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 quality of the career of director Robert Zemeckis can almost be broken evenly in half. His first 12 films, which included the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Forrest Gump, and Cast Away, were mostly hits both with critics and audiences. But in his last 10 films starting with The Polar Express in 2004, Zemeckis has become obsessed with pushing technological boundaries, which has ironically hindered the success of those movies.
His latest boundary-pushing film isHere, which uses the highly unusual technique of never moving the camera. Instead, it’s what happens at this one particular corner of the world that’s of interest, from the time of dinosaurs to the rise of COVID, and many other things in between. The film sees a small parcel of land go through many changes, finally resulting in a house built around 1900, a home that goes on to be occupied by a number of people over the course of 120 years or so.
The most prominent among them are Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), who buy the house soon after Al comes home from World War II. They raise a family of three children, with one of them, Richard (Tom Hanks), becoming the main focus of the film. He falls in love with Margaret (Robin Wright), has a child of his own, discovers a love of painting, gives up that passion to provide for his family, and more as he spends almost his entire life under the same roof.
The marketing for the film wants to make sure you know that it is the long-awaited reunion of Zemeckis, Hanks, and Wright following the Oscar-winning smash hit that was Forrest Gump (Eric Roth, who wrote Gump, also co-wrote this film with Zemeckis). Zemeckis clearly liked the storytelling from Gump, and much like Forrest was part of many historical 20th century moments, the small area of land in an unnamed Eastern state in Here somehow sees it be both the home of the son of Benjamin Franklin and the inventor of the La-Z-Boy recliner (fact check: not true).
Zemeckis was inspired to use just one angle in the film from the graphic novel by Richard McGuire on which it is based. Similar to the novel, Zemeckis inserts rectangles that show small glimpses of different time periods overlaid on the current scene, fading them in and out to help with transitions. Although at times the film can feel more like theater than a movie, these brief looks at other eras within another era help the film feel more dynamic.
What doesn’t work is the computer-generated imagery in the film. Before the house is built, everything on screen (save for the actors) is CGI and it feels wholly unnatural. And for some reason, Zemeckis has the nearly 70-year-old Hanks and nearly 60-year-old Wright play themselves as young as teenagers, and the de-aging technology simply isn’t believable. As their characters age, the effect improves, but only slightly.
Because the performances of everyone in the film are chopped up into small pieces, it’s tough to say any one of them stands out. As the bigger stars, Hanks and Wright naturally draw attention, and they acquit themselves well. Bettany and Reilly are fine, but they seem to be playing mid-century caricatures instead of actual human beings. Actors in other time periods aren’t given enough to do to be judged properly.
Alternately cheesy and poignant, Here is a bold swing from a filmmaker who has made many in his long career. Because of the inherent emotions that come with following characters over a long period of time, the story has an impact, although it constantly has to contend with Zemeckis trying to distract viewers with displays of technical prowess.
