weekend event planner

Here are the top 8 things to do in Houston this weekend

Grammy-winning soprano Jessica Jones presents an hip evening of opera.

Photo courtesy of Opera in the Heights

Halloween is upon us. On top of the spooky haunted houses here to scare you, a few fall festivals are here. The 22nd Houston Polish Festival is currently underway at AMC Studio 30, continuing through Sunday. The ten-day, Blessington Farms Pumpkin Patch and Fall Festival in Simonton starts on Thursday.

And the 12-day, Ann and Stephen Kaufman Jewish Book & Arts Festival begins on Saturday at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center of Houston.

Without a doubt, the scariest thing happening this weekend is comics (and notorious joke thieves) Dane Cook and Jay Mohr will be in town performing — at the same time!

Let's get through this together. Here's your best bets for the weekend:

Thursday, October 31

The Exorcist: The Director's Cut at Alamo Drathouse LaCenterra
What better way to celebrate Halloween than watching a horror movie that basically set the template for how scary movies should terrify the hell outta people? This version of William Friedkin's supernatural classic, with Linda Blair as the head-spinning, pea soup-spewing girl possessed by Satan himself, features 10 minutes of footage deleted before the film's 1973 release. So, expect even more things from the movie to mess you up. 7:30 pm.

Whiskey & Witchcraft Party at Bosscat Kitchen & Libations
If you want to spend this Halloween drinking yourself silly instead of chasing down candy, Bosscat will be having a Halloween party (benefitting Hermann Park Conservancy) that'll get you in the spooky, sloshed spirit. We're talking cocktails, costume contests, a live DJ, and more. Tickets include entry to the private event, one cocktail, and small bites. Prizes will be awarded for Best Couples Costume, Scariest Costume, and Funniest Costume. 8 pm.

Friday, November 1

Jessica Jones at Space HTX
Jessica Jones, an opera-singing, Grammy-winning soprano (and Opera in the Heights alumna). She'll be here to do an evening of audience favorites, an evening that will include a cocktail hour, dinner, concert, and an aria raffle. 6:30 pm.

Sabrina Claudio at House of Blues Houston
Florida alt-R & B singer Sabrina Claudio is a performer you almost hate to admit you enjoy listening to. The half-Cuban/half-Puerto Rican artist nearly had her career derailed when it was discovered she posted some racist tweets years ago on an old Twitter account. (She has since apologized, but y'all know Twitter doesn't forget about that stuff.) Nevertheless, she continues to churn out good music, like the tunes on her recently-released second album, Truth Is. 7:30 pm.

Saturday, November 2

A Funky Good Time at Smart Financial Centre
Majic 102.1 will be taking a lot of people back to the '70s and '80s with this concert. The lineup is a full-fledged collection of funk legends: Cameo, Rose Royce, SOS Band, Zapp, Dazz Band, Lakeside, and Morris Day, the frontman for The Time. This show is definitely for all those people who like to enjoy live music while sipping on bottles of Crown Royal they snuck into the show. Majic on-air personality Funky Larry Jones will emcee the event. 5:30 pm.

Blue Note Records 80th Birthday Celebration at Wortham Theater Center
Da Camera of Houston will bring in artists to celebrate the birthday of Blue Note Records, one of most legendary jazz labels out there. (This makes us wish Madlib would've dropped another Blue Note remix album.) The first date in a nationwide tour, the lineup features Kandace Springs, Houston native James Francies and the James Carter Organ Trio. They each will perform a set of their own music, followed by a finale with all of the artists performing a classic Blue Note tune. 8 pm.

Sunday, November 3

Depressed Cake Shop and Bake Sale at Silver Street Studios
It's time once again to make some desserts for depression. Jody Stevens of JodyCakes will host the seventh annual bake sale, which will have unique, grey-colored baked goods that are thematically tied to mental health issues. Attendees will get a chance to bid on one-of-a-kind auction cakes that will be on display, from some of the city’s top restaurants, bakery owners, and pastry chefs. All proceeds will be donated to The Montrose Center and NAMI Greater Houston. 1-5 pm.

House (Hausu) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The MFAH will basically wrap up this Halloween weekend with one head trip of a movie. This 1977 Japanese horror/comedy/whatever, about a schoolgirl who travels with six classmates to her ailing aunt’s creaky country home, is also known as a crazy cult classic. This Movie Houstonians Love selection will be introduced by Fareena Arefeen, Houston’s second Youth Poet Laureate and a graduate of the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. 5 pm.

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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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weekend event planner

Here are the top 8 things to do in Houston this weekend

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

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