Weekend Event Planner

Top things to do in Houston this weekend: arcade expo, Honeyland fest, and tree lighting spectacular

Galleria Ice Spectacular Nov 2015 Santa and skater

It begins to look a lot like Christmas at The Galleria this weekend.

Photo courtesy of Dave Rossman

The holidays arrive in Houston this weekend with the big lighting of the Galleria Christmas tree. Before that, though, there's a big film festival, an arcade expo, a show by a hit comedian, and much more.

Below are more best ways to spend your precious free time this weekend. Want more options? Lucky for you, we have a much longer list of the city's best events.

Thursday, November 9

Houston Cinema Arts Festival
The Houston Cinema Arts Festival will screen/premiere short films and feature length movies from Houston and around the world. Highlights include opening night film Lost Soulz; a 25th anniversary screening of Rushmore; The Herricanes, about 1970s women's football team Houston Herricanes; and more. Screenings will take place at multiple venues, including the DeLUXE Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Rooftop Cinema Club. For the full schedule, go to the festival website. 7 pm. (12:30 pm Saturday; Noon Sunday).

Friday, November 10

2023 Houston Arcade Expo
Expect a weekend of fun and free play as The Houston Area Arcade Group (HAAG) is holding its 20th Annual Arcade Expo. There will be hundreds of classic and current coin-op pinball machines, video arcade games, penny arcades, and console video games ready for attendees to play on free play or buy them for their home. There will also be tournaments, events, music and workshops to keep the young (and young at heart) entertained. Noon (10 am Saturday and Sunday).

Reeves Art + Design presents "Terry Suprean: Futurescapes" opening reception
In "Futurescapes," a solo exhibition of new paintings by Terry Suprean, the artist presents a large and diverse body of work utilizing the experimental artist-manufactured paints he has developed and worked with over the last decade to mimic and mirror geological processes, engage with the language of abstraction in the digital age, and probe the meaning of landscape painting in the Anthropocene. Through Thursday, November 30. 6 pm.

DACAMERA presents Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones with the E-Collective and Turtle Island Quartet
Terence Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones made history in 2021 as the first opera written by a Black composer to be staged at the Metropolitan Opera. This “opera in jazz” tells the true coming-of-age story of a young boy growing up in the face of great adversity and forging his personal identity. Now, Blanchard presents a new suite of music from the opera, performed by the celebrated trumpeter and his E-Collective, the Grammy-winning Turtle Island Quartet, and vocalists Nicholas Newton and Adrienne Danrich. 8 pm.

Saturday, November 11

Canstruction and Houston Food Bank presents Canstruction Houston
Canstruction Houston is an annual design-build event that benefits the Houston Food Bank and features top Houston architects, engineers, designers, contractors, and mentored students from across greater Houston. They will showcase their talents and creativity by building can-structures that range from replicas of iconic Houston landmarks to popular locations around the globe to favorite characters in pop culture. Through Sunday, November 19. 8 am.

The Galleria presents 34th Annual Tree Lighting and Ice Spectacular
The Galleria's 34th Annual Ice Spectacular will kick off the holiday season with the lighting of its 55-foot Christmas tree, featuring 450,000 twinkling lights and 5,000 ornaments in a variety of colors and shapes. A time-honored holiday tradition, the 45-minute tree-lighting show will feature a performance by The Voice Season 21 contestant Jershika Maple. The event will culminate with the lighting of the tree by Skating Santa and a fireworks display. Noon.

Honeyland Festival
Honeyland is a festival celebrating the best of Black expression, where the top restaurateurs, beverage makers, and artists get together to remix, refresh, and create more of what ﬂavors the world. The two-day fest is led by food curator Marcus Samuelsson, spirits curator Fawn Weaver, and Houston ambassador Tobe Nwigwe. The music side of the event will feature performances by Nwigwe, Mary J. Blige, Miguel, Jazmine Sullivan, Tems, Lucky Dave, Chloe, Coco Jones, Scarface, Slim Thug, Paul Wall, and more. Noon.

Sunday, November 12

PrintHouston presents Rockin’ Rollin’ Prints
PrintHouston’s biennial Rockin’ Rollin’ Prints returns. The event will feature approximately 50 artists from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New York, and London. Each artist will bring a carved 3’ x 5’ woodblock, which will be inked and printed using a two-ton steamroller as a printing press. PrintHouston’s first From Press to Table print fair will also be held on Sunday, in tandem with the Rockin’ Rollin’ Prints event. Kids will have their own space and inked up board to ride bikes and skateboards over to create monotypes. 10 am.

Smart Financial Centre at Sugar Land presents Ali Wong
Ali Wong is a stand-up comedian, writer, and actress. She’s best known for her two hit Netflix specials, Baby Cobra, Hard Knock Wife, and Don Wong. Wong has done a lot for Netflix: she voiced the co-lead and executive-produced the animated comedy Tuca and Bertie, alongside Tiffany Haddish; starred in the movie Always Be My Maybe, which she co-wrote with longtime friend and creative collaborator Randall Park; and executive-produced the dark comedy Beef, where she co-starred with Steven Yeun. 8 pm.

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.

movies film