San Antonio actor Jonathan Joss, known for his work on King of the Hill and Parks and Recreation, was fatally shot in a June 1 altercation outside his 200 Dorsey Dr address. The local celebrity was 59.
San Antonio Police say officers were dispatched to the scene for a shooting in progress. Joss was found outside the roadway at the South Side location and pronounced dead on the scene after life-saving measures failed. Suspect Sigfredo Alvarez Ceja has been detained and booked for murder.
Joss is best known for voicing John Redcorn on Fox’s animated series King of the Hill. During a May 30 panel at the ATX TV Festival in Austin, show creator Mike Judge confirmed he would be reviving the character in an upcoming Hulu reboot. Joss was in attendance at the event but not on the panel.
The ‘90s classic led to other Hollywood gigs, usually portraying Indigenous American roles. He memorably had a recurring role as Chief Ken Hotate on the NBC sitcom Parks & Recreation and acted in Westerns like the remakes of True Grit and The Magnificent Seven.
In January, an accidental blaze destroyed Joss’ South Side childhood home, killing three of his dogs. A fan raised $10,000 through a GoFundMe campaign to help the actor recover.
Family members have not released funeral details for the actor at press time. San Antonio Police say the criminal investigation is still ongoing.
In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.
The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.
Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.
Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.
The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.
It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.
Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.
Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.
