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    Education power

    A sexier Cinco de Mayo helps Musiqa fight the Texas arts funding cuts

    Joel Luks
    May 7, 2011 | 8:29 pm
    • Jazz composer/pianist David Harris entertains a captive audience with his owncompositions.
      Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra
    • Photo by Rajat Chopra

    Musiqa rolled out the red carpet for its annual spring benefit, welcoming Cinco de Mayo with a touch of sophistication for a cause Thursday night. MusiqaFiesta raised funds for its National Endowment of the Arts supported educational efforts and initiatives, mingling margaritas and sombreros with a mini concert.

    Leave it up to soprano Karol Bennett and pianist Tali Morgulis to sexy up the evening with sultry and passionate Latin American tunes, warming up the minimalist offices and breathtaking architecture of PageSoutherlandPage with sass and class. Continuing this South of the border musical journey was jazz pianist/composer and eight-year Musiqa board president, David Harris, who premiered a romantic piece dedicated to his wife Sharyn and his two daughters.

    Chairs Alison Bieser and Maria Glymph masterminded the event, including an ambitious silent auction which included a special commission by Musiqa composer Karim Al-Zand.

    "The arts are not a luxury, they are essential," Musiqa's founder and artistic director Anthony Brandt noted to a responsive audience, earning an ovation for his remarks. "It's impossible to sustain families and build communities without the tools the arts give us for self-exploration and self-expression."

    Recognizing that Musiqa's partners in helping reach 30,000 children, educator Rickey Polidore and Alley Theatre's Joe Angel Babb were acknowledged for their role in helping successfully implement "Around the World with Musiqa" and "Musiqa Remix," two of the non-profit organization's educational programs.

    Standing to lose $20,000 due to budget cuts to the Texas Commission on the Arts, Musiqa is not letting up its efforts to provide free arts education programs to at-risk youth and Title I schools.

    Those supporting music education included PageSoutherlandPage host Jeff Bricker, Sue Payne, Joe Wilson, Carrie and Ed Shoemake, Isabelle Ganz, Mary Lou Swift, Roger Hochman, Scotty Thompson, Rose Ann Medlin, William Joor, Alex Montoya, Marlon Scott and Marsha and Sidney Wallace.

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    Movie Review

    Final Destination: Bloodlines reboots cult favorite horror franchise

    Alex Bentley
    May 15, 2025 | 4:30 pm
    Kaitlyn Santa Juana in Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Photo by Eric Milner
    Kaitlyn Santa Juana in Final Destination: Bloodlines.

    On the surface, the Final Destination films really shouldn’t work. There is no villain other than the concept of death itself, and nearly every death that occurs is foreshadowed so heavily that it removes the normal suspense that comes in horror films. And yet the franchise was successful enough to spawn five films over 11 years in the early 2000s, and now a reboot, Final Destination: Bloodlines.

    A fantastic opening sequence set in the 1960s sets both the tone and the plot of the film, in which Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has a recurring nightmare about a disaster that her grandmother, Iris (Gabrielle Rose), helped to avert. A visit to the reclusive Iris convinces Stefani that she and her family should not exist, and that each one of them is destined to meet a grisly end in the near future.

    Met with resistance from her family members, Kaitlyn is unsurprisingly proven right as the film goes along, with different people dying in a variety of bizarre ways. A visit to William Bludworth (the late Tony Todd), a mortician who’s been the one constant in the series, provides a glimmer of hope that they can cheat death. But will they figure it out before it’s too late?

    Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, and written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, the film does not try to reinvent the wheel for the concept. The entire point is to get as creative as possible with the death scenes, and the filmmakers take that mandate seriously, with each successive death becoming increasingly gruesome. The Rube Goldberg-like manner in which each death occurs makes the scenes come off as entertaining instead of off-putting.

    The idea of Death hunting down an entire family line due to the actions of the family elder is a solid twist on the series’ central premise, and that change keeps the film from feeling repetitive. The story also introduces the possibility that the entire series is connected due to Iris’ actions, with the character possessing a scrapbook that references well-known incidents from previous films, a fun Easter egg for longtime fans.

    The creativity of the kill sequences does not carry over to the overall story, though. Almost every character in the film only exists in order to meet a horrific end, so anything that they have going on outside of being stalked by Death is purely window dressing. Consequently, it’s hard to really care about anybody, even if they are all related to one another.

    Because characters are so easily dispatched in the film, the cast is devoid of well-known actors. This is by far Santa Juana’s biggest role to date, and she does well enough to want to see more of her in the future. Adults like Alex Zahara and Rya Kihlstedt are character actors who bring some history with them, while the younger group is composed of people still trying to make names for themselves.

    Final Destination: Bloodlines is a solid return for the franchise, even if it feels more like a one-off film rather than a justification for more stories in the future. But given how easily the concept can be adapted into new circumstances, don’t be surprised if another movie pops up in a couple of years.

    ---

    Final Destination: Bloodlines opens in theaters on May 16.

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