Zac Brown Band review

Zac Brown Band jam on hits and covers during polished RodeoHouston set

Spring break was in full effect this week on the NRG campus as amiable chamber of commerce weather blew through Houston. The grounds are experiencing a bit of an adrenaline hangover after this week’s run of Los Tigres Del Norte, Whiskey Myers, Bun B’s All-American Takeover, and Nickelback pulling in nearly 286,000 into NRG Stadium alone. Which makes the 70,095 people who showed up for tonight’s performance by Zac Brown Band seem relatively paltry.

We’ve talked a lot about attendance records lately in the modern rodeo era this week and the RodeoHouston website’s attendance logs are endlessly fascinating. Like, what happened in 2001 with only 1,382,183 people? Y’all had Destiny's Child, Diana Ross, Brooks & Dunn, and Duran Duran. According to a report at the time, low attendance was blamed on construction and traffic, presumably the construction of Reliant Stadium off Kirby and the METRORail taking shape off Fannin caused mild havoc.

It sounds awfully precious to say that the Zac Brown Band is the most jam band adjacent act that RodeoHouston will see, barring an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band which wouldn’t be too far-fetched if they stuck to compact versions of the hits. Full-scale Zac Brown Band shows are a much different beast, full of extended instrumental jams and even more adventurous covers in the mix. That’s not to say that ZBB shows at RodeoHouston are lacking, but the band on the open road with two and half hours or a venue curfew ahead of them as opposed to 45 minutes on the dirt are so very different.

Thursday night’s ZBB set started with a jaunty bluegrass-injected “Knee Deep” after the briefest of delays. Hey, there’s nine people in the band these days, including the recent induction of multi-instrumentalist Caroline Jones. She’s added another dimension to ZBB’s burlier output. “As She’s Walking Away” and its interlocking harmonies benefited the most from Jones’ touch.

The first cover of the night was the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” in southern-rock goth drag. The ZBB’s island-hopping “Toes” at one time had the band nearly-anointed as the next coming of Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band, that is until Kenny Chesney made a sandy heel turn and hit the beach.

“We wanna do one for the cowboys,” said Brown, clad in his best honky tonk bouncer garb, plucking his way into Garth Brooks’ “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)”. The ZBB has always excelled at being the affable jukebox band at RodeoHouston. It wasn’t too long ago that they covered Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”, Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post”, and Van Halen’s “Panama” in this same spot.

Brown welcomed country-blues guitar slinger Marcus King onstage to slather some stadium-sized slide guitar on top of “Colder Weather” which — naturally — transitioned into the Eagles’ “Take it The Limit”.

King himself has an highly-anticipated Rick Rubin-produced album dropping on April 5. The first singles show King leaning into Americana and lush R&B with a specific fervor. He would be a welcome addition to my dream RodeoHouston 2025 bill, which already features a three-hour Billy Strings Saturday afternoon matinee.

We’re heading into the RodeoHouston homestretch with the Jonas Brothers on Friday night, Brad Paisley on Saturday afternoon, and Eric Church sending us home on Sunday after brunch.

Setlist

Knee Deep
Keep Me in Mind
As She’s Walking Away
No Hurry
Paint It Black
Toes
Much Too Young To Feel This Damn Old
Free / Into The Mystic
Lovin You Is Easy
Homegrown
Same Boat
Colder Weather >> Take it To The Limit (with Marcus King)
America, The Beautiful >> Chicken Fried

Courtesy of the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo

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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

Zac Brown Band review

Zac Brown Band jam on hits and covers during polished RodeoHouston set

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

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