Music in the (hot) air

Taking the kids to the Houston Symphony: It's a hill thing

I ended up bringing a 2- and a 4-year-old to the Houston Symphony last night.

This wasn't on purpose. I'm not into intentionally inflicting pain on myself or others. A babysitter fell through and I wanted to see a 25-year-old wunderkind conductor I'd interviewed do his thing, so it was me and the kids — and Tchaikovsky's Fourth.

It turned out to be a perfect combination for two rambunctious toddlers (and my kids can redefine rambunctious — the one and only time they visited the CultureMap's office, they drove my boss, Editor-in-Chief Clifford Pugh, out of the building so quickly that you would have thought there was a fire — or at least a tanker spill on the premises). But neither their natural loudness (the whole concept of an inside voice ... not happening) or the classical music atmosphere turned out to be an obstacle.

Not when the concert is one of the Houston Symphony's Miller Outdoor Theater affairs.

Now, I didn't sit under the covered pavilion, which was completely filled by the time we wandered over from the Hermann Park playground, a perfect pre-concert family warmup, anyways. Instead, the boys and I hit the hill, the land of blankets, wine bottles and kids as far as the eye can see. There are actually two levels of hill around Miller, the high plateau everyone sits on and then, the large trek-up section and they're separated by a paved walkway.

It turns out, there's nothing like some hill sprints (or toddler "Wheee! downs) as a warmup for a Mozart: Overture to The Marriage of Figaro opener.

But once conductor Diego Matheuz took the stage, the kids did largely pay attention. OK, the 2-year--old fell asleep 15 minutes in (but he's snoozed through NBA Finals Games too, so it's not like he's discriminating against the arts). My 4-year-old seemed to like the music (Matheuz does make his concerts accessible), loved the clapping, was endlessly amused by seeing how far the full moon would dip behind Miller's top and wasn't close to being one of the louder people on the hill. (Here's looking at you — special wine cooler showoff guy!)

Culture without crying chaos. That's a success.

The music ran 46 minutes flat too, the perfect amount of time to prevent serious fidgeting from setting in. By the time, I was getting asked when we could run down the hill again, we were running down the hill.

What most struck me about the night was just how many young kids there were though. It was a scene that was almost more New York than Houston. When my wife and I are New York, we always take our kids to high-end restaurants like Blue Hill and Bouley and get welcomed with open arms, something we largely never try in a still-more-restaurant-conservative Houston, with the exception of a few spots like Reef.

While on the hill, we even ran into a family from our neighborhood that we had no idea were Symphony fans. It's a small musical word.

Check out CultureMap's exclusive piece on Diego Matheuz — a prodigy who's gone from dealing with Italy's debt to Houston success — as part of our ever-expanding Sunday coverage (if you think CultureMap is a Monday through Friday 9-5 thing like many websites, you're missing some of the best stories in the city). For now, I'm off.

There's another young conductors concert tonight at Miller — this one is Krzysztof Urbański, the rare conductor who doesn't use notes, relying on a photographic memory instead — and we're hitting the hill again.

Next weekend, over the Fourth of July holiday, the Symphony closes its summer nights series with another outdoor show at Miller, the annual Star Spangled fireworks salute.

Beware Symphony patrons. If this keeps up, you could see a lot more kids at Jones Hall in the future — including a rowdy pair of toddlers.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

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.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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