Live Music Now

These are the 5 hottest concerts to rock in the holidays in Houston

The annual Christmas extravaganza is back when the Trans-Siberian Orchestra is at Toyota Center on December 29.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra/Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/TSO]

It was the holiday wish heard around the country:

Dear Santa,

All we want for Christmas is Taylor Swift tickets.

Unfortunately, thousands of Houston residents were left out in the cold with a lump of coal — and no tickets to see the Anti-Hero star. Adding insult to injury, Tay-Tay fans had to go through Ticketmaster hell in an attempt to obtain entrance into three announced May shows at NRG Stadium. We feel their pain.

On the bright side, Houston wraps up one of the busiest music years in memory with plenty of holiday season shows that still have tickets left, no waiting room necessary. Here are five shows that are worth your time before 2023 arrives.

Chris Isaak
Sunday, December 18
House of Blues, 1406 Caroline St.

Heartthrob crooner Chris Isaak returns to Houston as part of his Everyone Knows it’s Christmas tour, playing your favorite holiday hits in his recognizable Americana-meets-rockabilly sound. Isaak, whom every teenager in the ‘90s will remember from the “Wicked Game” video that starred a scantily clad Helena Christensen, has maintained a healthy career since his commercial highpoint. He recently released his first album in six years in First Comes the Night this year, recorded in Nashville.

Tickets start at $35 plus fees. Doors open at 7 pm.

Toadies with Flickerstick
Tuesday, December 27
House of Blues, 1406 Caroline St.

A band that always rolls through Houston around the holidays, the ‘90s hit band Toadies head to the House of Blues stage. One of the better alt-rock acts to garner mainstream success, the North Texas act went platinum with their major label breakthrough, Rubberneck, producing radio hits like “Possum Kingdom” and “I Come From the Water,” the former still receiving regular airplay.

Unfortunately, label woes pushed their follow-up album back six years and by that time, audiences had moved on to new sounds. That doesn’t diminish Toadies killer live show, perfect for those who are looking for something that doesn’t involve family gatherings.

Tickets start at $30 plus fees. Doors open at 7 pm.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Thursday, December 29
Toyota Center, 1510 Polk St.

The long-running, holiday-centric, lights and sound spectacular Trans-Siberian Orchestra makes its annual pilgrimage to the Toyota Center with its show, “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve – The Best of the TSO and More.” The “more” likely refers to the bonkers rock 'n' roll/metal versions of your favorite seasonal tunes set to eye-popping visuals that will make it nearly impossible to fight feeling the Christmas spirit.

Lasers, lights, dozens of giant video screens, a full-size orchestra, and a band of guitar shredders will get you more joyful than “Joy to the World.” Christmas dinner with the in-laws has nothing on this.

Tickets start at $29 plus fees. Doors open at 2 and 6:30 pm.

Tobe Nwigwe
Friday, December 30
713 Music Hall, 401 Franklin St., Ste. 1600

In what’s becoming a trend, Alief-raised cult rapper Tobe Nwigwe is playing another hometown show for the holiday season. A few months after a fellow Alief performer, Lizzo, performed at the Toyota Center, Nwigwe follows a similar path as an outspoken and positive-minded artist. He’s taken that outlook to critical acclaim, playing at the BET Awards in 2020 and reaching No. 4 on the Billboard R&B charts with “Jesus Says.”

Heavily influenced by the ‘90s hip-hop scene and his upbringing as a Nigerian-American, Nwigwe has elevated his star status in 2022 with an appearance in the Houston-based Netflix comedy, Mo, and a nomination as Best New Artist at the 65th Grammy Awards set to air in early 2023.

Tickets start at $22.50 plus fees. Show starts at 8 pm.

The Suffers with Fat Tony and Dem Roots
Saturday, December 31
Last Concert Café, 1403 Nance St.

Gulf Coast Soul collective extraordinaire, The Suffers, closes out a busy 2022 that saw them perform several U.S. tour dates to promote their third – and possibly best – album, It Starts with Love. That record placed on NPR music critic Ann Powers’ Top 20 Albums of the Year list, who called it a “major artistic leap.”

They’ll ring in the new year with some of the best local acts, including eclectic rapper Fat Tony, who also embarked on a national tour earlier this year, and Dem Roots. If there is one Bayou City band best suited to ring New Year’s Eve, it’s The Suffers, who always bring it in a live setting.

Tickets start at $50 plus fees. Doors open at 9 pm.

Photo courtesy of Chris Isaak

Christmas Crooner: Chris Isaak will perform holiday favorites at the House of Blues on December 18.

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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