Karina on SpoutBlog

They’re calling it an exclusive, which we’re sure won’t be accurate for long, but for the time being the Times Online has the first full review of Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom. Again, this seems like a case of a filmmaker winning by vaulting over an extremely low-set bar, but as far as three-star reviews go, this one’s damn near hyperbolic. Unless we’re just talking about everyone in the same sentence as Robert Altman these days? Here’s the nut graph:

Yet despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud. Her film has an artistic ambition that has simply bypassed her husband, the film director Guy Ritchie. She captures that wonderfully accidental nature of luck when people???s lives intersect for a whole swathe of unlikely but cherishable reasons. Altmanesque would be stretching the compliment too far, but Filth and Wisdom shows Madonna has real potential as a film director.

You can check out some of Madonna’s, um, potential, in the clip above. I have no idea what the announcer is saying (and yet us know if you do), but you can make out a bit of Filth and Wisdom behind it. Meanwhile, if you were Guy Ritchie??????and had run your once-promising (I mean, some of you like Snatch, right?) career into the ground by first remaking a socialist/misogynist classic with your pop star wife in the lead, then by allowing said pop star wife to infuse your next generic gangster picture with Kabbalah bullshit??????how many reviews like this would you stick around for?

Under discussion:

Pierrot Le Fou  (1965)

Criterion is about to release a beautiful new edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou. I’ll have my own review of the two-disc set (which includes a new interview with Anna Karina, as well as a documentary about the actress’ relationship and work with Godard) next week, but others have already begun to weigh in.

Glenn Kenny sets to work dissecting the film’s literary references, both direct and indirect. At the A.V. Club, the less-enamored Nathan Rabin blames those references in part for making the film feel “at worst…like the product of a man rapidly losing interest in anything beyond politics and ideology.” Rabin cites the famous scene embedded above, in which Samuel Fuller reduces cinema to “one word, emotion!” as “bitterly ironic” because “it would be hard to imagine a film with less visceral emotion than Pierrot Le Fou.”

I have not watched my screener copy yet, but in art school I wore out a VHS copy of Pierrot Le Fou by watching it over and over again, falling obsessively in love with a film for maybe the first time, so I’m eager to watch it again and with Rabin’s assessment in mind. Still, after reading Rabin’s piece, I went back and took a second look at Kenny’s, and noticed that Kenny has very little to say in terms of an assessment of the film’s actual quality, or how it makes him feel??????which is fine, neither is necessarily the goal of this particular piece??????but it seems safe to assume that one doesn’t undertake such trainspotting in regards to a film that they could take or leave. Maybe the passion Pierrot inspires is more of the obsessive reference-catching and decoding variety; maybe that’s just not Nathan Rabin’s thing. In any case, I’m anxious to unwrap the DVD to see if it’s still mine.

Under discussion:

Basquiat  (1996)

The Playlist passes along word that David Bowie has recorded back-up vocals for Anywhere I Lay My Head, Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits covers album. The record’s producer, Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, describes Anywhere as having a “‘cough medicine/TinkerBell’ vibe”??????which, funnily enough, seems as good a description as any of Bowie’s performance as Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat.

In other indie-cred starlet-turned-pop star news, remember Zooey Deschanel’s album? Justin Wolfe, that smart-star who writes one of the blogs I mentioned in this post about The Hills, wrote an incredible post last week, in which he made the argument that, as “extension of their brand, from image to sound”?? the She and Him stuff as a Zooey Deschanel product is materially the same as Hills star Heidi Montag’s much-reviled first single. Check it out here.