"The Magnificent Seven": Actually Nine, Including a Gay Couple

 Movie night this week was The Magnificent Seven (2016), a remake of the 1960 movie, which was in turn a remake of The Seven Samurai (1954), neither of which I have seen.  Apparently I'm not missing much.  It was 133 minutes of killing people.

In the Old West in 1879, snarling, sneering, moustache-twirling cartoon villain Bogue and his absurdly huge army of miscreants storm into the idyllic frontier town of Rose Creek, demanding that the townsfolk sell their land for a pittance and agree to be worked to death in his mines.  Anyone who refuses will be killed.  To show that he is serious, he kills about 20 of them on the spot, and burns down the church.

Cut to another town, where Emma, who lost her husband, and her friend Teddy (Luke Grimes, top photo) have settled.  When bounty hunter Sam Chisholm (Denzel Washington) rides in and kills everyone in the town tavern, they ask if he would be interested in killing Bogue and liberating the town.  He hates Bogue, so he agrees.  He gathers a diverse group of marksmen to help:

1.-3. Teddy, Chisholm, and Emma

4. Mischievous scamp Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt)

5-6. Former Confederate soldier Goodnight Robichaux (Ethan Hawke) and his boyfriend, an Asian knife-thrower named Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee, left)

7. Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a Mexican outlaw.  One of his colleagues doesn't like Mexicans.

8. Jack Horne, a retired Indian-killer who is not all there.

9. Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier, below), a Comanche who speaks no English, and uses a bow and arrow instead of a gun.  He bonds with Jack Horne, for some reason.

Chisholm is black in 1879, but his race is irrelevant.  It is surprising, therefore, that "learning to overcome racial prejudice" is part of the character development of at least four of the Magnificent Nine.  

And while I'm on the topic of plot inconsistencies, where, exactly, is this town?  Chisholm works out of Wichita, Kansas, but the Comanche territory was west Texas and eastern New Mexico, but the town is three days by horseback from Sacramento, California.  I guess the writers didn't bother to look at a map.  Exteriors were filmed in Louisiana, Colorado, and New Mexico.

After the colorful "gathering the gang" scenes, the Magnificent Nine roll into Rose Creek and kill about 300 of Bogue's men, plus the townsfolk who joined his side.  How are they better than Bogue?  

Bogue owns hundreds of towns throughout the Wild West, so he could just let this one go -- but no, he's snarling and unstable, so he decides to ride out himself with his absurdly huge army and kill everyone.  

It  takes three days to get to Sacramento, and three days to get back, so the Magnificent Nine have just under a week to whip the surviving townsfolk into an army -- a problem because most of them have never touched a gun before (in the Wild West?).  They also rig the town with booby traps and lots of dynomite.  

The Bogue army arrives, and everyone kills everyone.  Body after body, death after death, for about twenty minutes.  All of Bogue's army, most of the surviving townsfolk, and most of the Magnificent Nine die.  I'm wondering why you want to liberate a town full of corpses.  Teddy, Emma, Red Harvest, and Chisholm survive, and Emma voice-overs that the Seven were "magnificent." 

Beefcake:  No. A lot of close-ups of unshaven, sweaty men staring at each other just before they shoot.

Other Sights: Rose Creek is a stereotypic Hollywood one-street town, which nevertheless manages to support a hotel and a restaurant.  How many visitors other than assassins does it get?

Gay Characters: #5-6.  Apparently the writers intended for them to be gay, but the studio insisted on just a subtext, to allow for deniability: "What?  No, you're reading too much into it.  They're just friends. Gay people didn't exist in the Old West."

Heterosexism:  Surprisingly, there are only a few scattered references to heterosexual desire, and no one falls in love. I was very surprised that Emma didn't hook up with Teddy or Chisholm.

Body Count:  Endless.  

My Grade: I have a new rule.  No movies with more than 58 deaths.  How did anyone in the Old West survive?

Danny Greene: Professional Hunk of the 1980s

During the 1970s and early 1980s, producers started realizing that heterosexual women like to look at men, so they began marketing male physiques to them -- Playgirl magazine,  the Chippendale Dancers, Gregory Harrison in For Ladies Only , Jon-Erik Hexum in Cover Up.  Of course, gay men were watching, too.  The producers usually pretended that they were unaware of the existence of gay men, but the performers knew.

Daniel Greene (aka Danny Greene) rode in on the tide of "female" adulation of the male form.  He began making the rounds of guest hunks on tv in 1982: Trapper John MD, Alice, Three's Company, The A-Team, a sex comedy called The Rosebud Beach Hotel (1984), an aerobics movie called Pulsebeat (1985) (Yes, there were aerobics movies.)

It didn't matter, as long as he took his shirt off, or better yet stripped down to his underwear or a Speedo, and the camera panned out to shots of ladies lusting over his killer bod.

His biggest role was in the nighttime soap Falcon Crest (1985-86), playing Dwayne Cooley, a truck driver who somehow finds his way into the ultra-rich family and begins having affairs with the ladies (thus cleverly combining the trucker and glitz fads).  He was so popular that he even got fan mail from Governor Bob Graham of Florida, his home state.

Afterwards Danny played buddy-bonding man-mountains in Hands of Steel (1986), Skeleton Coast (1988), The Opponent (1988), and Soldier of Fortune (1990), but he really wanted to market himself  "to the ladies" (and the gay men) again.

 So he played Buck on the gay-themed Brothers (1985), Bob, mild-mannered hunk who is romanced by the saucy Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988), and "Fantasy Rusty" in the sitcom Babes (1991).

Not a lot of starring roles during the 1990s and 2000s, when every actor worth his Equity card knew his way around a gym, so a body by Michelangelo was no longer a guarantee of stardom.

Danny is married to actress/model LaGena Hart, and according to wikipedia works for a company called ACN in Florida.

"I Know What You Did Last Summer": LGBTQ Representation. For Two Episodes, Anyway

In the original I Know What You Did Last Summer movie (1997), four teens driving along the North Carolina coast accidentally hit and kill a pedestrian.  Instead of, say, calling the police, they throw the body in the ocean and get on with their lives.  But a year later, a slasher who "knows what you did last summer" starts slashing them and their friends, leaving only the the Last Girl, Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and her boyfriend, Ray (Freddie Prinz Jr.), to smooch and declare their love for each other.

A sequel was inevitable.  In I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), the slasher continues to vex heterosexual college sweethearts Julie and Ray and their friends, including a token black guy (Mekhi Pfifer).  He gets slashified, but Julie and Ray survive, and get married. 

Someone said that tragedies end with a stage littered with bodies, and comedies end with a wedding.  

Eight years later, the franchise continued with I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006).  This time four teens accidentally kill a peer in a prank that goes wrong, and a year later the slasher starts slashing. The Last Girl's boyfriend (David Paetkau, left) gets sliced and diced, but she survives with a new beau (Ben Easter).

I never saw any of these movies -- they sounded heterosexist to the max, and besides, the slasher genre is stale.  But I watched the first two episodes of the new Amazon retread, I Know What You Did Last Summer.  This time the setting is a small town in Hawaii, and the squashed pedestrian is Allison, the straightlaced, uber-square twin sister of boozing, drugging, screwing wild child Lennon.  Or is it Lenon who was squashed, and Allison decided on a dead-sister masquerade?  And, for the first time in I Know history,  one of the teens is gay: Johnny (Sebastian Amoroso).  He even discusses dating a guy at the gym, Erik (Duncan Kamakana), although they're not shown kissing or anything.

Ok, I've tried 15 times to get that last name right.  Amoroso makes the most sense, since it's an actual Italian word, but Google doesn't have any images of an actor named Sebastian Amoroso.  Wikipedia says Amoruso, but it also calls Johnny "Jhonny."    Amaroso?  Amoruso?  Amaruso? Amando?   How about a photo of Duncan Kamakana instead?

Four episodes have dropped to date, but I'm only planning to watch two, because:

Johnny and Eric are the first to die.

Bury your gays.