The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Anything but magnificent
No no no no no!! You cannot be serious! What is wrong with people?
This – and a lot more in a similar vein but unfit for publication in a family newspaper on account of the bespattering of undeleted expletives – is more or less representative of my response to the appearance in The Courier (at the age of 200 years and three days), of arguably the greatest insult to the cultural evolution of the human spirit.
It was cunningly disguised as a film review but it didn’t fool me.
It is surely beyond all doubt that the supreme achievement in the history of world cinema was The Magnificent Seven (if you disagree, you may leave this column at once). Well, some alien from the Planet Zogg has gone and made a remake.
What’s next? Casablanca set in Notting Hill? (“Of all the wine bars in all the towns in all the world…”)
Or My Fair Laddie?
Pooh penguin
It’s been a tough week. First of all there was the news that there is to be a new Winnie the Pooh story featuring a penguin. Why?
AA Milne has been dead for 60 years. He didn’t write a story about a penguin so how can there be one now? It’s like writing The Gospel According to Andrew and shoehorning it into the New Testament between Mark and Luke.
This is worse than Bob Dylan’s album of Frank Sinatra songs – and I didn’t think cultural vandalism could stoop lower than that.
But The Magnificent Seven… I can practically lip-synch the whole dialogue.
McQueen to Brynner as they ride the funeral hearse up to Boot Hill and a gunshot resounds from a second storey window: “You elected?”
Brynner to McQueen as he considers the ruined cigar which had been in his mouth when the bullet hit it: “No. Got nominated real good.”
All the way through until the final scene – the seven reduced to just Brynner and McQueen again as they ride out of town: “The old man was right. We always lose.”
Oh and that music. Altogether now: “Dum dum-di-dum, dum di-dum-didum…”
Words fail me. No, wait, they don’t. Here are some more.
You know what they use to replace Elmer Bernstein’s immortal score? The House of the Rising Sun, that’s what.
Yes, that same hoary old crappy Animals song that you tried to wrap your fingers round on your very first guitar.
It’s like replacing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with Acker Bilk.
One of the most depressing aspects of the announcement (and I may never get over this as a lifelong devotee of The Courier), is that my newspaper of choice failed to ridicule the film.
In fact, it rather approved: “It rests comfortably on the shoulders of Washington and his co-stars and the final assault packs in sufficient excitement to warrant staying in the saddle for 133 minutes.”
Well, I’m with Steven Whitty, the New York Daily News reviewer, who concluded: “There’s a nagging feeling, pardner, you really should have just rented the original Magnificent Seven instead.”
And I’m with Christopher Orr of The Atlantic: “Though not quite proactively bad, the movie does virtually nothing to justify its existence.”
How did society let this happen? This is America we’re talking about, the country that invented jazz, Walt Whitman and Meryl Streep.
Trump
I know there’s been the odd blip along the way. It has produced Donald Trump and he might become president any day now and really America should not have let that one slip through its fingers.
But a remake of The Magnificent Seven? Where were the CIA? Where were the FBI? Where were the thought police? How could they do this to me? I was brought up on penguin-less Winnie the Pooh books, cowboys and toy guns.
These did not, incidentally, turn me into a member of the NRA when I grew up and I have never had a real gun in my hand, although I do admit to a fondness for honey and sometimes still misspell it hunny.
There was also a more or less endless supply of western films (one of my grandfathers being the Lochee cinema manager helped a lot in that regard), so I was perfectly groomed for that moment when the genre soared effortlessly to its apotheosis in 1960 and The Magnificent Seven achieved western perfection. Nothing has got close since.
And now this. Denzel Washington instead of Yul Brynner.
Chris Pratt (this whole enterprise is awash with prats) instead of Steve McQueen.
They might as well have just used the Osmonds.
This is my boyhood and youth they are besmirching. This could scar me for life.
And do you know what they do at the end? They play the Bernstein theme. The one from 1960.
And that’s the moment you realise, pardner, that you really should have just rented the original instead.
This is worse than Bob Dylan’s album of Frank Sinatra songs – and I didn’t think cultural vandalism could stoop lower than that