I usually ignore movie reviews, because I so seldom see new releases, but on day nine of being sick has left me sucking the marrow from The New Yorker. It’s a good thing, because Anthony Lane’s review of Madonna’a “Filth and Wisdom” is a hoot:
What vexes me most about “Filth and Wisdom” is the economics. Madonna has been a global star for decades. She has amassed a fortune, much of which presumably remains intact. She can’t have spent all of it on jodhpurs and conical bras. So why, when it came to launching herself as a film director, did she limit her budget to $365.23? Such, at any rate, is my estimate for the funding of “Filth and Wisdom.” If the actors were paid according to their talents, they cannot have cost more than forty bucks. In the case of Richard E. Grant, the one sizable name in the cast, his performance as a tweedy, sightless poet is so embarrassing that I trust he took no payment at all. The only major expense was the lighting: a toy flashlight, I would guess, placed carefully in the corner of each room and angled upward—hence the capering shadows that Andriy casts on his living-room walls. In technical terms, more professional productions than this are filmed and cut on iMovie, by ten-year-olds, a thousand times a day.
I adore reviews that pan awful movies.
Anthony Lane is savagely funny when he’s pissed off about an awful movie. His review of _Mamma Mia_ is worth reading, if you’ve got that back-issue laying around. My favorite lines:
“Mamma Mia is more like a theatrical kebab, onto which she skewered as many Abba songs as humanly possible…”
“The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take “Mamma Mia!” to be a useful contribution to that debate.”
“I thought that Pierce Brosnan had been dragged to the edge of endurance by North Korean sadists in his final Bond film, “Die Another Day,” but that was a quick tickle with a feather duster compared with the agony of singing Abba’s “S.O.S.” to Meryl Streep through a kitchen window.”
On the other hand, I am strongly in favor of Gogol Bordello and anything that may advance their great cause.