One cannot tour the Texas State Capitol without spending a hot minute in the center of the rotunda yelling “HELLO!” or listening to a friend whisper to you from across the room. The dome’s natural sound amplification, frankly, never gets old.
It seems foolish to reserve this sound bouncing phenomenon for rowdy 3rd graders on a field trips, so it was pleasant to hear of the Inside the Capitol Concert Series, a unique music event hosted by Austin based singer-songwriter, Ben Ballinger.
Wednesday night, some of Austin’s favorite musicians, including Dana Falconberry, Paul Banks (The Carousels), Caitlin Kraus and Ben Ballinger (The Dalles), will come together in celebration of resonance and reverberation for an acoustic performance amplified solely by the walls of the majestic marble dome.
This marks the seventh Inside the Capitol Concert Series event, the last being held during SXSW in March. Details of future concerts have not yet been released, but from the looks of it, tonight won’t be the last.
The show starts at 8 p.m., but it’s best to arrive a bit early so you’ll have time to get through security — this is a government building after all. It is advised to leave your booze, drugs and weapons at home.
The event is completely free, so there’s no excuse not to spend your Wednesday evening listening to some of Austin’s folksiest folk while surrounded by statues of great, Texas heroes of the past.
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Inside the Capitol Concert Series happens Wednesday, July 18 at 8 p.m.
Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway in The End of Oak Street.
Steven Spielberg is the iconic director of the last 50 years, so it’s no surprise that many other filmmakers have borrowed from his classic films. But most of the time those come in the form of references or homages, not straight up theft, which is what it feels like watching The End of Oak Streetplay out in front of your eyes.
Set in the early 1980s in an idyllic suburban neighborhood of an unnamed city, Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) are parents to two teenagers, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). They’re also possibly heading toward divorce, as Audrey is secretly writing a novel with a thinly-veiled plot about their life, and Brian is cagey about having to earn extra money with a pizza delivery job.
That all gets put on the back burner when a mysterious event takes their entire neighborhood back to the time of dinosaurs. Armed with little more than a shotgun and sledgehammer, Audrey and Brian do their best to keep the family safe in their house. But the longer the ordeal goes on, circumstances force them out onto the streets and into the increasing danger that’s all around them.
Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, the film tries immensely hard to be like the Spielberg movies its filmmaker clearly adores, but fails at almost every turn. It never earns the broken family in ‘80s suburbia vibes that were prevalent in E.T., going all in right away in the opening scene with a neighborhood block party that feels forced. Other elements like a bully who has it out for Brian, the family dog that disappears, and an angry neighbor come across as the tropes they are and not as organic parts of the plot.
When it finally gets to its dinosaur sequences, they pale in comparison to those found in Jurassic Park. The strange manner in which the dinosaurs appear is a big part of that, but the action involving them forgoes ominous moments that could build tension for those that play up gore in an unexpected way for a PG-13 movie. Many of the attacks have so little emotional meaning that they come off as comical, which is entertaining but in a hollow way.
As if those weren’t enough, Mitchell — perhaps at the behest of producer J.J. Abrams (who made his own Spielbergian film, Super 8) — tries to honor Spielberg in other ways. Just like in Jaws, he employs the use of a split diopter lens, which keeps characters in both the foreground and background in focus. But instead of using it judiciously, it’s brought out in three separate scenes, including a laughable one with the four family members where it turns into overkill.
Hathaway, coming off of a role in The Odyssey that could earn her an Oscar nomination, is the best part of this film. But even her evident skills are dragged down by the ridiculousness of the story, which requires hysterics that even she can’t sell. McGregor can normally be counted on for a good performance, but he gives several line readings with strange cadences that make his already-underwritten character come off worse. Stella and Convery are okay, but their roles are unmemorable overall.
Mitchell and his team can never settle on exactly what type of film they were trying to make, and so even though The End of Oak Street has a few moments that work, they’re surrounded by many others that don’t. In trying to emulate Spielberg — there’s even a blatant Back to the Future (produced by Spielberg) rip-off towards the end — all Mitchell has done is show how difficult it is to be the master.
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The End of Oak Street opens in theaters on August 14.
