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I swore up and down that we would not play this concert movie because they wouldn't give it to us on the break. But October and the beginning of November has been so horribly miserable that there is literally nothing else to play. So we took it for a weekend.
I was not disappointed in the sound. It shook the floor and rattled the rafters. We had a couple of loudness complaints so we wound up playing it a bit softer the last couple of shows, but I still thought the sound was impressive. Really good low end. And the lyrics were easy to understand. The visuals were top notch. The staging was amazing, with one jaw-dropping moment after another. More than anything, I wanted to see the behind the scenes video.
The concert itself was a bit of an overload for me. I'm not really a Taylor Swift fan - I find her music to be pleasant but it all started to sound the same around the middle of the show. She definitely knows her way around a pop hook, that's for sure. And knowing that the whole lyrical content of the show was based on her real life experiences kind of lent a Fleetwood-Mac-ish vibe to the proceedings, although Taylor, as talented as she is, will never be Stevie Nicks.
But as an old school concert guy, I was kind of left cold by everything being so tightly choreographed and staged. You got the impression that if you see this show twice, you're going to see two identical shows. No spontaneity at all. Even Taylor's between-song patter seemed to be "written." And the band was, for the most part, shuffled off into the far corners of the stage where they could barely be seen. The show was all about one person and her crew of dancers; the band is not deemed to be all that important, I guess.
I couldn't tell if the vocals were lipsynched or live. I'm guessing it was a combination of the two. The sound and production had a very obvious sheen laid over it -- it sounded like a studio recording with 70,000 teenage girls screaming overdubbed.
Businesswise, it just did OK for us. Part of this I blame on the fact that we didn't get it until Week 4; the bloom was off the rose. Also there's a bit of a TS backlash brewing, I think, due to her overexposure on NFL channels and a bit of bad blood generated by the fact that the media has been trumpeting that she's now a billionaire.
The other likely cause of our lackluster showing here was, we didn't know we were going to play it until Monday of last week, and we didn't receive the onesheets until Thursday, so we haven't been playing the trailer, so we did zero publicity for it. If they'd given it to us on the break we probably would have grossed 3x as much. But, that's movie distribution for ya. An industry run by idiots who don't understand that small town people have FOMO too, and their attention span is just as short.
The people who did come, though, loved it. So I'll give it a three out of five stars for being a crowdpleaser. It was certainly a lot more pleasant to listen to than "Exorcist: Believer" which was played to mostly single-digit crowds last week.
I was not disappointed in the sound. It shook the floor and rattled the rafters. We had a couple of loudness complaints so we wound up playing it a bit softer the last couple of shows, but I still thought the sound was impressive. Really good low end. And the lyrics were easy to understand. The visuals were top notch. The staging was amazing, with one jaw-dropping moment after another. More than anything, I wanted to see the behind the scenes video.
The concert itself was a bit of an overload for me. I'm not really a Taylor Swift fan - I find her music to be pleasant but it all started to sound the same around the middle of the show. She definitely knows her way around a pop hook, that's for sure. And knowing that the whole lyrical content of the show was based on her real life experiences kind of lent a Fleetwood-Mac-ish vibe to the proceedings, although Taylor, as talented as she is, will never be Stevie Nicks.
But as an old school concert guy, I was kind of left cold by everything being so tightly choreographed and staged. You got the impression that if you see this show twice, you're going to see two identical shows. No spontaneity at all. Even Taylor's between-song patter seemed to be "written." And the band was, for the most part, shuffled off into the far corners of the stage where they could barely be seen. The show was all about one person and her crew of dancers; the band is not deemed to be all that important, I guess.
I couldn't tell if the vocals were lipsynched or live. I'm guessing it was a combination of the two. The sound and production had a very obvious sheen laid over it -- it sounded like a studio recording with 70,000 teenage girls screaming overdubbed.
Businesswise, it just did OK for us. Part of this I blame on the fact that we didn't get it until Week 4; the bloom was off the rose. Also there's a bit of a TS backlash brewing, I think, due to her overexposure on NFL channels and a bit of bad blood generated by the fact that the media has been trumpeting that she's now a billionaire.
The other likely cause of our lackluster showing here was, we didn't know we were going to play it until Monday of last week, and we didn't receive the onesheets until Thursday, so we haven't been playing the trailer, so we did zero publicity for it. If they'd given it to us on the break we probably would have grossed 3x as much. But, that's movie distribution for ya. An industry run by idiots who don't understand that small town people have FOMO too, and their attention span is just as short.
The people who did come, though, loved it. So I'll give it a three out of five stars for being a crowdpleaser. It was certainly a lot more pleasant to listen to than "Exorcist: Believer" which was played to mostly single-digit crowds last week.
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