Each year, the Texas Heritage Songwriters' Association honors troubadours who have left a mark on the Texas music industry — from homegrown Austin heroes to Nashville-based legends — by inducting them into its Hall of Fame. And this year, the organization is bringing out the big guns with some deserving inductees of legendary status.
The 2014 honorees, announced on Wednesday, are Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens and K.T. Oslin. Grammy Award-winning artist 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.
As a tribute to Buck Owens, king of the Bakersfield sound, Bonnie Bishop and Lee Roy Parnell will perform, 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 on June 22 at ACL Live at the Moody Theater. 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.
The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.
Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.
After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.
It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.
One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.
Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.
Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.
Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.
