One of Austin’s favorite live music series returns in just a couple short weeks to Zilker Park. Presented by H-E-B and benefiting the Austin Parks Foundation, Blues on the Green 2022 kicks off on June 14 with performances from mainstays in the Austin music scene, including Sir Woman, Zach Persons, and Sneak Peaches and the Fuzz.
The concert series has become an Austin summer tradition, with hyper-local lineups and the city’s growing skyline acting as the iconic stage backdrop. Past performances have included Gary Clark, Jr., Mobley, and Jimmie Vaughan.
Following the June 14 kickoff event, Grupo Fantasma will play Wednesday, June 15, with a revue-style show featuring Colombian Gaita All Stars, Amalia Mondragon, Trevor Nealon, Kalu James, Tomar Williams, Gina Chavez, Third Root, and Money Chichas.
The next set of concerts will take place on July 19 and 20, with a yet-to-be-released lineup. Visit ACL Radio's website for more details.
Music starts at 7 pm for every BOTG show this year, and as always, the performances are free to attend. So grab your blankets, friends, dogs, sunscreen, and chairs, and we’ll see you at the park.
Elio (Yonas Kibreab) and Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in Elio.
Pixar has done a ton of different things in the 28 feature films they’ve released over the past 30 years, but the one they’d never done is deal with aliens (and, no, the alien toys in Toy Story don’t count). Now they’re going where many storytellers have gone before, but in their own unique way, in the new film Elio.
Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is a space fanatic who has recently lost both of his parents in an unnamed event. His Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) is now his guardian, and because she happens to be a member of the U.S. Space Force, Elio finds himself tantalizingly close to communications from space. With a desire to be abducted by aliens for both curiosity and sentimental reasons, Elio sends a message into space, hoping for some kind of response.
He gets that and more when a ship full of multiple types of beings takes him into space, believing him to be a leader instead of a child. An encounter with a hostile force led by Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) gives Elio both a new friend, Grigon’s son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), and responsibility for maintaining peace during an unexpected galactic crisis.
Pixar has not typically followed the route of many Disney movies of giving their child protagonist the trauma of dead parents, and doing so here is the first of a few minor missteps. Having Olga be his mom instead of his aunt would have altered their dynamic, but only slightly. While Elio is shown to miss his parents, his major focus is on making contact with aliens. Since the film only briefly deals with his grief, it would have been better served by excising it altogether.
For the most part, the film is goofy, with Elio’s enthusiasm for aliens matched by the oddness of the creatures he meets in space. The filmmakers — there are three credited directors and three credited writers — seem to have taken inspiration from sea creatures and Pixar’s own history, as the main bad guy emulates Mike and Sully’s boss from Monsters, Inc. Almost every character in the film is heightened to a degree that makes for funny situations, but not as much sentimentality as other Pixar offerings.
Surprisingly, especially since the film ends with a voiceover from notable astronomer Carl Sagan, the filmmakers play fast and loose with real-life science. Elio’s journeys to and from the alien spaceship are treated as close-to-instantaneous trips, even involving portals directly to Earth. The idea of the story doesn’t allow them to delve into things like relativistic time dilation, but there still could have been other scientific references to keep the story aboveboard.
There are very few stars to be found among the film’s voice cast other than Saldaña and Garrett, who are each fine if unmemorable. Kibreab and Edgerly are given many more scenes than anyone else, and they each do a great job of bringing out both the joy and naivete of their characters. Some lesser-known actors like Jameela Jamil, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Brendan Hunt show up in minor roles, but they don’t stand out in any way.
The story and characters in Elio are sweet and fun, but the film as a whole falls well short of the top tier Pixar movies. The filmmakers could have gone many different directions with a story about a boy who wants to be abducted by aliens, and the way they chose ended up being innocuous and less than compelling.