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    taylor's grand opening night

    Fearless Taylor Swift takes more than 62,000 Houston Swifties on 3-hour journey through all her Eras at NRG Stadium

    Craig Hlavaty
    Apr 22, 2023 | 2:19 am

    Megastar Taylor Swift began a three-night run in Houston on Friday, April 22, the first of three monstrously sold-out shows inside the cavernous NRG Stadium, or as it's known this weekend, "NRG Stadium (Taylor's Version)."

    She's the first artist to play three straight shows inside the stadium. The crowd was estimated at 62,690.

    Earlier this week, Swift merch trucks arrived on site, quickly mobbed by fans and families who couldn't afford tickets to the shows proper or wanted to get first crack at the wares before they went up for sale in the concourses. You will be seeing this merch for the rest of the year. The shirts. The bracelets. The branded everything.

    This 52-date tour comes with all the religiosity and thrill of a big tent revival. It's a traveling affirmation of her legacy, running through the past two decades of her discography, with accompanying costume changes. If she ever hits her Vegas Residency Era, they might build a hotel and casino for the occasion.

    Imagine revisiting all of your personal eras over the course of three hours every night. It's not quite a greatest hits show, but a greatest weird vibes tour. It's been constructed with enough flashbacks and callbacks to tell a cohesive story. Each of those cuts is there for a specific reason, and Swifties can deduce the why and how for each song's inclusion.

    Some acts find it hard to rectify their past personas, preferring to throw them in the mental and physical junk drawers, but Swift's had an open diary of a career. She's made it okay to look back with a touch of anger to find a common thread because she's been methodical enough to leave plenty of connective tissue.

    Swift's tour is easily the biggest of the post-COVID era, with demand and thirst for tickets reaching biblical levels of frustration and triumph. In the long term, it may change how concert tickets are sold now that the government has seen enough. In the short term, millions of credit scores will take a hit.

    There is no past analog for what Swift currently holds in her hands. Her only true, current-day peer is Beyoncé regarding the devotion and mania she's commanded. Even Beyoncé seems to have backed away from the kind of exposure that Swift enjoys for queenly applause and cathartic, culture-defining tours. Beyoncé doesn't have eras as much as she has had a veritable planetary reign since the first George W. Bush administration.

    Plop Swift in the '80s, and she would be the equivalent of Madonna and Michael Jackson combined, with a dash of Stevie Nicks, Carole King, and Siouxsie Sioux thrown in for zest. Lately, she's been closer to her namesake, James Taylor, in introspection and wordplay.

    Opening night

    On Friday night, the streets around NRG were closed except for roving multigenerational bands of sequined dresses, handcrafted jackets, and the occasional dad already in earplugs, ears girded for screams. Every sequined dress in the Gulf Coast area was at NRG Stadium on Friday and will be in residency until Sunday. Houston Texans head coach Demeco Ryans and his squad will be breathing in glitter dust all Texans season long inside NRG Stadium, no doubt.

    Just before 8 pm, Swift hit the stage and embarked on a three-hour tour through the various eras of her career in a non-linear format, preferring to tell her story in vignettes of pop fire of multiple hues. Compartmentalizing a nearly 20-year career is no tall order, especially for a 33-year-old alone at the top of a mountain.

    Luckily, she's the master of recasting even the messier bits as lessons, not misfires. As she's begun to diversify her creative output and get more pastoral with her last three albums, it's hard not to see an era-spanning tour like this as a polite form of setting some of those former faces on a shelf for the next decade.

    Showcasing her "Lover" era -- centered around the 2019 album -- allowed the material that never made it to tour (thanks to COVID) to get its long-awaited live due. The "Lover Tour" was one of the most significant pandemic-era casualties of the music world, a surefire hit with a solid set of new songs to showcase. "The Man" and "You Need to Calm Down" finally got the stage set adulation they deserved.

    The "Fearless" era is the glue of sorts to this whole thing, as it's where a great deal of the crowd will be stepping inside NRG this weekend, fully invested in Swift as she teetered over from country to power-pop. A song like "You Belong With Me" can exist on several plains, which speaks to Swift's songwriting prowess. Later in the wildcard portion of the set, she played a wizened and poisonous take on "You're Not Sorry" alone on the piano.

    It was on the "Evermore" and "Folklore" portions of the night where things got interesting, with Swift casting herself as a very Stevie witchy woodland fairy, swathed in soft-goth finery surrounded by a dramatic, moss-covered set design. She seemed to be the most comfortable in a flowing cream-colored dress and ballet flats than any other part of the night, acting out the emotions of the characters she conjured across those two albums. "Tolerate It" came with Swift and a male dancer in an emotional chess match at a kitchen table.

    The "Reputation"-era material has aged incredibly well for an album that at the time confused everyone but Swifties, who completely bought into the cryptic industrial pop collection. During this era, Swift was finally able to respond to what had been a hellacious set of years in the tabloids with the proportional amount of venom in from her glittered fangs.

    The catharsis of Swift returning to the touring stage was laid bare during "Look What You Made Me Do" for both the artist and the audience. Swift commented on the pandemic's influence on her relationship with her fans and career. Fans had been waiting to sing these songs at a concert for five years, and she had spent just as long working back to the stage.

    Looking back at the "1989" era in a new context alongside the collected other eras, the songs acquire a sly bitterness that went unnoticed the first time. "1989" was a monster of a shout-laden pop album, a party thrown in defiance of haters. All Swift had to do was reorder these songs during a three-hour to show off new colors we hadn't seen before. "Wildest Dreams" remains a modern torch song stunner.

    Throughout the night, Swift would always return to the tools of her trade, the piano or the guitar, to give songs on the setlist the emphasis she thought they deserved. Even her most playful hits began as an idea on a guitar. Imagine a solo Swift acoustic tour, with our heroine captivating an 80,000-seat stadium.

    By the time we got to the final leg of the night — the current "Midnights" era — both "Lavender Haze" and "Anti-Hero" felt like summations of the night. Swift made an excellent after-hours album for ruminating to, combining her newfound character-driven songwriting style with a lo-fi skitter that throbs and rumbles inside a stadium.

    Being able to intellectually redesign and recast even the messiest pieces of your past as an artist is something we've only seen the likes of Dylan and Bowie having the latitude to do. Most artists stay in the same gear for decades out of financial necessity. There's a long game shaping up. Whatever era awaits us after this or the next Swift persona we've yet to meet will be in great company.

    "Strategy," sings Swift, "sets the scene for the tale."

    Setlist

    Lover

    Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince

    Cruel Summer

    The Man

    You Need to Calm Down

    Lover

    The Archer

    Fearless

    Fearless

    You Belong With Me

    Love Story

    evermore

    'tis the damn season

    willow

    marjorie

    champagne problems

    tolerate it

    reputation

    ...Ready for It?

    Delicate

    Don't Blame Me

    Look What You Made Me Do

    Speak Now

    Enchanted

    Red

    22

    We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

    I Knew You Were Trouble

    All Too Well

    folklore

    seven

    the 1

    betty

    the last great American dynasty

    august

    illicit affairs

    my tears ricochet

    cardigan

    1989

    Style

    Blank Space

    Shake It Off

    Wildest Dreams

    Bad Blood

    Surprise Songs

    Wonderland

    You’re Not Sorry (Taylor’s Version)

    Midnights

    Lavender Haze

    Anti‐Hero

    Midnight Rain

    Vigilante Shit

    Bejeweled

    Mastermind

    Karma




    Taylor Swift Houston 2023 Eras Tour
      

    Photo by Marco Torres/Marco from Houston

    A sellout crowd of 62,690 packed NRG Stadium.

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    Movie Review

    New movie Friendship pairs Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd in a bizarre bromance

    Alex Bentley
    May 16, 2025 | 3:30 pm
    Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd in Friendship
    Photo courtesy of A24
    Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd in Friendship.

    Comedian Tim Robinson has gained a cult following thanks to series like Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave, in which his brand of cringe comedy is on full display. The former Saturday Night Live writer/performer has had a few small movie roles over the years, but he’s now getting his first starring role in the off-kilter Friendship.

    Robinson plays Craig, a mild-mannered suburbanite with a wife, Tami (Kate Mara), and son, Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer). Craig has a boring life that involves little more than going to his middle manager job while wearing the same clothes day after day, anticipating the next Marvel movie, and helping Tami out with her at-home floral business.

    He gets a jolt of energy when Austin (Paul Rudd) moves into the neighborhood. The two men seem to hit it off, with Austin — a weatherman at a local TV channel — even taking Craig on a couple of impromptu adventures. But when Craig commits a couple of faux pas at a group gathering at Austin’s house, their bond starts to fracture.

    Even though the film is written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, it’s clear that Robinson had a big influence on the style of comedy it features. There are no big set pieces with a slew of jokes coming one after another. Instead, the film forces the audience to try to vibe with the very particular type of wavelength it’s giving off, one that could almost be called anti-comedy for the way the laughs come out of left field.

    The 100-minute film is full of random comedic moments, like Steven kissing Tami on the lips, Craig being obsessed with his plain brown clothes, a group sing-along, and more. More often than not, it’s the way Craig reacts to both normal and abnormal situations that gets the laughs. The character is needy and oblivious, two traits that combine to make many of his actions cringeworthy.

    Perhaps most importantly for this type of movie, many things in the story go unexplained or don’t make sense. Seemingly crucial elements are brought up only to fade away just as quickly, while other parts that appeared to be throwaway sections get callbacks later in the film. DeYoung and Robinson are determined to keep the audience on their toes the entire time, never knowing what to expect next.

    Robinson has the perfect face for a story like this, one that’s bland enough to blend into the background but memorable enough to sell the jokes. His demeanor is also excellent, never becoming too expressive, even when he gets angry. With long hair, a mustache, and a certain swagger, Rudd is a great complement to Robinson. Only in a film like this would an everyman like Rudd be considered the suave and cool one.

    There will be some that will see Friendship and come away wondering what the hell they just watched. But anyone who goes in knowing that they’re about to witness a comedy that challenges their sensibilities will likely have a great time.

    ---

    Friendship is now playing in select theaters.

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