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

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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