look how they shine

Coldplay clocks into Houston as part of global low-carbon stadium tour

Coldplay in all their sustainable glory.

Courtesy photo

Rock band Coldplay is coming to Houston — part of a newly launched 2022 tour to complement a new record, Music Of The Spheres, which will be released on Friday, October 15.

The tour will hit stadiums around the world, including NRG Stadium on Sunday, May 8. The band will make only one other Texas stop at the Cotton Bowl on Friday, May 6. Tickets go on sale on Friday, October 22 at 10 am.

The global juggernaut is also pledging to make tour as sustainable and low-carbon as possible.

The "Music Of The Spheres World Tour" begins on March 18, with the band's first ever show in Costa Rica, before traveling to the Dominican Republic, Mexico, USA, Germany, Poland, France, Belgium, and the UK.

It currently ends on September 10 in Rio De Janeiro at the Rock in Rio Festival. Opening acts will include H.E.R. and London Grammar at selected dates.

The band has had a commitment to make tours as environmentally beneficial as possible since 2019, and this tour will follow a set of sustainability initiatives and environmental commitments including:

cutting direct emissions by 50 percent compared to the band’s most recent tour (2016-17).
powering the show entirely by renewable, super-low emission energy — with solar installations at every venue, waste cooking oil, a kinetic stadium floor, and kinetic bikes powered by fans.
drawing down more CO2 than the tour produces with a range of nature- and technology-based solutions, including planting one tree for every ticket sold.
providing each venue with a sustainability rider requesting best environmental practices.
encouraging fans to use low carbon transport to and from shows via the official tour app built by SAP, rewarding those who do with a discount at venues.
ensuring all merchandise is sustainably and ethically sourced.
offering free drinking water and striving to eliminate plastic bottles at every venue.

They'll also put 10 percent of all earnings into a fund for environmental and socially conscious causes, including ClientEarth, One Tree Planted and The Ocean Cleanup; and establish a partnership with climate change experts at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute — Climate Change and the Environment to quantify the impact of the tour – both positively and negatively — on the environment.

To ensure tickets get into the hands of fans directly, the tour will have a Verified Fan presale available for all U.S. dates. Registration is available now through Sunday, October 17 at 8 pm via Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program.

Verified Fan presale begins Wednesday, October 20 at 10 am through Thursday, October 21 at 10 pm.

Tour dates are as follows (Texas dates bolded):

March 18: San Jose, Costa Rica - Estadio Nacional
March 22: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic - Estadio Olímpico
March 25: Monterrey - Estadio BBVA
March 29: Guadalajara - Estadio Akron
April 3: Mexico City - Foro Sol
April 23: Santa Clara - Levi’s Stadium
April 26: Los Angeles - SoFi Stadium
May 3: Phoenix - State Farm Stadium
May 6: Dallas - Cotton Bowl Stadium
May 8: Houston - NRG Stadium
May 28: Chicago - Soldier Field
June 1: Washington DC - FedExField
June 4: East Rutherford, NJ - Metlife Stadium
June 8: Philadelphia - Lincoln Financial Field
June 11: Atlanta - Mercedes-Benz Stadium
June 14: Tampa - Raymond James Stadium

music sustainability concerts

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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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess