Jake Gyllenhaal

So, in the end, it wasn’t so much Oh, Mary! as it was Not Tonight, Mary! Cole Escola’s out-there, queer-as-they-come farce, revolving around the strained relationship between the “foul and hateful” Mary Lincoln, a dipsomaniac with ambitions to be a cabaret singer, and honest Abe, here presented as a pitiful figure so deep in the closet he may as well be in Narnia, was widely regarded as the play to beat at this year’s Tonys. There hasn’t been an out-and-out comedy that’s won the major awards for a considerable time, let alone one that emerged from off-Broadway, and it’s testament to Escola’s prowess (as well as some of the most laudatory reviews in recent memory), that it was front-runner for Best Play.

There is a magical nexus between awful and amazing on which some movies land. Sometimes it is a self-aware reach toward the awful that creates the magic, other times it is the filmmaker’s obliviousness that creates a Bob Ross happy accident that delights viewers and creates a cult classic. Amazon’s Road House is not such a movie. The 2024 film, loosely based on 1989’s Road House, mostly adheres to the Wikipedia plot summary of the Patrick Swayze classic, if you forgive them for forgetting to make the plot discernible. Jake Gyllenhaal is a former UFC fighter, rather than a professional bouncer, in this iteration. He is recruited to become a bouncer for a club experiencing a wave of violence, as was the case in the original. He is a badass, as Swayze was.

Taylor Swift's album Red, her fourth, originally dropped my first semester at college. It was Swift's first full foray into pop and she matched the change in genre with a new signature appearance; bright red lips and glossy, straight hair with bangs to replace her sweeping curly blonde 'do. Red's exploration of deep love and subsequent heartbreak, plus Taylor's personal reinvention, felt like a comfort during my own transition into adulthood. Swift announced last week that she would be dropping the "Taylor's Version" of Red earlier than expected. The re-release is part of a project Swift has undertaken to re-record all of her masters after her former label sold them out from under her to Scooter Braun.