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6 best movies, podcasts, and TV shows to stream in Houston this weekend

Charly Clive stars as a young woman trying to escape her intrusive, X-rated thoughts.

Photo courtesy of HBO

This weekend, we can all rest easy knowing we've dodged a devastating hurricane (our thoughts with those affected by Laura — here's how you can help). You can celebrate by venturing out, or you could simply stay in and stream some hot new releases.

This week, look for a most excellent return of two of cinema's most favorite, rockin' airheads. Check out a podcast that makes the boring...interesting. And a new TV shows sheds light on the dirty disruption that OCD can cause. Here are your best weekend streaming picks.

Movies

Bill and Ted Face the Music (Orion)
Yeah, Tenet may be the big-name movie that''ll be hitting selected theaters and drive-ins this weekend. But this latest installment in the Bill and Ted saga is highly anticipated as well. The film, which boasts Houston producers, has airhead rock-star wannabes Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves) once again going time, space, and all kind of different dimensions in order to save their young daughters, as well as human civilization as we know it. (Available for rent on Friday)

The Binge (Hulu)
For those of you wondering when a comic version of The Purge was gonna show up, it's finally here! Instead of people using one night to commit any crime they want, this comedy takes place on the night where people can legally take all the drugs they possibly can. The movie mostly follows a trio of teens who meet a fair share of messed-up people as they try to get to a rager of a party. Vince Vaughn co-stars as a conservative (of course), high-school principal. (Premiering Friday)

Podcasts

Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Alex Schmidt (self-distributed)
Ken Jennings isn't the only fascinating Jeopardy! champion out there, folks. We also have comedy writer/emoji creator Alex Schmidt (formerly of The Cracked Podcast), who is out to show how awesome the mundane is with this weekly podcast. Whether it's microwave ovens, grocery stores, the color gray, or U.S. post offices (who we can all agree need our support now more than ever), Schmidt is ready to give us the beauty in the boring.

The Treatment (KCRW)
For nearly 25 years, film critic/gadfly Elvis Mitchell has done this weekly interview show from the studios of California public-radio station KCRW. He has talked to big-screen stars both behind and in front of the screen, and he still continues to do so. Just this year alone, he's hollered at filmmakers Oliver Stone, Judd Apatow, and The Old Guard director Gina Prince-Bythewood. But he also continues to talk to people in arts and entertainment who, just like him, are fascinating as hell.

Television

Love Fraud (Showtime)
We don't know if this was the filmmakers' intentions, but this four-part docuseries serves as yet another jarring reminder that maybe being alone isn't a bad idea. Oscar-winning documentarians Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp) follow a group of women and their search for Richard Scott Smith, the criminal/bigamist/flim-flam man who spent the past two decades scamming ladies out of their money by simply telling them those three little words. (Premiering Sunday at 8 pm)

Pure (HBO Max)
While television shows portray characters who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder as quirky, good-hearted weirdos (shout-out to Monk!), this British import is out to show people how much OCD can wreck a person's life. Based on Rose Cartwright's biography of the same name, this coming-of-age dramedy focuses on a young lady (Charly Clive) who moves to London and tries to stop the intrusive, sexual thoughts that are stuck in her head. (Now streaming)

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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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