Club Nomadic Day 3

Taylor Swift closes out Club Nomadic with her only show of 2017 in dazzling concert

Superstar Taylor Swift performed her first — and last —concert of the year at Club Nomadic Saturday night, as a crowd of 9,000 jammed the temporary venue for its farewell Super Bowl concert. “As far as I know I'm doing one show in 2017. As far as I know, this is that one show," Swift told the crowd. "By coming here tonight you are essentially attending 100 percent of this year’s tour dates, so thank you."

Around 11:30 pm, the singer, wearing a black sequin-and-fringe mini dress and black bedazzled booties, appeared in a cloud of smoke and launched into "The Night is Still Young" (and "So Are We," the crowd sang along, waving LED wristbands that flashed bright colors to the music), "New Romantics" (the bonus track from her hit album 1989), and "Blank Space." The hits kept coming throughout the nearly two-hour concert, with such favorites as "Bad Blood," "We Are Never Getting Back Together," "Out of the Woods," "You Belong With Me," "All Too Well," and "Wildest Dreams" during the 17-song set.

Swift also offered the first live performance of her new ballad, "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" from the new Fifty Shades Darker movie. Before performing an acoustic version of the song she apologized that her collaborator Zayn Malik wasn't there to join her on the duet and asked the crowd to take his place.

In a segment about top-selling songs she has written, Swift performed "Better Man," a No. 1 country song she wrote for Little Big Town — it's the first time she has performed the song live — and an acoustic version of Rihanna's "This Is What You Came For," which she and her ex, Calvin Harris co-wrote.

And, to no one's surprise, she ended the show with her monster hit, "Shake It Off," telling the crowd, "It's time to dance."

The show was vintage Swift, with high energy songs punctuated by a slower segment in the middle in which she showcased her considerable talents on the guitar and a silver baby grand piano. Throughout each song, kicky graphics and awe-inspiring photos flashed on a screen that ran the length of the long stage in the slick production.

The only thing that wasn't perfect was Swift's hairdo. She experienced a bad case of "Houston hair," as her blond locks went limp amid the heat and humidity in the venue as the show progressed. But it didn't seem to slow her down as she wiped the sweat from her face often between songs and then resumed her trademark movements, with a flip of the head and a nod to the crowd.

Celebrities turned out in droves for the concert, which was billed as DIRECTV Now Super Saturday Night. Olympians Simone Biles and Aly Reisman posed for photos with John Legend on the the red carpet and Legend's wife, Chrissy Teigen, seemed in better spirits than the night before when she refused to be photographed.

Other celebs included New York Jets receiver Brandon Marshall and Heisman winner Tim Tebow, both wearing white shirts, actors Chris Evans, Vince Vaughn, Jeremy Renner, and Adrian Grenier, actress Lea Michelle, TV personality Maria Menounos, and quarterbacks Tony Romo and Eli Manning.

Orange is the New Black co-star Ruby Rose DJed sets before and after Swift's appearance.

Although a temporary venue, Club Nomadic got high marks as a concert space. Organizers added a walkway over the gravel leading to the venue, which made walking in high heels much easier for the ladies, and, inside, it was easy to move around even amid the large crowd. The acoustics were excellent and, although the venue is large, it seemed intimate as we stood only about 40 feet from the stage in the general admission section during Swift's performance.

While there was a long Uber line at the end, traffic in the area was surprisingly easy to navigate. After the concert, my friends and I walked a few block to Washington and easily called Uber to take us home in a matter of minutes.

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Taylor Swift set list:

New Romantics
22
Blank Space
I Knew You Were Trouble
Style
I Don't Wanna Live Forever
You Belong With Me
This Is What You Came For
Better Man
Red
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together
Love story
All Too Well
Enchanted/Wildest Dreams medley
Bad Blood
Out of the Woods
Shake It Off

Taylor Swift performed her first — and last —concert of the year at Club Nomadic Saturday night.

Getty Images for DIRECTV

Taylor Swift performed her first — and last —concert of the year at Club Nomadic Saturday night.

super-bowl

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

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.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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