get your museum on

Your cheat sheet to Museum District Day: Tips for all types for the free cultureromp

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau
Holocaust Museum
The Menil Collection
Courtesy photo
Contemporary Arts Museum

Museum District Day beckons with free cultural offerings on Saturday, Sept. 25. The day-long event offers free admission to 17 Houston museums, providing a fleet of bus shuttles to take you to and from each cultural institution (Click here for free bus shuttle routes and stops).

"There's so much I'm excited about for this event," Susan Schmaeling, representing the Houston Museum District, tells Culturemap, explaining that this is the event's 14th anniversary.

Schmaeling's top underground tip of the day is the Buffalo Soldiers Museum. "From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. they do a live performance of a buffalo soldier every hour, on the hour. I think that's really cool — a lot of people don't know about this great museum," she says.

Count on CultureMap to guide you through the day, no matter your tastes. We've got a few prime picks for art lovers, in-the-know families, international tastemakers and soul-searching Houstonians.

The Art Ace

Start off with a new survey of Art 101 with the exhibition, Earth Paint Paper Wood at the Menil Collection. Featuring an array of new acquisitions, from 18th century French portraiture to 21st century watercolors and ceramics, this exhibition reveals gifts, purchases and bequests that have remained under the radar of many Menil enthusiasts.

Next, join docent-led tours of the exhibition Dance with Camera at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston to get an inside view on how art, dance and video can flow together. From noon to 3 p.m., dance instructors will be on hand to reveal their secrets and teach the tango and some ballroom boogie.

Hop back on the bus and check in at Rice Gallery to experience D-17, Sarah Oppenheimer's monumental installation that soars upward and out of the museum space. You can temper Oppenheimer's conceptual rigor with free ice cream beneath the campus' sprawling live oaks.

Get crafty as you interact with craft artists and watch demonstrations at the "Gathering of the Guilds" event at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, where the CraftTexas 2010 exhibition is also on view. Be sure to wander Convergence II to get a glimpse of currents in glass bead jewelry.

The Jet-Setting Staycationer

Just because you're staying inside the Loop doesn't mean Museum District Day can't resemble an international jaunt. See the world with Created and Found Maps - Exploration of Self and World at Houston Center for Photography. Stroll over to the Menil campus and listen in on a world music sensation, "Divine Rhythm & United Motion" of award-winning reggae band D.R.U.M.

"It's so nice to lay out on the lawn at the Menil and listen to music — usually there are little kids dancing around," Schmaeling says.

Next, take the bus to the MFAH and be whisked away to Africa with the latest exhibition, Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria, featuring artifacts that are taking a leave from their Lagos museum for the fist time. Pretend that you're galavanting through an authentic Kunsthalle at the museum's shows — German Impressionist Landscape Painting: Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt and Drawing from Nature: Landscapes by Liebermann, Corinth, and Slevogt.

To top off your tour, delve further into Central European culture at the nearby Czech Center Museum.

The Soul Seeker

Remake your mantra during Museum District Day while contemplating the Menil exhibition, Objects of Devotion, showcasing treasures from the world's religions. Next, meditate in the recreated 13th-century sacred setting at the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum.

While in the area, learn about Mark Rothko's monumental murals at a panel discussion, "Transformative Encounters with the Rothko Chapel." Professor Helen Winkler Fosdick, art conservator Carol Mancusi-Ungaro and Christopher Rothko, Ph.D. (the artist's son) will weigh in on the chapel's spiritual potential.

Contemplate the past on Caroline Street as Houston-area Holocaust survivors will speak about their experiences in appearances at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Visitors to the Holocaust Museum will also have the opportunity to create their own "stained glass windows" using contact paper and tissue paper, in conjunction with the exhibit, Never Let it Rest!

The Cultured Kiddo

The urbane adolescent comes with high entertainment expectations, and Museum District Day will not disappoint. On the top of the list is the Inventor's Workshop at the Children's Museum of Houston, where visitors can design a musical automation that will engineer tunes to be played by machines on-site (at 10:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 2:30 p.m. or 4:30 p.m.).

More music and family-fun arts and crafts stations await at The Health Museum, and the tykes can get in on hands-on climate creativity at The John C. Freeman Weather Museum.

Aspiring artists can create sock creatures inspired by Tobiah Mundt's felted work, BEING, and decorate the back patio with sidewalk chalk at Lawndale Art Center. The little prodigies can take a pitstop there with free lemonade.

Finally, children can chill out at the mini film fest, Kid Flix Mix 2010, featuring the best of the New York International Children's Film Festival, screened in the Brown Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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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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