Venue News

Mark Cuban's new concert venue HiFi Dallas is ready to rumble

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The incomparable Gary Clark, Jr.

Photo by Daniel Cavazos

UPDATE 8-25-2021: This weekend's Gary Clark Jr. concerts have been moved to House of Blues, per the Live Nation website, and will no longer be the inaugural shows at HiFi Dallas. The Leon Bridges show scheduled for September 11 at HiFi has been moved to Southside Ballroom. According to a Facebook post from opener Abraham Alexander, the change is due to construction delays at HiFi.

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After a false start in 2020, The HiFi Dallas — the new upscale venue in the Design District from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban — is ready to rumble.

According to a release, the venue will open on August 29, coming out of the gate with a three-night stand, from August 29-31, by Texas singer-guitarist Gary Clark Jr.

A schedule with more than 20 artists is already confirmed that includes established touring artists as well as local musicians on the rise, from Utah alt-pop act The Aces to L.A. DJ act Boombox Cartel to rapper Princess Nokia, doing her first headlining tour. Tickets are now available at TheHiFiDallas.com, and more shows and details will be announced.

The venue was originally set to debut in March 2020, and unveiled an opening lineup back in February. But then you-know-what came along and put everything on hold. (Info on refunds is here.)

Located at 1323 N. Stemmons Fwy., HiFi is in a former warehouse/furniture store, next door to the Mavericks training facility, sort of "across the freeway" from American Airlines Center (on the west side of I-35 rather than east).

It's a two-story building with 25,000 square feet and capacity of 1,000. It's managed by Venue Nation, a newly created affiliate of Live Nation that is a venue management company with more 200 owned-and-operated venues. Venue Nation strives to provide a one-of-a-kind experience that includes food & beverage partnerships, VIP/premium seats, special event services, and more.

Sherri Sosa, who was appointed president of Venue Nation in April, says in a statement that they're excited to open the club which she says will provide a new platform for artists and bring more live music to Dallas.

"There is no other venue in the area that provides fans an intimate experience at every show the way The HiFi in Dallas does," Sosa says.

Features include an immersive sound system, a concert hall with an open floor surrounded by sound-enhanced walls and floors, and luminescent lighting that changes throughout the evening.

The HiFi Dallas also has an outdoor patio and parking hosted on-site, including optional valet, and rideshare access.

The HiFi Dallas Grand Opening Concert Lineup is as follows:

Sunday, August 29-Tuesday August 31 – Gary Clark Jr.
Thursday, September 9 – Omah Lay
Wednesday, September 29 – Chet Faker with Thunder Jackson
Thursday, September 30 – Noga Erez
Saturday, October 2 – Princess Nokia
Friday, October 8 – Sub Urban & Bella Poarch
Friday, October 15 – Anderson East
Saturday, October 16 – Andy Mineo
Sunday, October 24 – Ruston Kelly with Margaret Glaspy
Saturday, November 6 – Madison Beer
Saturday, November 13 – Goose
Friday, November 19 – Cory and the Wongnotes featuring Antwan Stanley
Sunday, November 28 – CloZee with Of The Trees and Tripp St.
Friday, December 3 – Boombox Cartel
Saturday, December 18 – The Aces
Sunday, January 9, 2022 – Mother Mother
Monday, April 18, 2022 – Ashe

concerts openings music nightlife

Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

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

Venue News

Mark Cuban's new concert venue HiFi Dallas is ready to rumble

Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

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