Update: Mala Luna Music Festival revealed more names for the 2016 lineup on August 19. Additional artists include Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, Jacquees, G Herbo, Sango, Lunice, Kranium, and Sammy. San Antonio artists that have been put on the bill include IVY, Vi$ion, Greg G, Mitch James, KWYK, and Phillip Wolf. The article has also been updated to reflect a change in ticket prices.
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San Antonio's newest music festival is dropping more than just beats. On Wednesday, Mala Luna unveiled the date, location, and headliners for its inaugural event.
Mala Luna Music Festival ("bad moon" in Spanish) will take over the Lone Star Brewery on Halloween weekend, October 29-30. The two-day festival will feature some of the buzziest names in EDM and hip-hop, with Kaskade, Travis Scott, G-Eazy, and Steve Aoki headlining. The festival teased the lineup with these four artists, but more artist announcements will follow.
Mala Luna is helmed by ScoreMore Shows, the Austin-based event promoters behind the JMBLYA festivals in Austin and Dallas. The group has also brought big-time artists like Kendrick Lamar, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Wiz Khalifa, and Chance The Rapper to venues across Texas.
In honor of San Antonio's giving spirit, Mala Luna will donate a portion of ticket proceeds to Network for Young Artists, a local nonprofit that provides kids with affordable music lessons. A few lucky students will get to perform at the fest too.
Tickets for Mala Luna go on sale Monday, August 8, at 10 am; two-day passes cost $119 and VIP passes are $159. A limited amount of presale tickets will be up for grabs online August 5-7.
Photo by Jasin Boland/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
Scarlett Johannson in Jurassic World Rebirth.
Given how successful the Jurassic Park / Jurassic World franchise has been at the box office, it’s no surprise that Universal Pictures will find any excuse to keep the gravy train rolling. So here comes Jurassic World Rebirth, a film with all new characters that only has a tangential relationship to the stories that have come before.
And, man, does it have a lot of characters. Leading the way is Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johannson), a woman who is known for being able to procure hard-to-get things. She’s hired by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), who works for a medical company looking to get blood samples from giant dinosaurs to make a life-saving heart medicine. Naturally, they need a dinosaur expert, which they find in Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), whose work at a natural history museum is coming to an end as the public seems to be growing tired of dinosaurs, five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion.
The dinosaurs they need can be found off the coast of Suriname, a subtropical environment that is one of the only hospitable areas left for the creatures. There Zora recruits boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who comes with a crew of three mostly anonymous people. And for good measure, Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) happens to be sailing nearby in the middle of an ocean voyage with his two daughters and his older daughter’s extremely lazy boyfriend.
Given the recent pedigree of director Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Rogue One) and original Jurassic Park writer David Koepp (returning to the franchise for the first time since 1997’s The Lost World), the film should be an unmitigated success. Instead, the filmmakers and their team stumble blindly through any kind of character development. The fact that they’re trying to introduce no fewer than 11 different people should be a big flashing red light, but still they persist.
Instead of making us care whether the people in the film live or die (spoiler alert: A lot of them die), Edwards and Koepp seem to lay all of their hopes on audiences being satisfied with yet-more dino mayhem. But dinosaurs rampaging or chomping people in half only works if the human component is compelling, which it is not. They try to gloss over this by having the characters encounter experimental cross-bred creatures, a story device that makes an impact with a monstrous one in the final act, but otherwise fails to land.
The film also yada-yadas a lot of the plot points, including how Krebs’ company knows they need the blood of these particular dinosaurs when they’ve never had it before. They reference events from previous films in oblique ways, but they run into the same issue every Jurassic World film has had: Not being able to properly explain the main premise of their story, given that previous events should have stopped them from ever happening.
Any film with an Oscar winner (Ali) and nominee (Johannson) at the top should be one worth watching, but it almost feels like neither actor knew what kind of film they were actually making. They each get by on charm, but even they can’t sell the nonsense they’re asked to say. Bailey, who played Fiyero in Wicked, is given a weird nothing part, while Friend plays the villain with little verve. We hardly get to know anyone else, but Audrina Miranda, who plays the youngest daughter on the sailboat, is super-cute and gets a couple of decent emotional moments.
As with the Marvel movies, there is bound to come a time when the general moviegoing public gets tired of being served mediocre Jurassic movies. If any of the franchise’s movies deserves to be the stopping point, it’s this one, with a non-starter of a story and little to get excited about when it comes to the dinosaurs.
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Jurassic World Rebirth opens in theaters on July 2.