Jill Conner Browne, center, crowns Reba McEntire as a Sweet Potato Queen at Reef restaurant. Also joining in the fun were Sharon Vaughn, Melissa Manchester, Bruce Lumpkin, and Marley Wisnoski.
Theater Under the Stars officials were thrilled to greet country superstar Reba McEntire, who traveled to Houston to attend the performance of The Sweet Potato Queens musical at the Hobby Center Thursday night.
Afterwards, McEntire posed with the SPQ creative team, including Jill Conner Browne, who wrote the best selling books on which the musical is based, Melissa Manchester, who created the music, and Sharon Vaughn, who penned the lyrics, TUTS artistic director Bruce Lumpkin and TUTS associate artistic director Marley Wisnoski.
The group then hightailed it to Reef for dinner. McEntire ordered the restaurant's famous Milkshake No Minors, and after finishing it off, said she wanted another one.
The musical, part of the TUTS Underground series of new productions, has performed well at the box office (its last performance is Sunday) and is likely to travel to other Southern cities where Browne's books are popular. Observers wouldn't be surprised if it eventually ends up in New York, with McEntire attached to the project.
In interviews, Connor has said that McEntire should play her in a biopic "because she's tiny and redheaded and sings up a storm. She is everything I would have been had I gotten any of my druthers! "
McEntire will have to fit the project in amid a host of other things she has going on, including regular appearances with Brooks & Dunn at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and a lifestyle line including beauty products and luggage.
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.
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Kraven the Hunter opens in theaters on December 13.
