the traveller returns

Chris Stapleton's fifth RodeoHouston ride shreds with Tennessee-whiskey-drenched soul

The dreariest, rainiest day at RodeoHouston this season (Thursday, March 16) cosmically coincided with Chris Stapleton's return to the neon cow and pony show. Maybe five songs in his growing discography match a sunny day, with the rest better suited for sepia-toned confrontations on prairies or a chilly kitchen table divorce request.

One of the biggest-selling country acts in recent history, Stapleton's pop culture seemingly knows no bounds of ubiquity. For the coming decades, generations will talk about hearing Stapleton throughout their lives. Sunday mornings spent fending for yourself in the kitchen for breakfast while Mom and Dad are blaring "Tennessee Whiskey" from the bedroom. The single mom in the school pick-up line wearing dark shades, playing "Broken Halos" until Spotify cries uncle. The emo cowpoke feeding the internet jukebox repeated plays of "Fire Away" at Buffalo Wild Wings at lunchtime. Making an NFL head coach projectile cry during his rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl.

Since his widescreen LP debut in 2015 with Traveller, Stapleton has done nearly everything in the industry besides winning a Tony or an Oscar. It wouldn't be surprising if somewhere under all that dirty blonde beard and Stetson is a Broadway show about a cattle rustler with a heart of fool's gold or a dirgy film score to end all film scores.

By the way, Traveller currently sits at No. 56 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, a mere eight years since the album's release. That kind of longevity is usually reserved for the likes of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (#133) and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours (#29). His last album, 2020's Starting Over, is down at #79.

Photo courtesy of Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo

Stapleton's bluesy country melancholy matched the rainy Thursday night.

Consistently stunning in his songwriting and studio pairings, Stapleton is in his myth-making era, the soundtrack for heartbreaking or babymaking, splitting the difference between Waylon Jennings and Otis Redding.

He's long crossed that imaginary, arbitrary pop threshold that most country artists find themselves in and went and made songcraft appreciated again. He paved the way for the likes of Zach Bryan and Maggie Rogers to top charts with ragged hearts and found time to collaborate with Justin Timberlake and Joy Oladokun.

Stapleton's big-time intimacy suits RodeoHouston like a well-worn pair of ropers and for his fifth performance since debuting at NRG Stadium in 2017. Opening with "Parachute," Stapleton and his four-piece band – with the legendary Paul Franklin – turned the stadium into the world's most expensive backyard ice house.

He always seems to channel ZZ Top whenever he enters Harris County, and on Thursday night, he was finding ways to interweave Billy Gibbons licks into nearly every song. There was a wink in "Second One To Know," a spiritual callback in "Arkansas," and his beard is pretty ZZ as it gets.

Eight years since its album debut, "Nobody To Blame" is the sound of Stapleton in a lab distilling the history of outlaw country into four minutes, showcasing his guitarwork as it chugs along.

So many people complain about rodeo shows for one nitpicky reason or another when many times, these are the first musical experiences that most kids even undergo. These are the kind of rodeo shows that inspire a kid to tug at their parents' sleeve during the show and ask for a guitar and set someone on a musical journey.

This was my fifth Stapleton show, and even I am pondering hitting up a pawn shop this weekend for a guitar.

"Fire Away" saw the crowd of 72,634 match Stapleton's glow from the stage with the lights from their phones, creating a bed of twinkling cellular stars in the stadium, so much so that even Stapleton seemed overcome by it.

Stapleton and company savored every sip of set closer "Tennessee Whiskey" as the Ford fleet arrived to whisk them off into the night. RodeoHouston books actual musical acts, and Thursday night was a reminder of how magic one of these communal experiences can be.

Setlist

Parachute

Second One To Know

Hard Livin’

Starting Over

Millionaire

Arkansas

You Should Probably Leave

Nobody To Blame

Worry B Gone (Guy Clark cover)

Fire Away

Broken Halos

Tennesse Whiskey

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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