It’s time to rally all those exes who live in Texas and mark those calendars. The King of Country, George Strait, is returning to the Texas stage, closing out RodeoHouston’s 90th anniversary season on March 20, 2022.
The full-length evening concert will be held in Houston's NRG Stadium on the final night of the 2022 Rodeo, which runs for 21 days February 28-March 20, 2022, organizers announced May 18.
Individual tickets for Strait’s concert-only performance go on sale to the public Thursday, June 24. (Tix are limited to four per person). The rodeo promises a full entertainer lineup announcement once available.
“What better way to celebrate the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo’s 90th anniversary than with a special, concert-only performance by the King of Country music himself,” rodeo president and CEO Chris Boleman noted in a statement. “After a couple of particularly challenging years, our thousands of dedicated volunteers simply can’t wait to welcome everyone back to the Rodeo grounds for a Texas-sized celebration of Western heritage that will be well worth the wait.”
Next year’s performance marks Strait’s 31st rodeo performance in Houston; his first was in 1983.
By the numbers, Strait has entertained more than 1.7 million rodeo fans through the years. To date, Strait boasts 33 platinum or multi-platinum-selling albums and 60 No. 1 singles — the most of any artist of any music genre in history — plus, a Grammy for his album, Troubadour. Not surprisingly, he is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.
For more information and to buy tickets, visit the rodeo's website.
The story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster is now over 200 years old, with Mary Shelley’s book having been adapted or referenced in close to 500 films. Less common is the character of The Bride of Frankenstein, which existed in the original text but has more often than not been excised in adaptations. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has tried to rectify that by giving the character a big showcase in her new film, The Bride!.
Gyllenhaal has reimagined the story as one in which a woman named Ida (Jessie Buckley) becomes possessed by the spirit of Shelley (also Buckley). At the same time, the already-existing Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) approaches Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), who specializes in reanimation, with the request to make him a wife. When Ida falls to her death in an “accident” involving her boyfriend (John Magaro), the ideal corpse becomes available.
After Ida’s resurrection, she and the monster become restless being studied by Dr. Euphronius and decide to break out to experience the world. The world, naturally, is not exactly welcoming to them, and soon the couple are on the run for causing mayhem, including a few murders. In hot pursuit are detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his assistant, Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), as well as other authorities.
It’s clear that Gyllenhaal wanted to merge the Frankenstein story with Bonnie & Clyde, especially since she sets the film in the mid-1930s. And that wouldn’t have been a bad idea if having the monster and The Bride going on a crime spree was truly the focus of the movie. But most of the time there’s less intentionality in their misdeeds and more confusion, leading to a muddled plot with no clear direction or end goal in mind.
One of the biggest problems is that Gyllenhaal starts the energy of the film at an 11, giving her and everyone else nowhere to go but down. She dabbles in multiple different tones, at times going the straight drama route and other times making what seems like full-on camp. At one point, she even has the monster and the Bride in a dance sequence set to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” which would be hilarious as an homage to Young Frankenstein if the film weren’t so disjointed.
Most baffling of all is what Gyllenhaal wants from The Bride character. She morphs multiple times over the course of the film, from close to unintelligible at the beginning to rough-and-tumble at the end. There are hints at the lack of control she has over her autonomy, including Shelley’s possession of her and the monster lying to her about her past, but any commentary that Gyllenhaal might be trying to make gets lost amid the oddity of the film as a whole.
Both Buckley and Bale are all-in for their performances, which definitely fall in the “love it or hate it” dichotomy. Each scene is pitched so high that there’s little nuance to either of them, and neither is on par with their previous Oscar-caliber roles. The high-powered supporting cast of Bening, Sarsgaard, Cruz, and Jake Gyllenhaal is watchable based on previous roles, but none of them elevate this particular movie.
Whatever intentions Maggie Gyllenhaal had in making The Bride! are only halfway legible in a film that can never find its tonal footing. There has rarely been subtlety in movies featuring Frankenstein’s monster and related characters, but this one makes all the others seem like stuffy dramas in comparison.
