The first round of shows have been announced for Austin Free Week.
Photo by Daniel Cavazos
As the new year approaches, the city's top venues are releasing the first wave of lineup announcements for Austin Free Week. The 10-day celebration of all things local will feature hundreds of live performances from January 1 through 10, 2016.
The goal of Free Week, started in 2003, is to get you out of your post-holiday slump and out on the town to explore the live music scene. Top venues like Mohawk, Cheer Up Charlies, Stubb's, and more will host multiple free shows with stacked lineups to ring in the new year.
Thursday marked a huge drop of artist names from Transmission Events, who coordinates concerts at Sidewinder, Mohawk, and comedy club The New Movement. Local bands on the bill so far include Golden Dawn Arkestra, American Sharks, Magna Carda, Otis the Destroyer, Knifight, Shivery Shakes, Calliope Musicals, Megafauna, Think No Think, and Sounds Del Mar. Other must-see acts include national touring bands Surfer Blood and Leftover Crack, as well as Austin's Bidi Bidi Banda, Total Unicorn, and Thieves.
In addition to live music, The New Movement has entered the fray with a lineup of comedy troupes and shows. The Megaphone Show, Opposites, Bad Example, Block Party Beta, The Quarter Show, and Little Miss Comedy are a few of the spectacles announced so far.
Keep your eyes peeled for more can't-miss concerts as Austin Free Week approaches.
Hèra (Gaia Wise) in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
The Peter Jackson-led Lord of the Rings movie trilogy in the early 21st century was such a smashing success that people have been trying to recreate that magic for a long time. First came the ill-conceived The Hobbittrilogy, which made lots of money despite mostly poor reviews. The recent Amazon TV series, The Rings of Power, has gotten generally good reviews, but doesn’t seem to hold a place in the wider pop culture consciousness.
And now comes The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an anime-style film that seems like an attempt at both reclaiming the world in animated form from the weird 1978 film, and a nostalgia play for fans of the original series. Set 200 years before the events in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, it nonetheless takes place in two very familiar locations that are recreated to appear exactly how they looked in Jackson’s films.
The story centers around Hèra (voiced by Gaia Wise), the only daughter of King Helm (Brian Cox) of Rohan. An early conflict with Lord Freca (Shaun Dooley) leads Freca’s son, Wulf (Luca Pasqualino), to develop a deep grudge against Helm and his family. Wulf pursues that ill will for years, eventually driving his foes into a fortress in a valley to make a final stand against his aggression.
Based on information found in the appendices of Tolkien’s novels, this is the rare instance when choosing to use animation holds back the creativity of a film. Typically, animation allows filmmakers to do things that wouldn’t be possible in the real world, but director Kenji Kamiyama and his team seem beholden to the look of Jackson’s films. While the animation itself is great, it doesn’t offer the fluidity of live action, and so the action scenes are often stilted and flat.
The story itself is not very compelling, as a quartet of screenwriters have concocted a plot that relies on revenge and heroism tropes that allow the audience to predict almost everything that happens. There are a few surprises to be had, but as the conflict revolves around a strong-willed female character and her unwillingness to be told whom to marry, it’s generally clear how the story will be resolved, with only the specific details left to be discovered.
It also would have been great if the film weren’t so dependent on nostalgia for the original films. The two main locations are ones that played a big part in set pieces from those films, and their usage here doesn’t measure up favorably. Eowyn (Miranda Otto) serves as narrator, and other characters/actors from the original trilogy also make appearances, leaving little room for this film to establish itself on its own terms.
The majesty of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, with its New Zealand vistas and incomparable visuals created by Wētā Workshop, set a high bar that none of the subsequent projects have been able to meet. The War of the Rohirrim is a competently made film, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny with the Oscar-quality work of 20+ years prior.
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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim opens in theaters on December 13.
