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Taylor Swift turns heel, owning her chaos and messiness on 'The Tortured Poets Department’

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Taylor Swift turns heel, owning her chaos and messiness on 'The Tortured Poets Department’

Taylor Swift has spent years warning us not to believe everything we hear about her. As the biggest star of pop music’s parasocial age, she argues that the facts of her existence are constantly warped by gossip and misinformation, which is one reason the Easter eggs and coded messages she’s long built into her work have helped create such a tight bond between her and her fans. Pay close enough attention, the thinking goes, and her art will always tell you the truth.

Except when it doesn’t.

Toward the end of her juicy new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift unloads a sparky electro-pop song called “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” In the song she essentially admits that last summer, as she was crisscrossing the country on her record-breaking (and far from finished) Eras tour — a show centered on her constantly living her best life — the singer was actually falling apart inside.

“They said, ‘Babe, you gotta fake it till you make it,’ and I did,” she sings over a whooshing groove that feels like it’s slowly picking up speed, “Lights, camera — bitch, smile / Even when you wanna die.” These are the makings of a very sad song, but “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” isn’t sad at all; it’s crisp, propulsive, almost ecstatic. The point isn’t that she suffered through this experience — it’s that she soldiered through it. “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day,” she crows in her perkiest voice, explaining why in the next line: “I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like a plague.”

Swift’s 11th studio LP, released at midnight Eastern time, follows a busy period in the 34-year-old’s personal and professional spheres: Beyond launching the Eras tour, which itself followed 2022’s hugely successful “Midnights” album, Swift — deep breath here — broke up with Joe Alwyn, the English actor with whom she was in a romantic relationship for more than half a decade; had a reported dalliance with Matty Healy of the 1975 that ended amid an uproar over offensive comments he made about Ice Spice; notched insane commercial numbers with re-recordings of two of her older albums; took the Eras production into movie theaters; and, oh, yeah, started dating Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs before his team won Super Bowl LVIII in February.

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Its sound pitched somewhere between the synth-soaked “Midnights” and 2020’s rootsy “Folklore,” “Tortured Poets” touches on all this, not least the split with Alwyn, whom she portrays in songs like “So Long, London” as a cold and disinterested partner. “I stopped trying to make him laugh / Stopped trying to drill the safe,” she sings. She also details the link-up with Kelce, whose NFL victory she evokes in “The Alchemy”: “Trying to be the greatest in the league / Where’s the trophy? / He just comes running over to me.”

Yet this isn’t the breakup album — or the new-love album — you might’ve expected. Swift doesn’t portray herself precisely as a victim as she did in old tunes such as “Dear John” or “All Too Well,” to name two of her masterpieces about unscrupulous men; nor is there anything dewy-eyed about “The Alchemy,” which likens falling for a new guy to a chemical imbalance. The LP turns out to be something of a heel turn; it’s got a proudly villainous energy as Swift embraces her messiest and most chaotic tendencies. This mind-set comes to light particularly in a handful of songs that appear to be about Healy, the edgelord rock star whom she alternately roasts as a selfish junkie in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and describes as the only guy crazy enough to match her in the title track.

“But Daddy I Love Him” is the album’s finest cut: a garment-rending folk-rock melodrama in which Swift seems to excoriate her audience for its disapproval of her and Healy’s affair. “I’d rather burn my whole life down than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning,” she sings, going on to compare her pearl-clutching fans to “judgmental creeps” and “vipers dressed in empaths’ clothing.” In a time of stan culture run amok, it’s thrilling to hear a superstar address her followers this way — and wild to imagine the response among those she’s relied on to fork over untold sums for concert tickets and collectible vinyl editions of her records.

In its cheerful bad vibes, “Tortured Poets” registers as a clean break from the therapized self-care pop heard lately from the likes of Ariana Grande and Kacey Musgraves. Swift isn’t seeking betterment in these songs about emotional trauma and its aftermath; if anything, she’s taking a perverse satisfaction in her unwillingness to learn someone else’s lessons. (In a funny twist, the A-list pop star she’s most closely aligned with right now is her frenemy Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Guts” maps a similar emotional terrain.)

We’ve encountered this Taylor before: More than anything she’s done since, “Tortured Poets” feels like the spiritual successor to 2017’s “Reputation,” which took a devious glee in dealing with the fallout of her feuds with various famous people. Indeed, many fans thought she intended to announce her “Taylor’s Version” remake of “Reputation” at February’s Grammy Awards, where she won album of the year for a record fourth time with “Midnights”; wearing black and white à la “Reputation’s” cover, she instead revealed that she’d made “Tortured Poets,” whose artwork shares a color palette with the earlier LP.

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As on “Reputation,” Swift delights in depicting herself as the bad guy, as in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” where she insists, “I was gentle till the circus life made me mean.” And that happy participation in pop’s celebrity death match is a crucial distinction from recent work by Billie Eilish and Lorde, who seem perpetually on the lookout for an escape from the highly scrutinized lives they’ve created. “I cry a lot, but I am so productive,” Swift sings in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” which ends with a flex — “Try and come for my job” — as chilling as it is hilarious.

All this lore — it’s a lot. Yet “The Tortured Poets Department” also showcases Swift’s gifts as a songwriter, musician and producer. Her melodies are sticky and her arrangements grabby; working in the studio with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, she’s honed an electro-acoustic style that’s instantly identifiable (even if that’s sometimes because she recycles a melodic figure she’s used before). Post Malone’s scratchy croon adds a welcome wrinkle to the album’s opener, “Fortnight,” while Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine ups the theater-kid intensity of “Florida!!!”

As a singer, Swift explores the sultrier lower depths of her range in “Fresh Out the Slammer” and the Fleetwood Mac-ish “Guilty as Sin?”; as a lyricist, she leans into detail in a way she didn’t quite on “Midnights,” fondly recalling a conversation with maybe-Healy in the title track where the two of them “declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” (!) and perfectly capturing the mid-30s position in “Florida!!!” with a line about how “my friends all smell like weed or little babies.”

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“Tortured Poets” closes with the slow-and-low “Clara Bow,” titled after the early-cinema It girl, in which Swift thinks through the all ways that show business has been chewing up — or trying to chew up — beautiful young women for the last 100 years. It starts with Bow, then moves up to Stevie Nicks before landing on someone who looks in this light like … Taylor Swift, which is truly a name you haven’t heard pronounced until Taylor Swift herself says it.

“You’ve got edge she never did,” the song’s narrator tells the woman — one more provocation on an album full of them.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: In ‘The Idea of You,’ a boy band is center stage but Anne Hathaway steals the show

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Movie Review: In ‘The Idea of You,’ a boy band is center stage but Anne Hathaway steals the show

In the warmly charming rom-com “The Idea of You,” Anne Hathaway plays a 40-year-old divorcee and Silver Lake art gallery owner who, after taking her teenage daughter to Coachella, becomes romantically involved with a 24-year-old heartthrob in the boy band August Moon. They first meet after she mistakes his trailer for the bathroom.

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There are a few hundred things about this premise that might be farfetched, including the odds of finding love anywhere near the porta johns of a music festival. But one of them is not that a young star like Hayes Campbell would fall for a single mom like Solène .

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Solène is stylish, unimpressed by Hayes’ celebrity and has bangs so perfect they look genetically modified. And, most importantly, she’s Anne Hathaway. In the power dynamics of “The Idea of You,” Hayes may be a fictional pop star but Hathaway is a very real movie star. And you don’t forget it for a moment in Michael Showalter’s lightly appealing showcase of the actor at her resplendent best.

“The Idea of You,” which debuts Thursday on Prime Video, is full of all the kinds of contradictions that can make a rom-com work. The highly glamorous, megawatt-smiling Hathaway is playing a down-to-earth nobody. The showbiz veteran in the movie is played by Galitzine, a less well-known but up-and-coming British actor whose performance in the movie is quite authentic. And even though the whole scenario is undeniably a glossy high-concept Hollywood fairy tale, Showalter gives it enough texture that “The Idea of You” comes off more natural and sincere than you’d expect.

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The only thing that really needs to make perfect sense in a movie like “The Idea of You” is the chemistry. The film, penned by Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt from Robinne Lee’s bestseller, takes its time in the early scenes between Solène and Hayes — first at Coachella, then when he stops by her gallery — allowing their rapport to build convincingly, and giving each actor plenty of time to smolder.

Once the steamy hotel-room encounters come in “The Idea of You,” the movie has, if not swept you away, then at least ushered you along on a European trip of sex and room service. At the same time, it stays faithful to its central mission of celebrating middle-aged womanhood. The relationship will eventually cause a social media firestorm, but its main pressure point is whether Solène can stick with Hayes after her ex-husband cheated on her. This is a fairy tale she deserves.

While Showalter has long showed a great gift for juggling comedy and drama at once, “The Idea of You” leans more fully into wish-fulfillment romance. That can leave less to sustain the film, which has notably neutered some of the things that distinguished the book.

The May-December romance has been shrunk a little. In the book, the singer is 20. Given that Galitzine is 29 and the 41-year-old Hathaway is no one’s idea of old, this is more like a July-September relationship. In the book, the daughter is a huge admirer of the pop singer, adding to the awkwardness, but in the movie, August Moon is “so 7th grade” to her.

There are surely more interesting and funnier places “The Idea of You” could have gone. But Hathaway and Galitzine are a good enough match that, for a couple hours, it’s easy to forget.

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But the most convincing thing about “The Idea of You”? August Moon. The movie nails the look and sound of boy bands so well because it went straight to the source. The original songs in the film are by Savan Kotecha and Carl Falk, the producer-songwriters of, among other pop hits, “What Makes You Beautiful,” One Direction’s debut single.

That connection will probably only further the sense that “The Idea of You” is very nearly “The Idea of Harry Styles.” The filmmakers have distanced the movie from any real-life resemblances. But one thing is for sure: With August Moon following 4Town of “Turning Red” , we are living in the golden age of the fictional boy band.

“The Idea of You,” an Amazon MGM Studios release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some language and sexual content. Running time: 115 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.

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Mavis Leno joins husband Jay at a premiere after dementia revelation: 'I feel great'

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Mavis Leno joins husband Jay at a premiere after dementia revelation: 'I feel great'

Jay and Mavis Leno donned their date-night best Tuesday at the red-carpet premiere of Jerry Seinfeld’s forthcoming film “Unfrosted.”

The premiere marked the couple’s second public outing since the former talk show host in January filed for a since-granted conservatorship over his wife following her advanced dementia diagnosis. The 77-year-old philanthropist previously attended her husband’s April 3 stand-up show at the Hollywood Improv.

Gracing the red carpet, the couple — who have been married since 1980 — flashed smiles and peace signs at the assembled photographers.

“I feel great,” Mavis told “Entertainment Tonight,” with her husband saying, “We have a great time. Forty-four years [married], so we’re doing good.”

Jay Leno, 74, also added that the two were glad to “come to something fun for a change.”

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“Everything is so controversial. Just to come to a funny, silly movie ― it’s great. I think people will have a great time,” he said.

Last month, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge granted Jay Leno’s request for conservatorship after his wife’s court-appointed legal counsel, Ronald E. Ostrin, in March filed a report recommending the decision.

In Ostrin’s report, he said that during his investigation, he learned that Mavis Leno has “major neurocognitive disorders,” “cognitive impairment” and “sometimes does not know her husband, Jay, nor her date of birth,” The Times previously reported.

Ostrin also included in his report comments from Mavis Leno’s neurologist, Dr. Hart Cohen, who told Ostrin she “has a lot of disorientation” and “will ruminate about her parents who have both passed and her mother who died about 20 years ago.” Ostrin “reviewed substantial medical records which supported Dr. Cohen’s opinions,” the report said.

In his January filing, Jay Leno said that he sought a conservatorship in order to structure a living trust and other estate plans to make sure that his wife has “managed assets sufficient to provide for her care” in the event that he dies before she does, according to a copy of the petition previously obtained by The Times.

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The petition said that Mavis Leno “has been progressively losing capacity and orientation to space and time for several years,” rendering her “incapable of executing the estate plan.” It also said she is under treatment for “dementia and mood disorder,” though it is still unclear when she was diagnosed with either.

At the April hearing, Ostrin said Mavis Leno was “in agreement” with the conservatorship and “receiving excellent care with her husband, Mr. Leno,” People reported.

The judge agreed, saying, “I think she’s in the least restrictive environment. I think she’s in very good care with Mr. Leno.”

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Film Review: Civil War is Too Timid to Be Interesting

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Film Review: Civil War is Too Timid to Be Interesting

A24

2/5 stars

When I heard that Alex Garland was making a film about a new American civil war to be released in the middle of an extremely contentious election year, I was hyped. The idea seemed more daring and provocative than we have seen in quite some time. Sadly, Civil War lacks any real courage and Garland remains frustratingly “apolitical” with a story that should be inherently political. The result is a thrilling but shallow action movie with little to say with its fascinating premise beyond the tired old cliche that “war is hell.”

Set in a near future in which the United States has devolved into warring factions, we follow photojournalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) who is traveling with several other journalists to interview the nebulously tyrannical president (Nick Offerman) before the “Western Forces,” a combined alliance between Texas and California, attack Washington D.C.

The film remains steadfast in its refusal to explain any of the factors involved in this conflict. Who are the Western Forces and what do they want? What has the president done to bring about a full-on civil war? Garland doesn’t even bother to ask these questions, failing to give audiences a sense of urgency. There is also some striking imagery reminiscent of footage from Vietnam and Bosnia. Seeing these images played out on American soil feels like they should be ripe for analysis, but there is no message behind them. The film says nothing about modern warfare or even photojournalism and only leaves us with sheer spectacle. The timid approach to politics gives us a film that feels like it wants to be The Battle of Algiers but becomes White House Down.

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Written and directed by Alex Garland // Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jefferson White, Nelson Lee, Evan Lai, Vince Pisani, Justin James Boykin, Jess Matney, Greg Hill, Edmund Donovan, Sonoya Mizuno, Nick Offerman, and Jesse Plemons // 109 minutes // A24 // Rated R

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