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

Action-packed Kraven the Hunter showcases gritty Marvel antihero

Photo by Jay Maidment

Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Kraven the Hunter.

One of the oddest things about the blockbuster era we live in is that while Disney owns the rights to the majority of Marvel comic book characters, Sony Pictures owns the rights to Spider-Man and any affiliated characters. Since they’re sharing Spider-Man himself with Disney, Sony has been trying to capitalize on those rights by making stand-alone films using niche characters that only comic book fanatics would know.

Having exhausted Venom and whiffed on attempts with Morbius and Madame Web, they’re trying again with Kraven the Hunter. Also known as Sergei Kravinoff, Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a self-styled vigilante who, as the film tells it, travels the world exacting vengeance on the truly bad people of the world. He’s the son of Nikolai (Russell Crowe), a hard-edged Russian oligarch, and brother to Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), who is relatively weak compared to the rest of his family.

The origin story has Kraven gaining his animal-like powers - including super-strength, speed, and jumping abilities - as a teenager from a mysterious serum given to him by a girl named Calypso (played as an adult by Ariana DeBose) after he was mauled by a lion. The two maintain a tenuous partnership as adults, with Calypso helping him hunt down other villains like Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) and The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott).

Directed by J.C. Chandor and written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, the film looks and feels enormously lazy, something made merely to hold on to potentially valuable intellectual property. Other than the tense family dynamic between the Kravinovs, little makes sense in the story. Kraven has an indecipherable moral code that has him going after poachers - because he’s part lion? - in addition to other high-powered criminals, with no clear goal except to … get back at his father?

The laziness extends to the action scenes, which feature Kraven being mostly impervious to any damage, whether it’s hand-to-hand combat, knives, or guns. The CGI-heavy scenes don’t even allow moviegoers to enjoy an R-rated bloody free-for-all, as all of the blood splatter is computer-generated, too. Since apparently one Spider-Man villain is not enough, three others make appearances with abilities that are under-explained and CGI that is poorly done.

That’s not even counting Calypso, another Spider-Man villain whose purpose in this film is nebulous at best. Her early connection with Kraven is so coincidental as to be laughable, and her continued reasons for helping him as an adult strain credulity as well. The only saving grace of her presence is that the filmmakers don’t try to shoehorn romance into the plot; perhaps they’re saving that for the (inevitable?) sequel.

Taylor-Johnson has had one of the most prolific-yet-anonymous careers in modern Hollywood, with appearances in big films like The Fall Guy, Bullet Train, and Tenet that have made very little impact. Even as the star here, he fails to hold your attention, with the story and visuals doing him no favors. DeBose has followed up her Oscar win for West Side Story with schlock like I.S.S., Argylle, and this, which doesn’t bode well for her career. At least Crowe gets to chew the scenery.

With a contractual inability to mention the name “Spider-Man,” movies like Kraven the Hunter exist in a weird area that forces filmmakers to make up stories for characters to which most people have no attachment. And just like Sony’s previous efforts, it is a very poor way to spend two hours in a movie theater; avoid at all costs.

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Kraven the Hunter opens in theaters on December 13.

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