rodeo idol

Luke Bryan closes RodeoHouston 2023 with year's biggest crowd and true American Idol heartthrob swagger

Bryan charmed a crowd of 74,779 — the Rodeo's biggest.

Photo by Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo

For nearly all of the rodeo concerts I’ve seen this season for CultureMap, I’ve stuck my AirPods into my ears when I got out of my truck and listened to the artist for that night as I did my nightly lap around NRG Park heading into the concert. It functions as a way to drown out the crowd noise, soundtrack my evening, and get into creative writing mode. It’s like breathing in the air on a new alien planet.

Some nights, like New Kids On the Block, it blended perfectly with oodles of elderly millennials in vintage ‘80s garb double-fisting wine cups in the concourses. Chris Stapleton’s western bedroom noir made me play gentle air guitar as I took the escalator up the side of the stadium with thousands of sweaty couples. The merrily morose indie country of the Turnpike Troubadours paired nicely with the party bus line oozing pre-gamers and the Parker McCollum and Margo Price lookalikes.

On Sunday March 19, the season closed out with lovable horndog Luke Bryan, which made for a slightly swaggery walk-in from the purple lot for me. “Country Girl (Shake It For Me),” makes this painfully urban cowboy shake it in his pretty little Tecovas, no lie.

“Kick the Dust Up” almost made me buy a new John Deere Gator XUV off-road cart for running errands around Montrose. “Knockin’ Boots” made for an awkward elevator ride up the seven floors of NRG Stadium, listening to Thomas Luther Bryan sing “Boys like me need the girls like you to kiss me” alone with an NRG attendant.

Closing the RodeoHouston season with a sold-out late matinee, Bryan jumped out of the Ford transport in full “Coolest Drunk Dad at the PTA Fundraiser Karaoke Jam” mode, setting things off with “I Don’t Want This Night To End” from 2011’s Tailgates and Tanlines. Our Tailgate Elvis – is it too late to copyright that? – settled into a flirty crowd-pleasing hits set, with jeans as tight as yoga pants.

This was Bryan’s 10th RodeoHouston show, which he credited with helping him “Buy Dirt” in more than a few states in the union. While you weren’t looking he became one of the busiest country acts of the past two decades, currently presiding as a Supreme Pop Judge on ABC’s American Idol with Justice Katy Petty and Chief Justice Lionel Richie.

In just a few days, Bryan will continue his ongoing residency at Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas, which could be called Nashville West for the proliferation of country stars posting up for weeks at a time for music-hungry revelers. Heck, Houston is arguably the country music capital of the world during rodeo season.

Bryan’s backing band seemed seamlessly seasoned from residency shows, aiming for the biggest riff, the biggest synth line, and the biggest chorus.

Tailgate Elvis is everywhere — and 74,779 rodeo fans can’t be wrong.

In closing, it seems that this real was the first “normal” RodeoHouston since COVID, with most of 2020 and the totality of 2021 falling victim to the virus. Last year still felt shaky and unsure, with most of the city still getting used to walking in large crowds and eating corn dogs again in public with dignity. It was Remedial RodeoHouston. The 2023 season was the true return of the rodeo, pre-pandemic and ready to party, with fans eager to sell out NRG Stadium for their favorite artists, eat fantastically insane food, and drink all the alcohol.

Note: Houston, we don’t know how to walk in public. We stop abruptly, walk against the human current, make erratic lane changes, and just generally walk just like we drive. It’s truly one of our best civic traditions and I can’t wait to do it all again with you at Minute Maid Park in a few weeks.

Setlist

I Don’t Want This Night To End

Kick The Dust Up

Rain Is a Good Thing

What Makes You Country

Buy Dirt

Country On

Crash My Party

Waves

Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset

Play It Again

One Margarita

Knockin’ Boots

That’s My Kinda Night

Country Girl (Shake It For Me)

Photo by Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo

Movie Review

Toy Story 5 proves that Pixar's toy box still holds some surprises

Photo courtesy of Pixar

Bullseye, Jessie, Atlas, Smarty Pants, and Snappy in Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5.

For fans of Pixar, the idea that it’s been over 30 years since the original Toy Story came out is a little mind-boggling. While the animation studio has had varying degrees of success with their other properties, they’ve always managed to make something special with each installment of their signature franchise. They’re now rolling the dice yet again with Toy Story 5.

The story is mainly focused on cowgirl toy Jessie (Joan Cusack), who — along with Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Forky (Tony Hale), and others — is concerned that new owner Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) is falling prey to the scourge of technology in the form of the tablet Lilypad (Greta Lee). They’re worried that the “friends” she makes through games online pale in comparison to those she could play with in person.

Woody (Tom Hanks) and Bo Peep (Annie Potts), living an on-the-go lifestyle but still in touch with the main group, come to help when Jessie goes missing while trying to help Bonnie. And — just because — a large group of new-and-improved Buzz Lightyears that have fallen out of a shipping container that has crashed on an island go on a mission that puts them on course to meet up with everyone else.

Written and directed by McKenna Harris and Andrew Stanton, the film is a mixed bag, mostly because of the disjointed nature of the story. When the group was separated in previous films, things rarely felt out of sync as everybody was still heading toward the same goal. But the different factions in this film seem to be after something different, especially the wholly superfluous addition of the fancy Buzz Lightyears, whose ultimate purpose doesn’t live up to the time dedicated to them.

There’s no way around it: While Jessie is a good character and has a lot of great moments in this film, the relationship aspect of the series is not as strong this time around. She mostly spends time with her mute horse Bullseye, but even when she interacts with new characters like Smarty Pants (Conan O’Brien), that ineffable magic is not there. Woody and Buzz have scenes together, but since they’re secondary to the main story, they don’t add as much to this film as they have in others.

However, even if the film can’t live up to the first four movies, it still makes for a fun time. The storyline about technology turning kids (and adults, for that matter) into zombies is a strong one, and the way they incorporate different devices is clever. The large number of characters is unwieldy, but when the filmmakers truly dig down to the personal lives of certain toys or humans, the film is as effective as Pixar has ever been.

Cusack, Hanks, Allen, and other returning voices are so attuned to their respective characters that you know they’ll deliver each line perfectly. People like Lee, O’Brien, and Craig Robinson are welcome additions to the group, but it’s tough to get used to new voices taking over for actors who’ve passed like Don Rickles, Estelle Harris, and Carl Weathers.

The pitch-perfect ending of Toy Story 3 made the idea of Pixar making Toy Story 4 seem strange, but then that film proved the studio knew what it was doing. While Toy Story 5 is not a disaster, it’s not to the standard set by the previous films. It should finally be time to put the franchise to bed, knowing that the toys have given all the joy they can give.

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Toy Story 5 opens in theaters on June 19.

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