Jimmy Buffett plays Fort Worth's Coyote Drive-in on June 19.
Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters
Jimmy Buffett & The Coral Reefer Band will perform at what is perhaps the unlikeliest of venues: a Fort Worth drive-in movie theater. Buffett's camp announced a June 19 show called "Live at the Drive-in," taking place at the Coyote Drive-in on Panther Island in Fort Worth.
Making it even more exceptional is the fact that the show will be simultaneously broadcast to drive-ins across the country, from Lakeport Auto Movies in Paradise, California, to Mendon Twin Drive-In in Mendon, Massachusetts.
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Buffett is the inaugural musician in a series conceived by Coyote Drive-in owner-operators Brady Wood and Brandt Wood (via their company Woodhouse), in partnership with Austin-based C3 Presents. As one-time owners of Trees in Deep Ellum, the Wood brothers have a background in booking bands.
A crew will film the show to be broadcast live via DirecTV. This is sure to be a hot ticket, as Coyote Drive-in only holds about 1,300 cars.
Tickets for the Coyote Drive-in concert go on sale May 2 at 10 am, via Buffett’s website. Unfortunately, you won't be able to just pack your car for one flat price, as tickets will be $125 per person. Simulcast tickets at other drive-ins nationwide, a full list of which will be announced Friday, will only be $18.
Monster movies can take on all sorts of different flavors, from all-out mayhem to quieter ones where the monster can sometimes be the protagonist. The new South Korean film Hopesplits the difference to a degree, delivering action-packed sequences while also attempting to understand the non-humans in a way.
The story starts in medias res, with an unseen creature having already done great damage to a huge bull and laying waste to much of a small Korean town. The local sheriff, Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-Min), tries to take control of the situation in the town, while a group of hunters led by Sung Ki (Zo In-Sung) travel into the nearby woods to see what they can find there.
Thus starts a nearly nonstop, 160-minute epic of each side trying (and mostly failing) to defend themselves against gigantic creatures who seem hellbent on destroying everything in their path. It’s not until 40 minutes into the film that the audience is shown one of the monsters in detail, and the less said the better about what it actually looks like, as the mystery behind it keeps the intrigue going.
That initial section of the film is the best, as Beom Seok — eventually joined by deputy Sung Ae (Hoyeon) — goes on a frantic hunt around the town, always just far enough behind the monster to keep from seeing it. The utter destruction he witnesses and his interactions with various locals are intense and oddly funny, with the hectic conversations he has laced with fear and incredulity over how different people choose to act.
Writer-director Na Hong-jin bounces back and forth between the people in the town and the group in the forest, doing his best to maintain the momentum of the first section. This approach works for a while as each group makes their own discoveries about the creatures and has run-ins with them that more often than not are ill-fated. Using a mixture of relatively good CGI, great production design, and an abundance of gore, the filmmaker shows he knows how to make an effective blockbuster-style film.
The trouble is, he doesn’t know when to stop. Somewhere around the two-hour mark of the movie, the story starts to become repetitive and Hong-jin introduces elements that don’t mesh well with what has come before. For some reason, he decides that some of the creatures should speak, a move that is baffling on several fronts. The biggest one is that they are voiced by English-speaking actors like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell, but each speaks a non-human language, rendering their performances moot.
Jung-min puts in a fantastic lead performance, one that requires him to vacillate between abject terror and in-control leadership. In-Sung is almost as good, although his character requires him to play one note over and over again. Hoyeon, who some may recognize from Squid Game, delivers an extra shot of energy when she enters the film, something she keeps going despite her character being forced to say some bad lines.
If Hong-jin had kept the focus Hope a little tighter, the sci-fi thriller might have ended up toward the top of this year’s films. But by choosing to extend the story into territories that don’t add much to the plot or make much sense, the filmmaker puts a damper on what was a fun and brutal monster movie.
