In a serious blow for Texas racing fans, the Formula One United States Grand Prix has been canceled due to COVID-19. The race weekend, hosted at Austin's Circuit of The Americas, was originally scheduled for October 23-25.
"The cancellation is prudent, but painful," said COTA chain Bobby Epstein in a statement. "We had secured blockbuster performers for the evening shows, and the racing this year is fantastic. I'm disappointed for the fans, COTA employees, our community, and everyone in the Formula One Paddock."
F1 has hosted its annual United States Grand Prix in Austin since 2012; this is the first time the COTA race has been canceled.
In his statement, Epstein said that after last year's sold-out event, advanced ticket sales for 2020 were up 250 percent. "Our staff was preparing for our biggest year ever," he said.
F1 hitting the brakes is the second in a series of blows for COTA. On July 10, organizers announced that the Red Bull Grand Prix of the Americas was also off due to the novel coronavirus.
The race's cancellation is yet another massive economic blow to the hospitality industry. According to COTA, events like F1 and the Red Bull Grand Prix pump more than $420 million directly into the local economy.
As for next year's grand prix, those dates have yet to be revealed, but Epstein said he's hopeful F1 will return in 2021.
"It is my hope that the pandemic will soon pass and we will celebrate 2021 with the greatest Formula One United States Grand Prix ever!"
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.
