The Eagles will play at American Airlines Center on October 11 as part of their "History of the Eagles" tour.
Photo by Sam Jones
The Eagles, a band with a reputation that has been burnished by their relative lack of output, are headed back to Dallas, adding a stop at American Airlines Center on Oct. 11 as part of the fall leg in the "History of the Eagles" tour.
The band had previously announced a 12-city reunion tour taking place in July. The Dallas date, one of 23 added in the fall, is the tour's only stop in Texas.
The Eagles burned hot and heavy in the 1970s, releasing six albums in seven years before an acrimonious break-up in 1980. Singers Glenn Frey and Don Henley both went on to successful solo careers in the '80s. The band has been back together in one form or another since 1994, even releasing a new album in 2007 called Long Road Out of Eden.
Fans can expect the band, which now consists of original members Frey and Henley, along with Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit, to play many of their iconic songs like "Hotel California," "New Kid in Town," "Take It to the Limit," "Lyin' Eyes," "Take It Easy" and more.
The band, which last came to Dallas in 2010, is touring in support of its latest project, a documentary also called History of the Eagles. The DVD features the documentary that first aired on Showtime, a concert from the band's Hotel California tour in 1977 and never-before-seen home movies, among other things.
Tickets go on sale to the general public starting June 15, although anyone with an American Express card can buy tickets starting June 9.
In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.
The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.
Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.
Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.
The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.
It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.
Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.
Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.
