It's not what's said but who's said it. The French language turns profanity into romance.
- Maven
Kanye visits Trump. Why ye?
KanyeWest met with president-elect Donald Trump today and the internet was less than happy about it. After several hours of being dragged over the coals, Kanye took to the internet’s favorite source for spleen-venting to explain himself.
In a series of tweets, ‘Ye explained that he wanted to have The Donald’s ear so that they could work together on issues that he thinks are important.
“I wanted to meet with Trump today to discuss multicultural issues,” he wrote. “These issues included bullying, supporting teachers, modernizing curriculum, and violence in Chicago. I feel it is important to have a direct line of communication with our future President if we truly want change.”
Kanye ended with a cryptic tweet of “#2024”, which might be a reference to his own political aspirations.
Of course, if Kanye decides to run, we have a whole list of possible campaign slogans for him. But given his recent unsavory political opinions, former ‘Ye boosters might not be as on-board with his half-serious campaign as they might have been. It’s worth remembering that a rant about Trump kicked off a series of events that led to the cancellation of the Saint Pablo tour, and that fans booed him for it.
aspirations.
With the town of Rose Creek under the deadly control of industrialist Bartholomew Bogue, the desperate townspeople employ protection from seven outlaws, bounty hunters, gamblers and hired guns - Sam Chisolm, Josh Farraday, Goodnight Robicheaux, Jack Horne, Billy Rocks, Vasquez, and Red Harvest. As they prepare the town for the violent showdown that they know is coming, these seven mercenaries find themselves fighting for more than money.
Movie remakes have not been setting the world on fire lately. The all-gal Ghostbusters will maybe break even. Ben-Hur and Tarzan each cost — and lost — a fortune. So what's Hollywood pushing this weekend? The Magnificent Seven, a remake of a remake — admittedly, one with a decent pedigree.
In Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), a pickup band of seven sword-wielding rōnin are hired by a Japanese farming village to protect it from bandits. Only three of them walked away at the end.
In the original The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges made it seven gunslingers protecting a Wild West town from Mexican banditos. Only three of them rode out.
Now comes The Magnificent Seven the remake, and though the plot's essentially unchanged, the filmmakers have made some clearly intentional updates to their time-honored formula. No banditos this time. The bad guy is a greedy U.S. capitalist named Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard). And the good guys? A rainbow coalition: Asian knife hurler (Byung-hun Lee), Hispanic outlaw (Manuel Garcia Rulfo), face-painted native-American archer (Martin Sensmeier), a Confederate sharpshooter (Ethan Hawke), a guy described as a bear in people's clothes (Vincent D'Onofrio), and a goofball gambler (Chris Pratt), all led by silky-smooth bounty hunter Denzel Washington.
Haley Bennett and Chris Pratt in The Magnificent Seven.
Courtesy of Sony Pictures
Actually, I say Denzel Washington leads this band of variously grumpy, dopey and bashful dudes, but they're actually in the employ of a woman this time — that's another change — a woman I started to think of as a particularly aggrieved Snow White (Haley Bennett). When asked if she seeks revenge, she says she seeks righteousness, but she'll take revenge. Whistle while you work on that.
Though much of the film was shot in Louisiana, there are crags and wide open plains enough that the Old West vistas and the artfully shot mayhem look appropriately majestic. If you're going to have church bells crashing down from flaming steeples, director Antoine Fuqua is definitely the guy you want behind the camera.
He previously teamed up with Denzel Washington on the contemporary shoot'em-ups Training Day and The Equalizer, and he seems to really relish the sight of his star riding a horse (or even just walking beside it). At one point, Washington quietly says something like "go on, horse" and his steed obligingly saunters away to give him a clear shot at a bad guy.
As you might expect, the firepower is significantly increased this time out — I don't recall a Gatling gun in the 1960 version — and the climax, pitting Bogue's thuggish army of 200 against the town's nobly heroic seven is, let's say "explosive."
If body count is what you go to Westerns for, by all means drift into this one's corral. It's hardly magnificent, and apart from its casting it's not doing anything particularly original with its premise. But it's diverting in about the way you'd expect of a remake twice removed — call it a perfectly competent seven.
Mavenvision
