Kayne West’s new short movie ‘Cruel Summer’, premiered at Cannes film festival, and according to the Guardian and other sources, it was a very Kayne event, as the movie was simultaneously projected on no less than seven 20ft square screens, above, around and below the audience, inside a big pyramid, in a parking lot of a casino.
It is Kayne West’s directorial debut, and it reflects what he stands for: the grandiose, the over-the-top and the ridiculous (I am especially saying this because of Kim Kardashian, who seems to be obsessively decorating his left side these days).
And what is this extended music video of 30 minutes about? First, it stars Kayne’s protégé Kid Cuti as a car thief who falls in love with a blind Arabian princess. There is a problem as her father will not let her marry the thief unless he cures her blindness…. You know what, it totally sounds like the plot of a Barbara Cartland’s book, oh Kayne, I didn’t know you could have this kind of girlie dream!
This is how The Guardian summarizes it:
‘Dad was a car thief – Kid's desperate not to follow in his footsteps, so instead he walks through a sparkly purple door into the middle of the desert. Men on horseback arrest him. He's taken to a palace full of fruit. A blind girl plucks a giant guitar string. Cudi's wrapped in bandages. A hawk flies. In, ultra, slow, motion. Cudi resolves to cure his love of her blindness. The cure for blindness is a remix of a song by Coldplay.’
Got it? I am not exactly sure, but West’s movies don’t need to make sense, they just exist for Kayne's own good . Also the soundtrack is not by Coldplay but by West’s G.O.O.D. record label, with hip-hop songs from Pusha T, Big Sean, Kid Cuti and new tracks from West’s upcoming album, entitled, of course, ‘Cruel Summer’.
The movie was shot in Qatar in four days and put together in two and half months, and it stars a Kardashian-look-alike-Qatari actress as the princess.
After the screening West declared that ‘The [seven screens idea] is related to a post–Steve Jobs, post-Windows era of where we're always on a BlackBerry or a phone at a ballgame, at the movies, and you're looking at seven windows when you're online. And I've found myself even falling asleep at the theater unless I'm talking to somebody or I'm on the phone, and it's because of the amount of information that we have at once. … I was very particular about having the screens be separate and having it where your mind puts the screens back together the way you can put memories together, the way that happens throughout the day and it all links back up.’
Such a bold declaration, I was not expecting less from this kind of rap royalty, but if he get bored at the movies, may be he doesn’t see the right ones, … and how can you watch seven screens at the same time exactly?
He also said it was a visual realization of his synesthesia, as he said he could see shapes in sound. – what? Kayne has synesthesia? Or does he just pretend to have it because it’s cool?
For Kayne, this was ‘a re-invention of cinema’, as ‘Maybe one day this will be the way we watch movies’,… At the risk to break one’s neck while trying to watch seven screens? He also said he wanted to work on cities, on amusement parks, to change what entertainment experiences are like…
As usual, he had to show his ever-humble side! He didn’t say how much this long ad for his upcoming album cost (because this is what it is at the end), but we can think that shooting a scene with twenty Lamborghinis speeding in the streets of Qatar was not cheap.