weekend event planner

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

Jay Leno brings the laughs to Houston.

Photo courtesy of Society for the Performing Arts

Don't look now, but it's December. Christmas. Hanukkah. Kwanzaa. Festivus. A month of nothing but holidays. Tinsel. Peppermint lattes. Frenzied shopping inquiries for "Baby Yoda."

What's a Houstonian to do? Relax and enjoy these calming weekend events.

Thursday, December 5

Cocktails & Conversations Series: Wines From Around the World - Sake: A Culturation Exploration at The Health Museum
To all the wine connoisseurs, cowboys, and novices out there, celebrate the history and health benefits of wine at this lovely, little mixer. Thanks to the Japan America Society of Houston, guests will be able to taste sake, explore Japanese culture, sample Japanese snacks and enjoy Passing the Baton, a documentary on sake brewing that has been selected for Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2019. 4 pm.

Aaron Sanchez at 40 Below
Aaron Sanchez is an award-winning celebrity chef (you might've seen him on Chopped or Chopped Jr.) and Texas native who'll be in town promoting his new memoir Where I Come From: Life Lessons from a Latino Chef. This event will feature Sánchez and good friend Shakey Graves (who will perform afterwards) as they share stories, answer culinary quandaries and basically talk about being two proud Mexicans from Texas. All guests will receive an autographed copy of the memoir and tasty bites. 6 pm.

Friday, December 6

Mozart and Aucoin at Hobby Center for the Performing Arts
Da Camera of Houston's 2019–20 season continues with Mozart and Aucoin, a compelling performance by the world-renowned Brentano Quartet. The ensemble returns to Da Camera for the premiere of a new work by composer Matthew Aucoin, for Da Camera and Carnegie Hall. The ensemble will also perform Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s String Quintet No. 2 in C Minor, K. 406/516. So, you're definitely in for an evening of sophisticated strings. 7:30 pm.

Jay Leno at Jones Hall
Jay Leno hasn't had a good couple of weeks. While he was a guest judge on America's Got Talent awhile back, he allegedly told an offensive joke (it didn't make air) that judge Gabrielle Union complained about. Unfortunately, she ended up getting fired, which Variety claimed was because of her speaking up about the toxic working environment. Do you think he'll talk about it during his Society for the Performing Arts show? Not likely. You think he'll do jokes about stupid people and airplane food? Hmmm. 8 pm.

Saturday, December 7

Segments & Spaces at Archway Gallery
Venezuelan artist Veronica Dyer will be showing off her latest paintings and sculptures at this new exhibit. Dyer creates dynamic paintings and sculptures in a style that she refers to as “abstract, with an industrial tendency.” In both her paintings and sculptures, areas of the composition are defined with geometric forms. The paintings incorporate the additional element of bold — and sometimes unconventional — color palettes. On view through Thursday, January 2, 2020. 5-8 pm.

Pride & Joy at Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church
The Gay Men's Chorus of Houston and the Bayou City Women's Chorus, collectively known as the Bayou City Performing Arts, will present this concert, which echoes the tolerance, social justice, and inclusiveness this organization promotes. This event, which will have unique arrangements of well-known Christmas carols, mixes the comical with the serious, the beautiful with the meaningful and weaves together the pride and joy of the season with threads of hope for a bright future ahead. 7 pm.

Sunday, December 8

Silent Santa at Santa's Workshop at Rice Village
For the next two Sundays, Rice Village will begin a new tradition this holiday season by giving children with autism the opportunity to visit Santa in a calm and comfortable environment. This will be hosted prior to Santa’s workshop opening, in which the lights will be dimmed, music turned off and stimulus turned down. The Village is introducing this initiative to make the experience of visiting Saint Nick inclusive and accessible to children who may become anxious around excessive noise and crowds. 9 am-noon.

Brazil at Alamo Drafthouse LaCenterra
This weekend will be a good one for fans of filmmaker and Monty Python alumni Terry Gilliam. His 1998 adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp as Thompson himself, will be this weekend's midnight movie at Landmark River Oaks. And, on Sunday afternoon, Alamo Drafthouse LaCenterra will screen his futuristic, Orwellian satire from 1985, with Jonathan Pryce as a daydreaming bureaucrat who unfortunately becomes an enemy of the state. 3 pm.

event-planner

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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