from Facebook: how Magnificent Seven almost had a callback to Blazing Saddles
[This post is not behind the paywall.]
film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
[This post is not behind the paywall.]
Humorless, rote, clichéd, and entirely unsurprising. Antoine Fuqua attempts to recapture old Hollywood magic — and fails — rather than create his own.
Nearly Blazing Saddles without the jokes: all genre conventions with none of the fun, just your inescapable expectations met around every sun-blighted corner.
Here are the few films coming in 2014 that are not sequels, remakes, reboots, or based on a stage show, the Bible, young-adult novels, comic books, cartoons, or — someone make it stop — toy lines.
Take a look back at an old trailer… For some mysterious reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, Jonah Rex, which is opening on Friday, is putting me in mind of this movie. Interesting how this trailer doesn’t come anywhere near spoiling the best jokes of the film, doesn’t give away the plot … more…
Can it be a coincidence that both of the big new flicks this Memorial Day weekend — the kickoff for Hollywood’s first summer movie season of the twenty-first century — are basically Hong Kong action movies? The people who think about these kinds of things — current-events journalists, mainly — have already predicted that if the 1900s were the American century, the 2000s may well be the Asian century… but they were speaking economically and politically. I guess it’s probably inevitable that Asia would start to hold some cultural sway in the West, too.