo courtesy of RodeoHouston

Garth Brooks appears downright jolly as he courts the Houston media February 27, hours before his first Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo performance since 1993. Seeming only slightly less pumped to be answering questions than he is singing in concert, he notes that his two Astrodome shows in the early ’90s pushed him towards adopting wireless microphones onstage, and, personally, represented huge strides toward following in George Strait’s footsteps.

RodeoHouston, Brooks says, is “a place of great history for us...it’s the reason why we started.”

If anyone can get away with the royal “we,” it’s probably Brooks, now 56. The reigning CMA Entertainer of the Year, he has sold upwards of 148 million albums in the U.S., and 6.1 million seats on his recently concluded Garth Brooks World Tour, which began with 11 straight sellouts in Chicago.

The morning after the first show of his June-July 2015 stand at Toyota Center, Brooks says, the phone rang with an offer to come back to RodeoHouston. Of the heavy promotion he’s done this week, he jokes, “they’ve been working us like a rented mule since we got here.”

His groundbreaking turn as the first entertainer on the the rodeo’s new high-tech star-shaped stage wasn’t lost on him either. “We don’t want to push every button,” says Brooks, noting he expects his show to be much different when he returns to close the season on March 18.

Before heading off to sound check, he took the time to meet individually with a handful of local reporters, including CultureMap.

CultureMap: What do you like to do in Houston if you have any time to kill?

Garth Brooks: Oh, it’s just a fun place. It’s a great place to come here to get, you know, your clothes. It’s a great place to come because you’ve got so many choices. But my favorite thing is still hanging out with my buddies. My brother lived down here for a while; he’s back up in Tulsa. But still, all the relationships from there. It’s just the people.

CM: What do you remember about your days here playing the honky-tonk circuit?

GB: It was fun, man. I remember coming here. Clint Black was out of here. When we first started Clint just cast this shadow, man. No matter how hard you worked, Clint was the guy. His family came out; I remember seeing them, hugging them, which made me feel really good.

We played a little place, I almost want to call it the Library, but it wasn’t. It was a club. We had a great time. There was a dancehall. And here comes The Woodlands, with Reba. And then Compaq. And then before Compaq, it might have been...I can’t remember the name.

CM: The Summit.

GB: Summit. Yeah. So it was the Summit before the Compaq [now Lakewood Church]. And in between those you’d play the livestock show. So it was fun. This has always been a place that I’m not from but has treated me like I’m from here, if that makes any sense. They’ve always supported me and treated me like a hometown guy and made me feel good.

CM: What do you think about when you look over and see the Astrodome over there?

GB: What about it? It’s cool? Have you ever been in the Superdome?

CM: No.

GB: It’s the same thing, man. Because they were the new kind of big structures at that time, so it was neat to get to play there. I love to say that I played there.

I’ll tell you this from just rehearsal right here — this place is amazing. This is a lot different. The Astrodome, if you said [sings] ‘Oh say can you see…’ and before you got to the end of it you heard ‘oh say can you see…’ The sound here is phenomenal. Loved playing over there; really going to love playing over [here].

CM: One music question: Is it tough to decide which song to play last?

GB: It’s not hard for me, because “The Dance” has always been that space for me. It would be like going to see Strait, and not hearing “The Cowboy Rides Away.”

Movie Review

New horror movie Faces of Death puts a modern twist on cult classic

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy — in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks — is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

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Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

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