Somebody's Darling is one of 10 new bands added to the lineup of the inaugural Dallas Music District Festival, taking place May 16 and 17 on the Trinity River Greenbelt.
Courtesy of Somebody's Darling
The new Dallas Music District Festival, taking place May 16-17 on the Trinity River Greenbelt, had already made a splash with its initial announcement. But this inaugural fest just got more interesting with the addition of more bands.
Among the new entries are blues rock group Somebody’s Darling, folk rock trio Leopold and His Fiction, Fort Worth songstress Gollay, up-and-comer Jessie Frye, psychedelic rockers Un Chien, garage rock trio Dome Dwellers, electronic-pop duo NITE, Marc Swafford, Mean Motor Scooter, and LEV.
Those 10 acts join previously announced performers like Jonathan Tyler, Aaron Behrons & the Midnight Stroll, ISHI, MOTHXR (featuring Penn Badgley of CW’s Gossip Girl), Donald Cumming of The Virgins, Mainland, Dreamers, and Exit 380 — bringing the total number to 19 for now.
It’s an eclectic lineup that offers a little something for every musical taste — especially those who pride themselves on following the local music scene. The bands will play on two stages over the course of two days. The first day starts at 2 pm, concurrent with the free Trinity River Wind Festival taking place nearby.
Tickets are now on sale, with prices ranging from $25 for a one-day pass to $50-$149 for a two-day pass.
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.
