The Gold Chain Cowboy is playing country's biggest stage.
Parker McCollum/Facebook
One wonders if a young Parker McCollum ever dreamed he’d one day play the nation’s largest concert series growing up in Conroe, but indeed, come March 12, 2022, he will.
McCollum will make his RodeoHouston (yes, it’s technically the biggest concert in America) on March 12, 2022, the rodeo announced.
He joins McCollum icons such as George Strait (who McCollum names as a major influence), Houston’s Bun B, and stars such as Cody Johnson in 2022. More entertainers on the lineup will be announced January 5, 2022.
“We can’t wait to welcome yet another Texas native and country music star to the RodeoHouston stage for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo’s 90th anniversary celebration in 2022,” said rodeo president and CEO Chris Boleman in a statement. “Parker McCollum’s passion for country music and Texas roots will certainly resonate among rodeo fans and Texans, alike.”
Fans will recognize McCollum from his 2015 album The Limestone Kid. From there, the young artist sold out many of Texas’ most well-known venues including Stubbs, Billy Bob’s Texas, and Nutty Brown Amphitheatre, according to his bio. His latest effort is dubbed Gold Chain Cowboy.
His most popular song, “Pretty Heart,” is a platinum-certified hit. McCollum’s shared songwriting credits includes mega-names such as Wade Bowen, Randy Rogers, Rhett Atkins, and Miranda Lambert.
Individual RodeoHouston tickets will go on sale to the public January 13, 2022 online, with prices starting at $20, plus a $4 convenience fee.
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.
