weekend event planner

Here are the top 12 things to do in Houston this Easter weekend

Get your Cajun on this Saturday.

Photo by Getty Images

This weekend will give us both the kooky April Fools' Day and the hallowed and joyous Easter Sunday. So, along with all the egg-hunting and prank-pulling that'll be going down these next few days, delight in these fun activities. Speaking of Easter fun, check out our handy Easter dining guide.

Here, then, are your best bets for the weekend.

Thursday, April 1

Gospel at the George: An Easter Celebration with John-Mark McGaha and Piper Jones
A.D. Players will present a gospel celebration featuring John-Mark McGaha and Piper Jones. Backed by a seven-piece band and a six-member, socially-distanced gospel choir, McGaha and Jones will perform such gospel hits as "Total Praise," "Jesus Will" and "Falling in Love with Jesus," as well as classic hymns like "Great is Thy Faithfulness," "Nothing but the Blood of Jesus" and "How Great Thou Art." This concert will be available to stream through Sunday, April 18. 7 pm.

Improv Houston presents Michael Yo
Actor, comedian, and self-proclaimed "half-black brother with a Korean mother" Michael Yo will be in town for a three-night stint at Improv Houston, as part of his We're Still Here Tour. He's been all over the place since he dropped his 2018 special Michael Yo: Blasian. He's been a regular on The Joe Rogan Experience and The Wendy Williams Show, as well as appearing on such sitcoms as Kevin Can Wait and Facebook Watch's Starter Pack. 8 pm (7:30 and 9:45 pm Friday; 7 and 9:30 pm Saturday).

Two Headed Dog presents Movies on the Patio
How about some outdoor movies to watch this April Fools' Day? If you're down with that, Midtown watering hole Two Headed Dog has a couple of particular selections you can watch. It starts with the 1997 Mira Sorvino-Lisa Kudrow comedy Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion. This will be followed by another high-school movie: the 1987 horror sequel Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II. There will also be door prizes, a Romy and Michelle look-alike contest and food from Knives in Water. 10 pm.

Friday, April 2

Harris County Cultural Arts Council presents Crowns
For the next couple of weekends, Crowns showcases examples of the various headdresses worn by Black women, including African queens and those who wore the Tignon, across the diaspora down through the centuries. Intended as a tribute to Iola Moss (1914-2019), who believed the hat signified godly covering and was rarely seen on Sundays without one, Crowns celebrates the grace, beauty, strength, and resiliency of black women. It runs through Friday, April 16. 4 pm.

Alley Theatre presents El Chuco Town Forever
The Alley will be running this production written by Texas playwright Isaac Gómez (commissioned author of the upcoming What-a-Christmas! at the Alley). It's about Janie and Miguel, two long-time assistant managers at an El Paso big-box store, right by Juárez, Mexico. The memorial service is tonight. It didn’t happen at their store, but it could have. Should they go? Will they go? This will be available to stream through Sunday, July 4. 7:30 pm.

Houston Symphony presents A Bach Easter
On Friday and Saturday night, the Houston Symphony will celebrate the season with the exquisite music of Bach. This will include the Concerto for Oboe and Violin with Principal Oboe Jonathan Fischer and Concertmaster Yoonshin Song, two of Bach’s great sacred cantatas with vocalists Yulia Van Doren and Elizabeth DeShong, and the well-known Suite No. 2. Baroque specialist Jane Glover conducts the Easter-weekend program. The Saturday night performance is available to livestream from home. 8 pm.

Saturday, April 3

Easter Egg Hunt at Lone Star Flight Museum
Little aviators can join their age group to hunt for Easter eggs around our aircraft. All eggs are filled with toys and/or candy. Keep an eye out for golden eggs filled with special prizes like a museum membership or a surprise gift from the gift shop. Museum visitors will also enjoy more than two dozen amazing aircraft, flight simulators, the Flight Academy exhibit, the Heritage Gallery, and the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame. 9 am.

Barbie Pop-Up Truck at Baybrook Mall
Barbie fans and '90s lovers will enjoy this outdoor mobile pop-up experience for just one day only. The hot-pink truck will sell exclusive, Barbie-themed, retro-inspired apparel and accessories like embroidered denim jackets, caps, T-shirts, iridescent vinyl "boombox" tote bags, iridescent vinyl fanny packs, "cassette tape" wallets, etc. There will also be a collectible, Barbie Polaroid camera in limited quantities. This is perfect for all those Barbie girls in this Barbie world. 10 am.

Easter Weekend at Big Rivers Waterpark & Adventures
The New Caney water haven will be open Easter weekend and will include a Peeps eating contest on Saturday and an Easter Egg Hunt on Sunday. Admission this weekend is a discounted $14.99 per person and includes, in addition to the Easter activities, floating waterpark Wild Isle, the Boca Chica Bay Wave Pool, axe-throwing, archery, a cougar climb, a forest maze, a petting zoo, and alligator encounters. Zip lines and ropes courses are also available for an additional fee. 11 am.

The 2nd Annual Cajun AF Festival
Let's keep crawfish season going this weekend with this throwdown, happening at the Live Oak Lounge & Grill. For $100, you can get all-you-can eat crawfish, shrimp, and blue crabs. For $75, you can get all-you-can-eat crawfish and shrimp. For $40, there's the crawfish and, for $20, you can just get in and wander around. If you're the kind of person who loves to sit with a big pile of crawfish and just go to town all day, you can't go wrong with this. (It's free with RSVP until 3 pm.) Noon.

Sunday, April 4

The Woodlands Cars & Coffee for a Cause
Presented by Woodlands Performance & Suspension, the purpose behind this event is to provide a morning gathering to show off special vehicles, be a supportive partner with Market Street & the local community, share information about needful, non-profit organizations in Montgomery County, and to give back monetarily. Donations are welcome for the Market Street “Change for Charities” program, that benefits four new non-profit organizations in Montgomery County each year. 6:30 am.

Boosie Badazz at Space Houston Nightclub
It's going to get particularly ignant at Space Houston Nightclub this weekend. Because Boosie Badazz will be doing a set there this weekend. The Louisiana rapper is always being a dang fool on social media. You may have heard about him getting kicked off Instagram for paying some drunk dude at a convenience store $550 so Boosie could slap him for a music video. Believe it or not, that's the least ignant thing he's done on the Interwebs. He'll most likely get more ignant when he performs this weekend. 8 pm.

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Movie Review

New comedy I Want Your Sex saddles an all-star cast with a dull story

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in I Want Your Sex.

Writer/director Gregg Araki has been making provocative movies for nearly 40 years, releasing his debut — Three Bewildered People in the Night — in 1987. Most of them have had plotlines that revolved around sex in one way or another, and for his latest — his first film in 12 years — he’s putting it right there in the title, I Want Your Sex.

Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is an aimless twenty-something who can’t even afford the rent for his apartment with best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). Thankfully, he finds a job at the gallery of artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who is open with her sexuality both in her artwork and in her day-to-day life. That soon includes Elliot, whom she convinces to enter into a dominant-submissive relationship with her, with sessions taking place both at work and her home.

Elliot, who’s in a going-nowhere coupling with Minerva (Charli XCX), is more than willing to participate, both because it lets him feel something he doesn’t get normally and because Erika offers a perspective on sex that’s much different from people of his generation. But as he gets in deeper with her, he starts to lose a sense of himself, going down a path in which he finds himself talking to police detectives Zem (Johnny Knoxville) and Zola (Margaret Cho).

Araki does his level best to make I Want Your Sex into a broad comedy, and early on it seems as if he might succeed. The deadpan way that sexual objects appear in the film (a penis-shaped rug in Elliot and Apple’s apartment, a vagina artwork with chewed gum as the medium) make for amusing sight gags. He also makes Elliot the bewildered other in multiple twosomes, with Minerva being the funniest, as she’s way more interested in studying than his ham-fisted attempts at sex.

It’s clear that Araki wants the film to be a commentary on the generational differences about sex, but he fumbles his own idea. It starts with an on-the-nose conversation between Erika and Elliot, and continues with the various dalliances, which seem to be more about making Elliot look and feel ridiculous than giving true insight. Their encounters certainly open his mind about what sex can be, but their one-note nature makes them repetitive and frankly boring, odd considering the acts in which the two engage.

The uninspired storytelling makes the 90-minute film drag way more than it should. Araki includes a few other characters to try to vary the tone of the film, including gallery workers Zap (Mason Gooding) and Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), but their early promise yields little results. The framing device of Elliot’s interview with the detectives never works, especially because Araki completely neuters the personalities of Cho and Knoxville for seemingly no good reason.

The cast as a whole goes to waste. Hoffman is showing the promise of his late father (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and even though he’s appealing here, the material pulls him down. Wilde just made her own provocative movie about sex (The Invite), and this one pales in comparison despite her heightened performance. Wonders, Charli XCX, and Gooding are all young stars who deserve to be showcased much better than they are in this film.

A film called I Want Your Sex is announcing itself as daring and alluring, but this film contains almost none of those qualities. Instead, it’s a slog that only occasionally has something interesting to show or say, mostly relying on the power of its actors to hold viewers’ attention — and failing at even that.

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I Want Your Sex is now playing in select theaters.

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