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Kanye West Screened a Movie in Cannes

Everyone has a movie to screen these days. You could throw a rock in LA and it’d hit someone with a film they want financed. So it’s no surprise Kanye West screened a 26-minute movie titled Cruel Summer in Cannes. What is surprising that it took this long and isn’t self-indulgent as you’d expect it to be.

The movie stars Kid Cudi, Pusha-T and a Kim Kardashian look-a-like named Sarah A. whose real name can’t be revealed because women aren’t supposed to act in Qatar where the movie was shot. The film was financed by the Doha Film Institute where Sarah A. used to intern and who probably threw a wad of cash at Kanye and shouted, “Make us your most fantabulous movie!”

Then came the ominous hum of violins. On the screen above us, two black-clad thieves (Cudi and Pusha-T) began climbing down an air shaft ladder into a parking garage. As they continued down the ladder, the image switched to the screen right in front of us, then expanded to all three front screens as they bantered about Prince versus Michael Jackson while casing out the garage. Suddenly, they were in Lamborghinis and screaming down the streets of Qatar with cops in hot pursuit as the music swelled. The seat-rattling bass thumps were more powerful than anything Michael Bay could have produced. Kim and Kanye held hands. He danced furiously in his seat; she sat still and attentive. The music, I’m told, is all new and will be the foundation for an album called Cruel Summer that Kanye will drop later this year, featuring his boys like Big Sean, Pusha, and Cudi.

No budget information was available, but if there’s any doubt about how much dough went into this, think about what it would take to shut down the streets of Qatar to shoot twenty or so speeding Lamborghinis for a one-minute sequence. Then multiply that by 26. Vutlure

Vulture sums up the plot thusly:

• Cudi’s gang of car thieves is called the Lamborghini Dons (not mentioned in the movie, but Cudi told me this later). He formed it to honor his father, who was a car thief, too.
• She lives in a palace filled with taut golden strings. Her mother set them up so she could run and play while holding onto them, even though she’s blind.
• Those strings all lead to a single Game of Thrones–like throne, where she sits, surrounded by barriers as if in a prison.
• Cudi finds her there but is immediately tackled by guards and winds up in a prison with … Aziz Ansari.
• Somehow Cudi winds up in the desert, beaten and abandoned by guards.
• He wraps himself in a magic scarf and becomes a cocoonlike statue standing against the sandstorms for a good third of the movie. “It kind of mummified me,” Cudi told us of the scarf.
• To make the princess “see,” Cudi plucks the strings to make music. Each note brings up a bright light, kind of like the end sequence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

PEOPLE reports the movie ended with a standing ovation for Kanye. Which sounds really dangerous. An ego that inflated could be a real fire hazard.

Vulture also has a mini interview with Jay-Z about what he thought of the short film and includes an enchanting description of an awkwardly long back rub given by Hova.

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Cookiemonster
Cookiemonster
11 years ago

Sounds like an extended music video.

po'bro'
po'bro'
11 years ago

Poor Kanye…he thought he had problems before. This Armenian Curse will do him in. I will pray for him.