Tag: Scarface

Houston Concert Watch 10/8: Keith Urban, Lumineers and More – Houston Press

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Following the death of drummer Neal Peart in 2020, it appeared that Rush would follow the lead of Led Zeppelin (another band who lost a drummer) and disband, so as to avoid damaging a stellar legacy. Remaining Rush members Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee have been firm on their stance, but it has been reported that, over cocktails, Sir Paul McCartney cajoled Lifeson into getting back on stage.

So Rush is (sort of) back, and the band is planning a brief tour of 12 dates in seven cities across North American next summer, with drummer Anika Nilles, who has played with Jeff Beck, behind the kit. No, Houston is not on the list. However, Rush will play two nights in Fort Worth at the Dickies Arena on Wednesday, June 24, and Friday, June 26. You can register (by 11:59 p.m. Thursday) here for Ticketmaster presales, which begin on Monday, October 13, but there are other sales (credit card holders, etc.) which begin this Friday. Complete information is available at rush.com.

Ticket Alert

Former Geto Boy and one-time Houston City Council candidate Scarface will perform at the Bayou Music Center on Friday, November 14. The presale begins tomorrow, with the general sale on Friday.

Kenny G is not only a best-selling instrumental artist, but – to use the words of Bob Eucker –
“this guy can get it out of the sand trap like nobody’s fuckin’ business!” Presale tickets for the saxophonist / top-ranked celebrity golfer’s appearance on Sunday, February 10, at the Smart Financial Centre are available now, and the great unwashed will be able to purchase ducats on Friday.

While it may seem kind of strange to buy tickets for a concert that is over a year away, that’s what is going on with Doja Cat’s performance scheduled for Saturday, November 7, 2026, at Toyota Center. Her “Tour Ma Vie” will promote the forthcoming album Vie, with the artist presale today, the Live Nation presale on Thursday, and the general sale on Friday. As you might imagine, VIP packages are available as well.

Concerts This Week

It’s a busy week for shows in Houston, starting with Wet Leg on the lawn Thursday at the White Oak Music Hall, part of the band’s “North American Moistourizer” tour. Wet Leg began as a duo former by frontwomen Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers, who released the single “Chaise Longue” in 2021 and won a Grammy after millions of online views and listens. If the line “Is your muffin buttered? / Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?” from “Chaise Longue” sounds familiar, that’s because it is a quote from the film Mean Girls.

Suicide Boys will play Toyota Center on Friday. Lyrically, these guys hit a number of hot buttons in the world of psychology: suicidal ideation, depression, and God knows what. The Boys might well benefit from a checkup from the neck up, as Kinky Friedman used to say.

After performing a mix of styles (singer-songwriter, rock, electronic) in their early days, the Lumineers eventually settled into an Americana / neo-folk groove, and prosperity followed. You can catch them at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion on Friday. ‘Cause Knowledge is Power: In its early years the band used a number of handles, including Free Beer and Cheek 6. The current name arrived when a club emcee became confused and introduced them as another band, who went by the name of Lumineers, and it stuck.

Soooo, we’ll get to see how Keith Urban is bearing up after his wife, Nicole Kidman, filed for divorce when he performs at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion on Saturday. The gossip has been swirling over the past week regarding Urban’s rumored fondness for guitarist Maggie Baugh, who recently played with Urban’s band at his gig in Chicago. In other news, Kidman just debuted a new hairstyle at Fashion Week in Paris, so it sounds like the situation is really getting serious here.

Michael Schenker is many things: mercurial, flaky, and one hell of a guitar player. While Schenker’s older brother Rudolf has steadily led the Scorpions for 60 (!) years, the younger Schenker has done two stints in that band and three in UFO. The story is that he was asked to replace Randy Rhoades in Ozzy Osbourne’s band but couldn’t come to terms regarding his requested fringe benefits, which supposedly included the use of a private jet. Schenker will play at the White Oak Music Hall on Sunday, and my guess is that he will arrive by bus.

A question that used to be asked in show biz circles when an act’s mass appeal was called into question was, “Yes, but will it play in Peoria?” So let’s apply the query to a mixture of prog-ish metal, costumes, face / body paint and a general horror movie vibe. In the case of Mudvayne, a band comprised of guys from Peoria, the answer is a resounding “yes.” You can catch them at the Bayou Music Center on Monday.

This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.

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Tom Richards

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October 8, 2025
Michelle Pfeiffer Recalls Bloody Incident With Al Pacino That Landed Her ‘Scarface’ Role

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Michelle Pfeiffer is revealing the bloody moment that Al Pacino was convinced she was perfect for the role of Elvira in 1983’s Scarface.

The Oscar-nominated actress recently went on the SmartLess podcast, hosted by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes, to recall her lengthy audition process for the Brian De Palma-directed film. She said that while the filmmaker wanted her for the part, Pacino didn’t feel the same way at first.

“Al will admit this,” she said, “[but] he didn’t really want me for the part.”

The Age of Innocence actress recounted meeting De Palma and the casting director and crushing her first audition for the movie. However, “over the course of two months, I just [got] worse and worse and worse, because I’m just afraid. And by the end, I’m bad.”

Pfeiffer admitted she didn’t “blame” Pacino for his initial reaction. “He just was like, ‘[She’s] bad.’ And Brian finally comes to me and says, ‘You know, doll, it’s just not gonna work out. I’m like, ‘I know, man. I’m sorry.’ Because Brian really wanted me,” she explained.

“As disappointed as I was,” the Batman Returns star continued, “I was so happy to be done with it. So, like, at least a month goes by and I get a call, they want to bring me in to screen test. So I show up and I don’t even give a shit, ’cause I know I’m not getting this part.”

But to Pfeiffer’s surprise, the screen test, which she recalled was the “restaurant scene where I explode at the end,” ended up being “my best work of the film.”

Though it was a bloody accident during the audition that ultimately scored her the role. “I swipe the table of the dishes and glasses break, the dishes break, cut. There’s blood everywhere. They all run over to me, to see where I’ve cut myself. Well, I didn’t cut me. I cut Al,” she recalled, adding that she “cut him in the finger or something.”

“I thought, ‘Well, there goes that part.’ [But] actually I think that was the day [Pacino] was like, ‘Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, she’s not bad,’” Pfeiffer added.

The 1983 crime classic follows determined, criminal-minded Cuban immigrant Tony Montana (Pacino), who becomes the biggest drug smuggler in Miami and is eventually undone by his own drug addiction. Elvira was Tony’s troubled wife, a drug-addicted socialite, who was the former lover of his boss, Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia).

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Carly Thomas

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October 5, 2025
Crime Boss: Rockay City Is So Bad The Culture Has Rejected It Entirely

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Crime Boss: Rockay City, a game announced last year with a trailer that seemed like the world’s most ill-timed April Fool’s Joke (it was December), is out! You may not know this, though, because nobody is talking about it.

Blade’s Book Club Is The Best Thing About Marvel’s Midnight Suns

If a game is good, people will talk about it. If a game is bad, people will also talk about it. If a game is bad in ways that also make it interesting, it gets talked about, and if a game is bad in ways that are incredibly funny then, once again, it gets talked about. Maybe it’s a 1000-word impressions piece on Kotaku.com, maybe it’s a bunch of tweets, maybe it’s a video series about bloopers and mishaps, these are all ways you—or someone, anyone—can talk about a video game.

This is important, because talking about a video game is the only way we, as a culture, keep a game alive. I don’t want to get too into it on this post—which does not have the bandwidth for it—but discs on a shelf are just hunks of plastic, and code on a HDD just 1s and 0s, lying around. It’s us experiencing them, building memories/opinions on them then sharing those with other people, that make video games what they are. What is all this, what I’m writing, what you’re reading, the communities you form and are a part of, if not just one big way for us to share our thoughts on video games?

Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that there’s space and scope to talk about almost every video game on the planet, love them or hate them. Except Crime Boss: Rockay City. Which nobody (except me, here, under great distress) is talking about, even though it’s been out for almost a month now. And now I know why.

I have “played” this, in so much as you can subject yourself to sitting down and experiencing this game. And have found myself unable to review it, or even give my impressions on it, in the standard “hey check this out” kinda way. I was so repulsed by its packaging, so in awe at the way it gets absolutely everything it sets out to do wrong that I feel like I have to write this and publish it on the site just so someone else can reassure me that any of this actually happened.

Rockay City is a fever dream. It’s the outline of a video game, coloured in by tortured ghosts from the 80s and 90s. It’s like a scammy powerpoint presentation for a blockchain game, only with sections containing actual gameplay. Here is the game’s launch trailer—it’s out, you can buy it, and even play it—to show I’m not making any of this up:

Crime Boss: Rockay City – Official Launch Trailer

Michael Madsen carried the burdens of 1000 lifetimes into the recording studio for this, and none of them turned in a good performance. Serial asshole Chuck Norris is so lifeless that an 80’s text-to-speech system could have done a better job delivering his lines. Kim Basinger and Danny Glover’s agents should be fired into the sun for this. And Vanilla Ice…well, Vanilla Ice is actually great here, I have nothing bad to say about Vanilla Ice.

There’s writing in Rockay City in the most qualifying sense, in that there are words in the English language that come after other words, but whether these form complete and coherent sentences is up for debate. There is also a plot, in the same way the key art and promo tweet for a Grand Theft Auto Online mission has a plot.

There’s no vision here beyond “here’s some stuff that might seem cool to guys who got too into the Johnny Depp trial and whose two favourite movies are Resorvoir Dogs and Scarface”. There’s no context or cohesion either, even though visually everything has the same generic crime game sheen you’d have expected from a clone of a clone of a GTA clone on the Xbox 360. To look at Rockay City is to be shaken around the inside of a shipping container full of Ed Hardy jeans and Steven Seagal movies.

6 Minutes of Crime Boss: Rockay City Official Gameplay

What’s it actually like to play? See above. You sneak around for a bit, you shoot some guys—who are often just innocent people, and who take a lot of bullets—then you shoot a lot more, because Rockay City never knows when to turn the volume down. It’s a “Level 99 Crime Boss” mobile game with the violent aspirations (or absence of a moral compass) of a late 90’s PC shooter.

Rockay City had real money spent on it, paid for genuine Hollywood involvement. It was a crime game, it had guns, it spent enough marketing money that it somehow turned up in a Kotaku.com announcement post, it should have meant something to someone. Yet we have, to our collective credit, rejected this game wholesale. The game doesn’t just suck, even the idea of it sucks. It’s a disaster at a conceptual level. Nobody talks about it, nobody plays it; the game is only available on PC, yet isn’t on Steam, and its official subreddit has…242 members.

I can’t say Rockay City is good. I can’t say it’s bad beyond the ways I’ve already described it (though here’s its Metacritic page if you’d like to broaden your horizons). I can’t say it’s so bad it’s good. I honestly don’t think traditional video game quantifiers work here. This isn’t a 2023 game release, it’s a black hole in the middle of it, sucking light and energy and washed up old actors into its void.

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Luke Plunkett

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April 26, 2023
Today in History: November 9, East Germany opens its borders

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Today in History

Today is Wednesday, Nov. 9, the 313th day of 2022. There are 52 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On Nov. 9, 1989, communist East Germany threw open its borders, allowing citizens to travel freely to the West; joyous Germans danced atop the Berlin Wall.

On this date:

In 1620, the passengers and crew of the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod.

In 1872, fire destroyed nearly 800 buildings in Boston.

In 1918, it was announced that Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II would abdicate; he then fled to the Netherlands.

In 1935, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis and other labor leaders formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (later renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations).

In 1938, Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in a pogrom or deliberate persecution that became known as “Kristallnacht.”

In 1965, the great Northeast blackout began as a series of power failures lasting up to 13 1/2 hours, leaving 30 million people in seven states and part of Canada without electricity.

In 1970, former French President Charles de Gaulle died at age 79.

In 1976, the U.N. General Assembly approved resolutions condemning apartheid in South Africa, including one characterizing the white-ruled government as “illegitimate.”

In 2007, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf (pur-VEHZ’ moo-SHAH’-ruhv) of Pakistan placed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto (BEN’-uh-zeer BOO’-toh) under house arrest for a day, and rounded up thousands of her supporters to block a mass rally against his emergency rule.

In 2011, after 46 seasons as Penn State’s head football coach and a record 409 victories, Joe Paterno was fired along with the university president, Graham Spanier, over their handling of child sex abuse allegations against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton conceded the presidential election to Republican Donald Trump, telling supporters in New York that her defeat was “painful, and it will be for a long time.” But Clinton told her faithful to accept Trump and the election results, urging them to give him “an open mind and a chance to lead.”

In 2020, President Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, injecting more uncertainty to a rocky transition period as Joe Biden prepared to assume the presidency; Trump said Christopher Miller, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, would serve as acting secretary.

Ten years ago: Retired four-star Army Gen. David Petraeus abruptly resigned as CIA director after an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, was revealed by an FBI investigation. Thousands of union bakers went on strike against Hostess Brands, Inc., to protest cuts to wages and benefits under a new contract offer. (Hostess responded by shutting down its operations and selling its assets to new owners who revived the Hostess brand.)

Five years ago: During a visit to Beijing, President Donald Trump criticized what he called a “very one-sided and unfair” trade relationship between the U.S. and China, but said he didn’t blame China for having taken advantage of the U.S. Actor John Hillerman, best known for his supporting role on the TV series “Magnum, P.I.,” died at the age of 84 at his home in Houston.

One year ago: A federal judge rejected former President Donald Trump’s request to block the release of documents to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned a $465 million opioid ruling against drugmaker Johnson & Johnson. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service struck down a Trump-era rule that would have opened millions of acres of forest in Oregon, Washington and California to potential logging. Max Cleland, who lost three limbs to a hand grenade in Vietnam and later became a groundbreaking Veterans Administration chief and U.S. senator from, died at his Atlanta home at 79. Brian Williams, who anchored NBC’s “Nightly News” before losing that job in 2015 for making false claims about his wartime experiences, announced that he was leaving the network after 28 years.

Today’s Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Famer Whitey Herzog is 91. Movie director Bille August is 74. Actor Robert David Hall is 74. Actor Lou Ferrigno is 71. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, is 70. Gospel singer Donnie McClurkin is 63. Rock musician Dee Plakas (L7) is 62. Actor Ion Overman is 53. Rapper Pepa (Salt-N-Pepa) is 58. Rapper Scarface (Geto Boys) is 52. Blues singer Susan Tedeschi (teh-DEHS’-kee) is 52. Actor Jason Antoon is 51. Actor Eric Dane is 50. Singer Nick Lachey (98 Degrees) is 49. Country musician Barry Knox (Parmalee) is 45. R&B singer Sisqo (Dru Hill) is 44. Country singer Corey Smith is 43. Country singer Chris Lane is 38. Actor Emily Tyra is 35. Actor Nikki Blonsky is 34. Actor-model Analeigh (AH’-nuh-lee) Tipton is 34.

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November 8, 2022