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    Rodeo Nights

    Lady Antebellum's pop/rock tunes fail to rouse rodeo crowd

    Michael D. Clark
    Mar 16, 2010 | 9:04 am

    Despite having one of the hottest country albums of the moment and several top-charting singles, new Nashville darlings Lady Antebellum suffered one of the cruelest fates at RodeoHouston in Reliant Stadium on Monday Night.

    Audience indifference.

    Unlike other typical music showcases —the famed South by Southwest in Austin, for example — where the newest bands generate the most buzz and biggest crowds, Houston rodeo fans prefer their country acts long in the tooth and with a resume of several dozen No. 1 singles before it's worth their while to stay up late on a school night.

    (Strangely, this tenure rule only applies to country acts. Untested rock, hip-hop and especially pop acts like Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus or Hilary Duff pack RodeoHouston like it's Disneyland.)

    It's the only way to explain how a middling Toby Keith could sleep-walk his way through last Friday's performance and get cheers like he was a returning king while Lady Antebellum's Charles Kelly, Hillary Scott and Dave Haywood couldn't seem to catch fire despite a slick 13-song set show, a spring break crowd and even a John Mellancamp cover.

    Beginning with the "yeah, yeah, yeah!" audience sing-along party starter, "Stars Tonight," from recent sophomore release, "Need You Now," Lady Antebellum fooled the crowd on hand ( the announced audience was approximately 61,000, but appeared to be less crowded than that) by offering an adult-contemporary, soft rock program masked in Nashville gift wrap.

    "Perfect Day," opened with the same Celtic-influenced electric guitar chords used by rocker Rod Stewart on his rendering of Bob Dylan's "Forever Young," back in 1988. Haywood delivered a bit of Led Zeppelin crunch to open "Our Kind of Love," and he and Scott shared the seat in front of a baby grand and offered backing support for Kelly's pop balladry on "Hello World."

    If anything, Lady Antebellum functions as two different bands: When Kelly took the lead on the jaunty, rhythm-driven "Love Don't Live Here," or a cover of Mellencamp's "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A," they are a harmonizing, easy rock trio emulating Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles.

    Strangely, it's only on the Grammy-winning, chart-topping hit singles like "Need You Know," and "American Honey," where the instruments strings get looser, the guitar picks turn to slide bars and Scott's, sexy hiccup morphs Lady Antebellum into the new toast of Music Row.

    That full-on country was kept to a minimum for the hits, however. The rest of their hour-plus set was closer to pop rock.

    Perhaps next time the rodeo should market Lady Antebellum as such, at least until they have a few dozen more hits and can draw Houston's country crowd out on a weeknight.

    unspecified
    news/entertainment

    Movie Review

    Action-packed Kraven the Hunter showcases gritty Marvel antihero

    Alex Bentley
    Dec 12, 2024 | 4:00 pm
    Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Kraven the Hunter
    Photo by Jay Maidment
    Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Kraven the Hunter.

    One of the oddest things about the blockbuster era we live in is that while Disney owns the rights to the majority of Marvel comic book characters, Sony Pictures owns the rights to Spider-Man and any affiliated characters. Since they’re sharing Spider-Man himself with Disney, Sony has been trying to capitalize on those rights by making stand-alone films using niche characters that only comic book fanatics would know.

    Having exhausted Venom and whiffed on attempts with Morbius and Madame Web, they’re trying again with Kraven the Hunter. Also known as Sergei Kravinoff, Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a self-styled vigilante who, as the film tells it, travels the world exacting vengeance on the truly bad people of the world. He’s the son of Nikolai (Russell Crowe), a hard-edged Russian oligarch, and brother to Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), who is relatively weak compared to the rest of his family.

    The origin story has Kraven gaining his animal-like powers - including super-strength, speed, and jumping abilities - as a teenager from a mysterious serum given to him by a girl named Calypso (played as an adult by Ariana DeBose) after he was mauled by a lion. The two maintain a tenuous partnership as adults, with Calypso helping him hunt down other villains like Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) and The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott).

    Directed by J.C. Chandor and written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, the film looks and feels enormously lazy, something made merely to hold on to potentially valuable intellectual property. Other than the tense family dynamic between the Kravinovs, little makes sense in the story. Kraven has an indecipherable moral code that has him going after poachers - because he’s part lion? - in addition to other high-powered criminals, with no clear goal except to … get back at his father?

    The laziness extends to the action scenes, which feature Kraven being mostly impervious to any damage, whether it’s hand-to-hand combat, knives, or guns. The CGI-heavy scenes don’t even allow moviegoers to enjoy an R-rated bloody free-for-all, as all of the blood splatter is computer-generated, too. Since apparently one Spider-Man villain is not enough, three others make appearances with abilities that are under-explained and CGI that is poorly done.

    That’s not even counting Calypso, another Spider-Man villain whose purpose in this film is nebulous at best. Her early connection with Kraven is so coincidental as to be laughable, and her continued reasons for helping him as an adult strain credulity as well. The only saving grace of her presence is that the filmmakers don’t try to shoehorn romance into the plot; perhaps they’re saving that for the (inevitable?) sequel.

    Taylor-Johnson has had one of the most prolific-yet-anonymous careers in modern Hollywood, with appearances in big films like The Fall Guy, Bullet Train, and Tenet that have made very little impact. Even as the star here, he fails to hold your attention, with the story and visuals doing him no favors. DeBose has followed up her Oscar win for West Side Story with schlock like I.S.S., Argylle, and this, which doesn’t bode well for her career. At least Crowe gets to chew the scenery.

    With a contractual inability to mention the name “Spider-Man,” movies like Kraven the Hunter exist in a weird area that forces filmmakers to make up stories for characters to which most people have no attachment. And just like Sony’s previous efforts, it is a very poor way to spend two hours in a movie theater; avoid at all costs.

    ---

    Kraven the Hunter opens in theaters on December 13.

    moviesfilm
    news/entertainment
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