rodeo idol

Luke Bryan closes RodeoHouston 2023 with year's biggest crowd and true American Idol heartthrob swagger

Bryan charmed a crowd of 74,779 — the Rodeo's biggest.

Photo by Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo

For nearly all of the rodeo concerts I’ve seen this season for CultureMap, I’ve stuck my AirPods into my ears when I got out of my truck and listened to the artist for that night as I did my nightly lap around NRG Park heading into the concert. It functions as a way to drown out the crowd noise, soundtrack my evening, and get into creative writing mode. It’s like breathing in the air on a new alien planet.

Some nights, like New Kids On the Block, it blended perfectly with oodles of elderly millennials in vintage ‘80s garb double-fisting wine cups in the concourses. Chris Stapleton’s western bedroom noir made me play gentle air guitar as I took the escalator up the side of the stadium with thousands of sweaty couples. The merrily morose indie country of the Turnpike Troubadours paired nicely with the party bus line oozing pre-gamers and the Parker McCollum and Margo Price lookalikes.

On Sunday March 19, the season closed out with lovable horndog Luke Bryan, which made for a slightly swaggery walk-in from the purple lot for me. “Country Girl (Shake It For Me),” makes this painfully urban cowboy shake it in his pretty little Tecovas, no lie.

“Kick the Dust Up” almost made me buy a new John Deere Gator XUV off-road cart for running errands around Montrose. “Knockin’ Boots” made for an awkward elevator ride up the seven floors of NRG Stadium, listening to Thomas Luther Bryan sing “Boys like me need the girls like you to kiss me” alone with an NRG attendant.

Closing the RodeoHouston season with a sold-out late matinee, Bryan jumped out of the Ford transport in full “Coolest Drunk Dad at the PTA Fundraiser Karaoke Jam” mode, setting things off with “I Don’t Want This Night To End” from 2011’s Tailgates and Tanlines. Our Tailgate Elvis – is it too late to copyright that? – settled into a flirty crowd-pleasing hits set, with jeans as tight as yoga pants.

This was Bryan’s 10th RodeoHouston show, which he credited with helping him “Buy Dirt” in more than a few states in the union. While you weren’t looking he became one of the busiest country acts of the past two decades, currently presiding as a Supreme Pop Judge on ABC’s American Idol with Justice Katy Petty and Chief Justice Lionel Richie.

In just a few days, Bryan will continue his ongoing residency at Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas, which could be called Nashville West for the proliferation of country stars posting up for weeks at a time for music-hungry revelers. Heck, Houston is arguably the country music capital of the world during rodeo season.

Bryan’s backing band seemed seamlessly seasoned from residency shows, aiming for the biggest riff, the biggest synth line, and the biggest chorus.

Tailgate Elvis is everywhere — and 74,779 rodeo fans can’t be wrong.

In closing, it seems that this real was the first “normal” RodeoHouston since COVID, with most of 2020 and the totality of 2021 falling victim to the virus. Last year still felt shaky and unsure, with most of the city still getting used to walking in large crowds and eating corn dogs again in public with dignity. It was Remedial RodeoHouston. The 2023 season was the true return of the rodeo, pre-pandemic and ready to party, with fans eager to sell out NRG Stadium for their favorite artists, eat fantastically insane food, and drink all the alcohol.

Note: Houston, we don’t know how to walk in public. We stop abruptly, walk against the human current, make erratic lane changes, and just generally walk just like we drive. It’s truly one of our best civic traditions and I can’t wait to do it all again with you at Minute Maid Park in a few weeks.

Setlist

I Don’t Want This Night To End

Kick The Dust Up

Rain Is a Good Thing

What Makes You Country

Buy Dirt

Country On

Crash My Party

Waves

Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset

Play It Again

One Margarita

Knockin’ Boots

That’s My Kinda Night

Country Girl (Shake It For Me)

Photo by Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo

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.

---

Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

movies film