weekend event planner

Here are the top 9 things to do in Houston this weekend

Stranger Things are happening at Present Company.

This weekend finds myriad events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. After celebrating history, celebrate some cute dogs.

The Houston World Series of Dog Shows has already began over at NRG Center. All this weekend, dog lovers can catch more than 30 independent breed specialty competitions, get hands-on experience with more than 110 breeds and discuss their advantages and disadvantages with breed experts. It's gonna be a shaggy good time.

And, of course, there are plenty of other fun events all over town:

Thursday, July 18

Celeste Barber at House of Blues
Australian comic actress Celeste Barber has gained a very massive Instagram following (we're talking 5.8 million followers here), thanks to her recreating sexy, usually scantily clad photos from such celebs as Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, and Miley Cyrus. She's now built a one-woman show around being Instagram-famous, and she's touring it around the country. She talks about her most famous photos as well as the celebs, stalkers, and mean commenters she's had to deal with. 6:30 pm.

Stranger Things '80s and '90s Party at Present Company
There's no doubt in our minds that a lot of you have been at the house, binge-watching the latest season of Stranger Things. If you're a big fan of Eleven and all those other kids who stumble upon the weird goings-on in their Indiana hometown, RTB Event Group has a nice, little theme party for you. We're talking props and decorations, staff members dressing like the characters, and a giant Demogorgon that spits. DJs Dayta and FREDster will provide the synth-pop. 9 pm to 2 am.

Friday, July 19

Fresh Arts Summit at Silver Street Studios
Fresh Arts will host Houston’s first artist summit, which was created to provide artists with essential business skills in arts marketing and self-promotion, financial management and fundraising, copyrights & legal resources and other topics related to arts entrepreneurship. Highlights of the Summit include an attendee reception, networking opportunities, multimedia presentations, hands-on workshops and roundtable discussions. Noon.

Palais Royal presents Juice Box Drive with No Kid Hungry and Kids’ Meals
Are we the only ones who think back to our childhood whenever somebody brings up Palais Royal in Meyerland? Remember all those Saturday afternoons with your momma, trying to while away the hours as she tried on one outfit after another? Kids and their moms can take part in a juice box drive there, to help ensure a juice box is delivered with each nutritious meal Kids’ Meals Inc. provides to hungry children in Houston. Houston Texans Cheerleaders will be around to meet-and-greet. 10 am.

Saturday, July 20

Houston Brunch Festival at Isles Eatery and Rum Bar
There's a brunch festival happening this week — and it's the greatest news we've heard in a long time! C'mon, who doesn't love brunch? This fest will feature some of the best restaurants in the brunch game serving up tasting size portions of the brunch items they do best. They will also have the brunch beverages people love — Bloody Marys, Mimosas, beer, and wine. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Houston Museum of African American Culture. 11 am.

Long Day's Journey Into Night at MFAH
As far as trippy movie experiences go, this neo-noir from Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan is certainly one of the most surreal movies to come out this year. The first half tells the story of an embittered man trying to track down the manipulative woman he fell hard for through flashbacks and flash-forwards. The second half has the man experiencing the most accurate representation of a dream that’s ever been put on film. It's an amazing, mind-bending treat. 7 pm (2 pm Sunday).

Sunday, July 21

This is Spinal Tap at Alamo Drafthouse LaCenterra
"These go to 11." "Hello, Cleveland!" "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever." We could spend this whole blurb just mentioning all the quote-worthy lines from Rob Reiner's classic 1984 mockumentary, which follows the titular heavy-metal band, led by frontman David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), and bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer). And it's still as funny now as it was back then. 3:15 pm.

The Try Guys at Revention Music Center
This weekend is a big one for fans of YouTube stars. On Saturday, makeup-tutorial guru James Charles will be entertaining his "sisters" in Sugar Land on Saturday night. And, on Sunday, the quartet of ex-Buzzfeed employees known as The Try Guys — Keith Habersberger, Ned Fulmer, Zach Kornfeld, and the recently out-and-proud Eugene Lee Yang — will be doing a show full of the shenanigans they usually do on their YouTube channel. 7:30 pm.

event-planner

Movie Review

New Pixar film Elio is fun but falls short of Disney's top tier

Photo courtesy of Pixar

Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio.

Pixar has done a ton of different things in the 28 feature films they’ve released over the past 30 years, but the one they’d never done is deal with aliens (and, no, the alien toys in Toy Story don’t count). Now they’re going where many storytellers have gone before, but in their own unique way, in the new film Elio.

Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a space fanatic who has recently lost both of his parents in an unnamed event. His Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is now his guardian, and because she happens to be a member of the U.S. Space Force, Elio finds himself tantalizingly close to communications from space. With a desire to be abducted by aliens for both curiosity and sentimental reasons, Elio sends a message into space, hoping for some kind of response.

He gets that and more when a ship full of multiple types of beings takes him into space, believing him to be a leader instead of a child. An encounter with a hostile force led by Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) gives Elio both a new friend, Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), and responsibility for maintaining peace during an unexpected galactic crisis.

Pixar has not typically followed the route of many Disney movies of giving their child protagonist the trauma of dead parents, and doing so here is the first of a few minor missteps. Having Olga be his mom instead of his aunt would have altered their dynamic, but only slightly. While Elio is shown to miss his parents, his major focus is on making contact with aliens. Since the film only briefly deals with his grief, it would have been better served by excising it altogether.

For the most part, the film is goofy, with Elio’s enthusiasm for aliens matched by the oddness of the creatures he meets in space. The filmmakers - there are three credited directors and three credited writers - seem to have taken inspiration from sea creatures and Pixar’s own history, as the main bad guy emulates Mike and Sully’s boss from Monsters, Inc. Almost every character in the film is heightened to a degree that makes for funny situations, but not as much sentimentality as other Pixar offerings.

Surprisingly, especially since the film ends with a voiceover from notable astronomer Carl Sagan, the filmmakers play fast and loose with real-life science. Elio’s journeys to and from the alien spaceship are treated as close-to-instantaneous trips, even involving portals directly to Earth. The idea of the story doesn’t allow them to delve into things like relativistic time dilation, but there still could have been other scientific references to keep the story aboveboard.

There are very few stars to be found among the film’s voice cast other than Saldaña and Garrett, who are each fine if unmemorable. Kibreab and Edgerly are given many more scenes than anyone else, and they each do a great job of bringing out both the joy and naivete of their characters. Some lesser-known actors like Jameela Jamil, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Brendan Hunt show up in minor roles, but they don’t stand out in any way.

The story and characters in Elio are sweet and fun, but the film as a whole falls well short of the top tier Pixar movies. The filmmakers could have gone many different directions with a story about a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, and the way they chose ended up being innocuous and less than compelling.

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Elio opens in theaters on June 20.

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weekend event planner

Here are the top 9 things to do in Houston this weekend

Movie Review

New Pixar film Elio is fun but falls short of Disney's top tier

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