weekend event planner

Here are the top 14 things to do in Houston this weekend

Comedian Nikki Glaser gets down and dirty for one night this weekend.

Houstonians everywhere are preparing for Easter weekend, with Good Friday observances and last-minute brunch plans on Sunday (check out our suggestions). We've rounded up a basket of events for the whole family — check it out here.

Other fun includes a college hoops party downtown, a film showcase, a time-honored dance festival, and a visit by an edgy national comedian.

Happy Easter — here are your best bets for the weekend.

Thursday, April 14

Inspire Film Festival Kickoff Event
Inspire Film Festival will host a kickoff event to launch its official move from The Woodlands to Houston. The evening will feature a screening of The Interpreters, an award-winning documentary about the journey of Afghan and Iraqi interpreters - who played a key role in enabling communication between locals and U.S. troops - as they attempt to escape the violence of the region as American involvement decreases. 6 pm.

Houston International Dance Coalition presents Dance Salad Festival
From Thursday through Saturday, The Houston International Dance Coalition will present the Dance Salad Festival, featuring six well-known dance companies. The companies will include Hofesh Shechter Company from London; Semperoper Ballett Dresden from Germany; Royal Danish Ballet’s Kammerballetten from Denmark; Royal Ballet of Flanders from Belgium; Dunia Dance Theatre from Zimbabwe and Belgium; and Laboration Art Company from France. 7 pm.

Stages presents You Are Cordially Invited to Sit-In
Houston, Texas, 1960. It’s the peak of youth in the lives of four Black college freshman. Some are ready for fun, some for success, some for love, and some just want to pledge and party, and in Third Ward they have all of the potential in the world — a segregated world. Set to the love songs, dance hits, and revolutionary tunes of the ’60s-’70s, this new musical is inspired by the real story of Houston’s first sit-in that led to the city’s desegregation. Through Sunday, May 22. 7:30 pm (8 pm Friday; 2:30 and 8 pm Saturday; 2:30 and 7:30 pm Sunday).

Friday, April 15

Disney on Ice: Mickey's Search Party
Mickey Mouse and his friends will be on hand for this adventure, filled with world-class skating, high-flying acrobatics, and unexpected stunts. They will follow Captain Hook’s treasure map and look for clues in the search for Tinker Bell in immersive, fantastic worlds. Audiences can explore the colorful spirit realm of Coco with Miguel, sail away with Moana, see Belle in the sky, and sing-along with Elsa in the icy world of Frozen. 10:30 am, 2:30 and 7:30 pm (11 am, 3 and 7 pm Saturday; 1 and 5 pm Sunday).

NCAA Final Four Fan Jam Truck Roll-In
The 2023 NCAA Men’s Final Four Houston Local Organizing Committee (HLOC) will unveil the Fan Jam Truck at Discovery Green. The interactive pop-up truck arrives in Houston to pass the Men’s Final Four host city torch from New Orleans to Houston for the 2023 NCAA Men’s Final Four Division I basketball tournament. Fan Jam Truck activities include basketball goals, photo opportunities with the Men’s Final Four trophy, Pop-A-Shots, giveaways, mascot appearances, a reading nook, and more. Noon.

Fight Club Houston Presents Fight Fest I
Things will most likely get crazy as hell at his free-for-all of live music and intense fisticuffs, to be held over at Higher Grounds. Plenty of bands, MCs and DJs will be on the premises: Vanilla Guerillaz, The Half Pipes, Barely a Team, Timmo!, Tony Lxve, etc. As for the fights, they will be served up according to weight and tough man. If the sight of violence is too much for you, there will be vendors and food trucks around to peruse. 8 pm.

Houston Symphony presents Beethoven’s Eroica & Liszt
Audiences can experience the power and grandeur of Beethoven’s immortal Eroica Symphony, led by one of today’s biggest young conducting stars, Rafael Payare. Liszt is synonymous with finger-flying piano fireworks, and his dramatic Piano Concerto No. 2 is in good hands with returning favorite Jean-Yves Thibaudet. The concerts open with Sofia Gubaidulina’s whimsical Fairy Tale Poem, inspired by the Czech fairy tale, “The Little Chalk.” The Saturday performance will be available to livestream. 8 pm.

Saturday, April 16

National Eggs Benedict Day at The Toasted Yolk Cafe
Apparently, Saturday is National Eggs Benedict Day, and all the Toasted Yolk Cafe locations in and around Houston want everybody to know they'll be coming hard with the Eggs Benedict on this day. The neighborhood eatery’s menu features a delicious line-up of eggs Benedicts — known famously at Toasted Yolk as Arnolds — that offer a variety of flavor profiles and ingredients to satisfy any craving. The cafe will also give away a $100 gift card to three lucky guests. 7 am.

Karbach Brewing presents Love Street Music Fest
Love Street Music Fest is back! Mt. Joy, Living Colour, Nané, and Moving Panoramas will rock the biergarten and it will be a show you won't want to miss. This will also be a perfect time to sample all the Love Street brews (including the new Love Street Citrus) Karbach Brewing will be ready to pour. (We're actually bigger fans of their Rodeo Clown line of IPAs — yes, we're those kinds of beer drinkers. Sorry.) 3 pm.

Nikki Glaser: One Night with Nikki Glaser
Nikki Glaser is a comic who isn't afraid to get a little taboo in her stand-up. After all, she had a Comedy Central series, Not Safe with Nikki Glaser, where Glaser and some of comedy’s funniest voices joked, learned, and shared their personal stories about sex, relationships, and other taboo topics. She also put a lot of her business out in the streets with her 2019 Netflix special Banging'. Expect her to get more down and dirty when she performs here this weekend. 7 pm.

Kem and Babyface in concert
R&B titans Kem and Babyface hit the road together again to solidify themselves in the hearts of many. Joining the two musicians is the queen of daytime and Emmy-winning TV host/comedian/actress Sherri Shepherd, who will serve as host. Kem is touring in support of his 2020 album, Love Always Wins. (He also has an upcoming EP in the works.) Babyface has released 10 albums in his career, including 2015's Return of the Tender Lover. 8 pm.

Sunday, April 17

Easter Art Market
After you're done having your yearly Easter brunch with the fam, head to this art market Re:HAB Bar On The Bayou will be hosting. There will be plenty of local artists and vendors on hand. Crawler Trawler will provide the food, making sure crawfish will be on deck throughout the day. And let's not forget the live music from The Zydeco Dots. Also, we're pretty sure some Easter eggs will be hidden here and there. Noon.

Punk Rock Garage Sale at Brash Brewing
We're glad to see the garage sale Insomnia Gallery and Deep End Records put together every month is still going strong. Skip those big box retailers and head to the Punk Rock Garage Sale instead for a true chance to score. More than 24 individual vendors will fill up Brash Brewing inside and out, selling everything cool: music, art, toys, books, comics, clothing, music gear, and crazy handmade offerings. 1 pm.

Alley Theatre presents Dead Man's Cell Phone
An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet café. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man. So begins this wildly imaginative comedy by MacArthur “Genius” Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House). It's an off-the-wall play about the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world. Through Sunday, May 8. 2:30 and 7:30 pm.

event-planner

Movie Review

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is technically stunning but lacks emotion

Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Matt Damon in The Odyssey.

For a story that is 3,000 years old and has been referenced innumerable times since the advent of the moving picture, it’s striking that The Odyssey has not been adapted into a film more often. Christopher Nolan’s new film is, depending on your definition, just the fourth time in film history that someone has attempted to tell the original story (oddly, the third film — The Return — came out just two years ago).

Matt Damon stars as Odysseus, who has been gone from his home of Ithaca for over 20 years. Waiting at home for him is his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland), as well as a hall full of suitors — most notably Antinous (Robert Pattinson) — who are hoping that Penelope will finally believe that Odysseus is dead and choose to marry one of them.

In typical Nolan fashion, the film goes back-and-forth in time often to show what has happened to Odysseus in the past two decades. His sea voyages with his crew have him attacking Troy using the legendary Trojan Horse; taking on the cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin); trying to escape the clutches of the witch Circe (Samantha Morton); living with the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron); communing with the vision of Athena (Zendaya); and more.

Nolan, who wrote and directed the epic film, has a clear reverence for the material and, perhaps more than any current filmmaker, has the chops to make the sprawling story feel coherent. With a plethora of characters who have names that take some time to understand for those not familiar with the ancient tale, it’s extremely tough to wrangle everything and everyone together, and Nolan and his team make that trick seem relatively easy.

However, there’s a difference between making the story comprehensible and making it compelling, and Nolan is not as successful on this front. As portrayed in this film, it’s difficult to care whether Odysseus ever finds his way home. His connection with Penelope and Telemachus is tenuous, at best, and his status as a hero is called into question on multiple occasions. Complicated protagonists are nothing new, but in a story where the hero’s journey is the whole point, Nolan fails to make the quest all encompassing.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some standout moments along the way. The sequence in Polyphemus’ cave is tremendous, as are a few other scenes in which Nolan’s reported reliance on practical effects make you wonder how the crew accomplished what they did. Damon has said this is the hardest movie he’s ever made, and that effort shows up in every scene, especially those on the water.

At 56 years old, Damon is getting close to elder statesman status in Hollywood, and he ably embodies the role of the respected and feared leader. Hathaway, Holland, and Pattinson get the next most screentime, and each makes their character interesting if not mesmerizing. The murderer’s row of the supporting cast — Theron, Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, Elliot Page, Morton, Jon Bernthal, John Leguizamo, and more — give each scene a nice sheen whether or not their individual arc makes sense.

While the technical achievements of Nolan and his team in The Odyssey are admirable and occasionally awe-inspiring, the story he lays out is not quite as overwhelming. The structure he chose to use doesn’t allow the story to overcome the episodic nature of Odysseus’ brutal journey, keeping big emotions mostly at bay.

---

The Odyssey opens in theaters on July 17.

movies film