Up With People

Up With People brings musical message of hope to Houston from all corners of the world

The Up With People cast perform Friday, April 21, at St. Pius X High School.

Up With People Courtesy Photo

Some very helpful, curious and talented visitors have been making their upbeat presence known throughout Houston this past week as the Up With People tour has come to town bringing their volunteer and performance spirit with them.

Yes, the organization first founded in the '60s as a people-positive counter to any violent strains in the counter culture movement is still flourishing and still offering young adults the opportunity to tour the world. Unlike a musical group or band whose main focus on a tour is getting in, performing and then moving on to the next city, these Up With People people arrived in Houston ready to explore the city while offering their own gifts in return for our hospitality.

This international cast of a 100 young adults, representing 20 different countries — some as far away as Madagascar and Nepal — are living with 43 local host families. Throughout their stay, they’ll volunteer with community nonprofit organizations and schools and on Friday (April 21) their Houston visit will culminate with a big musical show at St. Pius X High School before embarking on the European leg of their 2017 tour.

Homecoming

This week-long Houston stop is also a bit of a homecoming for one member of the current cast with deep Up With People and Houston roots. Chameli Belk-Gupta, the granddaughter of Up With People founder, J. Blanton Belk, graduated from Lamar High School in Houston, and so her host family this week is her real family.

I had a chance to catch up with Chameli, who was on a short break from a week packed with volunteer service and rehearsals, and her mother, Jenny Belk-Gupta, who was born the same year that her father founded Up With People and toured as a cast member herself in the mid-80s.

When discussing the founding of the organization in the '60s and those first song writers who helped hone the Up With People inspirational message, including an Up With People theme song, Jenny Belk-Gupta admits that in cynical times those ideals might sound naive.

“Now it sounds a little bit simple and hokey, but the message is really great. Instead of down with your political party or down with your beliefs, up with everybody. Up with people.”

Even when she left performing and touring, married and began raising a family, Jenny Belk-Gupta remained a supporter of the organization, often hosted cast members and instilled those beliefs in her daughters.

“I’ve always loved Up With People,” explained Chameli, who says one of her first memories was dancing in the aisles at an Up With People concert her mother took her to see when she was four years old. “I’ve been raised with the values and raised to live as a global citizen, but I’m also very passionate about things that Up With People believes in. I decided that before going to college I wanted to take a year and do Up With People and get this new perspective.”

Timeless Message

When I asked the Belk women how organization and touring experience has changed over the generations, both mother and daughter say at almost exactly the same time: “Our message hasn’t changed.”

“The core is still the same,” Jenny want on to explain, “but I think Up With People has kept up with the times very well and adapted the show to modern concerns.”

Chameli chimes in with examples of some of the current issues raised in the music of this latest show production including a song about global warming and one about Novel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, a song that Chameli says she still gets goosebumps every time she sings it.

Chameli also notes the organization has moved with the times when it comes to connecting with people around the world with a strong social media presence.

Yet Jenny Belk-Gupta sees many similarities between the issues that concern us in the 21st century and when her father founded the organization.

“I think it’s interesting it was 1965, and now 2017, and here we are again with racial tensions in this country and all over the world and sectarian strife between faiths,” pondered Jenny Belk-Gupta. “As far as we’ve come, we’re back to the basics again of needing to respect each other and find common ground because we have to or we’re going to implode.”

Still the Up With People message and show remains a very hopeful one, and Houston will even get its own space song of hope at the Friday night show, “Moon Rider.” The cast will sing a special rendition of the song about and inspired by Captain Eugene Cernan, Commander of Apollo 17.

Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon and later served on the UWP board for several decades. Fittingly, for both Houston and the show’s international cast, the song paints that image the astronaut saw from moon, of an Earth without borders, the place we all call home.

Up With People performs in Houston, Friday, April 21 at St. Pius X High School. For advanced tickets check the tour website.

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Movie Review

Masters of the Universe reboot mistakes nostalgia for good filmmaking

Photo courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

Nicholas Galitzine in Masters of the Universe.

Most children who grew up in the '80s were either a fan of or knew about Masters of the Universe. The property, based on a line of toys from Mattel, spawned a popular-if-short-lived animated TV series, comic books, a comic strip, magazines, and a 1987 live action film starring Dolph Lundgren. It is now the latest IP to get a nostalgic reboot in the form of a new blockbuster film.

Nicholas Galitzine stars as Prince Adam of the planet Eternia, who as a child is exiled to Earth to protect the Sword of Power from invaders led by the evil Skeletor (voiced by Jared Leto). Years later, Adam is now working in the human resources department of a generic company, well-versed in corporate speak but disconnected from his heritage other than a never-ending desire to find the sword he lost when he crash-landed on Earth.

Spoiler alert, he recovers the sword and is soon thereafter rescued from Earth by childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes). Adam’s return to Eternia is less-than-stellar, as the citizens have difficulty believing he’s the long-lost prince, especially because he initially can’t harness the power of the sword. Naturally, he figures it out eventually, leading to a number of face-offs between him and Skeletor’s minions.

Directed by Travis Knight (Bumblebee) and written by a four-person writing team, the film is yet another cynical attempt at exploiting a certain group’s nostalgia without putting any effort into actually making a good movie. The very first scene of the film is a CGI-filled battle between characters that have barely been introduced, much less explained to the audience. For longtime fans, this will be no issue. For everyone else, though, it immediately signals that the filmmakers don’t care about making them care about anyone or anything in the story.

Instead, they substitute actual character development with a campy and self-deprecating vibe that’s in line with the original series. That’s all well and good if the intended audience was solely 50-year-olds, but for a movie that presumably wants to bring in younger audiences, it’s a choice that never fully comes through. Some characters try to be funnier than others, and most of the “jokes” land with a thud since the tone hasn’t been properly established.

Worst of all, there are never any meaningful stakes in the film. Adam is impervious to damage, something that would have been truly funny if commented upon, but instead is just treated as fact for no good reason. Skeletor is not intended to be a fearsome villain, as he often bumbles through scenes or line deliveries, but the lack of a truly terrible enemy keeps the story stuck in neutral. Combined with bloodless PG-13 fight scenes with no sense of realness to them, there is rarely anything about which to get excited.

Galitzine has turned heads as both a gay (Red, White & Royal Blue) and straight (The Idea of You) romantic interest, but he can never find his footing as the leading man here. The film never allows him to develop into a true action hero, so instead he comes across as a pretender most of the time. Mendes is okay, but she, too, isn’t given the opportunity to become much more than a sidekick. Idris Elba is entirely wasted as Teela’s father Duncan. Leto lets loose, which works because he’s the only character without a recognizable face.

There may be a world in which rebooting Masters of the Universe makes sense, but it does not exist when the film that is offered doesn’t even try to appeal to anyone who doesn’t have a deeply ingrained knowledge of the decades-old property. By relying on nostalgia instead of good filmmaking, the film may get good box office returns on opening weekend, but it’s difficult to imagine that it will endure.

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Masters of the Universe opens in theaters on June 5.

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