Each year, the Texas Heritage Songwriters' Association celebrates troubadours who have left a mark on the Texas music industry by inducting them into its Hall of Fame. This year, the organization is bringing out the big guns with some legendary inductees — and performers.
The 2014 honorees are Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens and K.T. Oslin. Grammy Award-winning Oslin will perform at the program, while Waylon Jennings and Buck Owens — both being inducted posthumously — will be honored with performances by some of country music's biggest icons.
In what's sure to be an intimate, touching tribute, Jessi Colter, Jennings' wife and longtime singing partner, will perform alongside their son, singer-songwriter Shooter Jennings. Kris Kristofferson, a previous inductee (and part of The Highwaymen super group with Jennings, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson) will also pay tribute to the country outlaw.
To honor Buck Owens, king of the Bakersfield sound, Bonnie Bishop and Lee Roy Parnell will play, backed by a star-studded house band. Buck Owens, Waylon Jennings and K.T. Oslin join the esteemed ranks of Hall of Fame members that include 2013 inductees Roger Miller, Sonny Curtis and Ronnie Dunn.
The ninth annual event will be held June 22 at ACL Live at the Moody Theater in Austin. The awards show will close out a weekend-long "homecoming" celebration featuring a host of Texas songwriters. Tickets to the event go on sale April 15.
A tribute to Waylon Jennings will include performances by Jessi Colter, Shooter Jennings and Kris Kristofferson.
Waylon Jennings Facebook
A tribute to Waylon Jennings will include performances by Jessi Colter, Shooter Jennings and Kris Kristofferson.
Career revivals like the one that has happened to Ke Huy Quan are extremely rare in Hollywood. As a child, he scored two big back-to-back roles in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies. While he found occasional work after that, his career mostly went dormant starting in 2002 until he was cast in Everything Everywhere All at Once, a role that won him an Oscar.
Now, he’s the toast of the town, including his first-ever starring role as the lead in Love Hurts. Quan plays Marvin Gable, a relentlessly positive real estate agent who’s the top seller in his area. But from the beginning of the film, it’s clear that he has a hidden backstory, as he receives a veiled threat in a note from a woman named Rose (Ariana DeBose), who is seen early on defacing many of his advertisements around town.
When a heavy called The Raven (Mustafa Shakir) confronts Marvin at his office, he is pulled back into his old life, one where he was involved in the criminal enterprise of his brother, Knuckles (Daniel Wu). Soon he’s dodging attacks on multiple fronts, looking out for Rose, and all the while trying to keep up appearances at his day job.
Directed by Jonathan Eusebio (a stunt coordinator making his directorial debut) and written by Matthew Murray, Josh Stoddard, and Luke Passmore, the film is one big excuse to have Quan show off the martial arts skills he demonstrated in his Oscar-winning role. While there is some semblance of a story, it’s mostly to set up the various fight scenes; there’s little attempt to make the audience care about any of the stakes.
Instead, Eusebio and his team vacillate between moments of calmness and sequences with extreme violence. Quan and his fellow combatants (in addition to Shakir, he faces off against Marshawn Lynch, Cam Gigandet, and others) engage in a series of creative moves designed to inflict as much pain as possible. The juxtaposition of the seemingly mild-mannered Marvin with his abilities works relatively well, as does the variety of implements used as weapons (pencils, boba straws, feathers, and more come into play over the course of the film).
But the lack of a full story catches up with the film in the end, as instead of building to some kind of grand finale, there are diminishing returns with every scene. The filmmakers try to distract with a semi-amusing romantic connection between The Raven and Marvin’s assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton), something that works much better than allusions to a bond between Marvin and Rose. There’s also a mini-Goonies reunion with Sean Astin as Marvin’s boss that’s kind of fun, but the antipathy between Marvin and his attackers never fully develops.
Quan is a joyful presence who does his level best to make himself into a lead actor, but he’s not served well in the film as a whole. DeBose, an Oscar winner herself, seems to be stuck in a rut of mediocre roles, ones that don’t allow her to show off her skills like West Side Story. Lynch shows again he’s reliable in comic sidekick roles, while Tipton and Shakir are the only other actors to make any kind of impact.
The Valentine’s theme of Love Hurts is not the only part of the film that feels tacked on. While the idea of letting Quan show off his skills is a good one in theory, very little thought appears to have been put into making that showcase effective. The result is a forgettable action comedy that puts more emphasis on ultraviolence than its story.