This Week In Music

This week in music: The Suffers team up with Newport Folk Fest for Harvey relief show

For those on the naughty list hoping to get in good with Santa, a live music event to help Hurricane Harvey relief might be the solution.

A relatively quiet week in music surrounding Christmas Day means local music fans can practice some holiday giving to Houstonians in need. Organized by members of rock-soul collective The Suffers with the help from the acclaimed Newport Folk Festival, the With A Little Help From Our Friends concert on Friday, December 22, will benefit those who are still recovering from the impact of Hurricane Harvey.

The killer line-up features My Morning Jacket songwriter Jim James headlining, Americana troubadour Shakey Graves and indie-rockers Wild Child, both from Austin, Delta Spirit lead singer Matthew Logan Vasquez, the 60s-retro sounds of singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins, rising Dallas rockers The Texas Gentlemen, the artful sounds Joshua Asante and of course, hometown heroes The Suffers.

All proceeds from the show will go towards the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund established by Mayor Sylvester Turner and County Judge Ed Emmett. The Greater Houston Community Foundation oversees and administers the grant distribution process and 100 percent of the donations received will be distributed to the community for immediate and long term relief efforts, according to a statement.

“It’s amazing that we have so many great acts on one bill coming together for a great cause,” said Adam Castaneda, bass player and co-founder for The Suffers. “It may feel like the hurricane happened a year ago, but it hasn’t. Neighborhoods are still torn apart and people still need help.”

The idea for the show came about shortly after the story hit in early September. The Suffers were set to head to the airport to play a festival slot in Charleston, South Carolina when strange things started happening. Band members started experiencing car trouble and another had a leaky roof from a busted pipe. The increasingly ominous forecast led them to cancel the appearance.

“The universe was telling us not to go to this festival and we are glad we didn’t,” Castaneda said. “We took that financial loss and stayed at home. Our families and our city needed us.”

Band members spent the next few weeks working at shelters, delivering food and dealing with their own clean-up. The one ray of sunshine and hope: percussionist Jose Chapy Luna and his wife welcomed a baby girl, named Valentina, the day Harvey came to town.

The group soon met and started to discuss a more impactful way to help rebuild the community. They decided to reach out to their friends at the famed Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, an event they played in 2015 and in 2016 as an off-shoot concert. Their idea was to curate a concert that could really assist those in need, not just in the weeks following the storm, but in the months after the news cycle moved on.

“We decided to lend a hand not only because it is part of our mission, but because that's what families do for each other in times of need,” said Jay Sweet, Executive Director of the Newport Festivals Foundation, “And everyone involved in this event is Newport Folk Family.”

Newport helped book the acts and Fender put up some of the organizational costs, in addition to working to replace instruments lost in the floodwaters.

“All the acts are donating their time and presence to do the show,” Castaneda said. “Having someone like Newport on our side definitely gave some clout to booking these bands.”

The event will feature a live auction and hopefully the money raised will help bring some families some much needed Christmas cheer.

“We could have done something in the first few weeks but we felt like we wanted to help people who would need it a few months down the line,” Castaneda said. “People still need that help and there is no shame in asking for it. There are resources there for them.”

Newport Folk Presents & The Suffers: With A Little Help From Our Friends, a benefit Hurricane Harvey recovery, takes place at House of Blues on Friday, December 22. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets start at $45 plus fees. For more information on the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund, visit https://ghcf.org/hurricane-relief/nonprofits-grants/.

Houston's The Suffers will take the stage at House of Blues on December 22. Courtesy photo

music 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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