Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

The cultural phenomenon continues on the big screen! Immerse yourself in this once-in-a-lifetime concert film experience with a breathtaking, cinematic view of the history-making tour.

  • Released: 2023-10-13
  • Runtime: 160 minutes
  • Genre: Music
  • Stars: Matt Billingslea, Paul Sidoti, Melanie Nyema, Mike Meadows, Jan Ravnik, Eliotte Woodford, Jeslyn Gorman, Kamilah Marshall, Raphael Thomas, Taylor Swift, Amos Heller, Karen Chuang, Amanda Balen
  • Director: Sam Wrench
 Comments
  • david-meldrum - 2 July 2024
    Just Enjoy It
    I have cried at concerts. There's something about seeing your favourite artists in the flesh, breathing the same air as them, and hearing the music with which you deeply connect, that touches deep places in many of us. Like many others before me and countless to come, I have on several occasions found myself openly crying amid thousands of others; it's a sense that these are your people, and knowing now that you're not the only one who feels these things. The concert film of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour has a plentiful supply of shots of audience members in tears, but watching it in my living room on an unremarkable weekday morning, one moment made me cry too. Swift is singing 22, a deliriously fun song about being 22 years old; she is heading to the edge of the satellite stage that forms the end of the runway from the main stage. A young girl has been plucked from the audience, and is standing off-stage, near to where Swift is heading, with a rapturous look on her face. As Swift arrives within reach of the girl, she takes her hat from her head and places it on the little girl and continues to sing, directly at her.

    Taylor Swift during the Eras Concert Film. Photo from IndieWire

    Picking out individual audience members in a gig is nothing new; it's a way of saying to the person at the back of the stadium ... this is you! The one person selected represents all of us there. What moved me here a sense of anointing a younger generation the bestowing of the hat seemed to represent; one day you'll be 22 too. Don't worry; you've got this. One successful young woman was saying to a generation of women to be ... it's hard to grow up, but you'll be able to do it.

    I thought of this after seeing a social media post where someone I know asked what the big deal is about Taylor Swift. I've no problem with that question; when you get older you can't keep up with everything. It's OK to not get something, to not like something a lot of others seem to never stop talking about. That's life. What got to me was a couple of the responses. People talked about someone with a 'whiny American voice' and complained that the songs only used the same three notes. It's that sort of snarky, almost always male, response that sits so uneasily when you listen to Swift's music and watch the tour film. Her voice can't be described as whiny by anyone who's listening, and the three-note thing is just bizarre. The concept of the Eras tour is an unusual one for a major artist; she takes the audience on a non-chronological snapshot of each of her eleven career studio albums to date, complete with costume and set changes for each album. As you watch you find an artist confidently shifting between several different types of music, who has consistently and skillfully evolved over the eighteen years of her career to date. Very few artists shift musical styles as adroitly as she; that she's done so and become such a cultural force in the process is remarkable. The show clocks in at over three hours, and never flags for energy or interest; to my knowledge, only Springsteen performs three-hour shows these days. No shade on Bruce - I love his music - but he doesn't shift musical styles in the same way as Swift does.

    Since my daughter made me start paying closer attention to Taylor Swift about seven or eight years ago, I've fallen for her music. She's a deft songwriter - if you're able to watch the concert film, do so with the subtitles on. There are some brilliantly written songs there, expressing truths with economy, wit, and insight. The way she's taken control of her own career as a woman in an industry so often the preserve of male guardians of taste is something to note. If she was a flash in the pan, she wouldn't be this popular after eleven albums. In every city she's played a concert on this tour she's made significant donations to local food banks and community kitchens. She's not perfect, but she is, I think, a good news story. A generation of young women are connecting with someone who's helping them discover a different way of doing things and being in the world. And, of course, she hasn't reached this level of success without reaching into many other demographics.

    The role art plays in our lives is unique. If we can bear to remember the Covid lockdown, so many of us found the strength to keep going by going back to the art that sustains us each the most - be it music or books or tv or film or much else; both as people enjoying consuming the art and practicing it in whatever ways were open to us. Imagine a life without the soulful connection that our favourite arts bring us; is it something we even dare contemplate? The arts are a God-given gift to enhance and enliven our lives, to build connections, to form community, and to bring joy. Life is hard enough as it is; if people are finding joy and meaning in art which to us means little, so be it. I know I used to be the person who snarkily looked down on the 'wrong' type of music, books or films. I hope I'm learning to change that. We can justifiably be bored of saturation media coverage and hype; we can not understand the appeal of many things. But let's not complain and patronise and speak down, especially to people just learning to make their way in the world and in the process discovering something that helps do that with a little more confidence. Somewhere there's a child, lingering at stage's edge or singing along alone in their room, discovering that they're not alone. Surely that is all that we really need to know.
  • thedarkknightreturns-96915 - 29 March 2024
    Utter trash
    Don't see how this is rated so high... it's below mediocre. It's all smoke and mirrors... Taylor is nowhere near on par with the top 20 best singers of today. She does the same arms movements throughout the concert and it's considered choreograpy and dancing 😂😂😂. What have become as a society to where we think this constitutes as good music or even real music. If u stripped all the effects all the echo and boring show what would u have ? Nothing but a girl on stage doing nothing... she has always been a flash in the pan and she will never be on the level of Whitney, Adele, Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick or any other greats. Her music is super basic and has no merit or feeling.