Madonna's directorial debut...

[Ben]

Has anyone seen Madonna's directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom???
Didya like it????
She, too, also co-wrote it.

[Coroner]

:lol:

[Ben]

Madonna runs out of steam
Eugene Hutz stars in Madonna's ''Filth and Wisdom.
By Ty Burr
Globe Staff / October 24, 2008

Now that Madonna and Guy Ritchie have officially called it quits, all that remains is the issue of custody. Madge should get the children and the brassiere collection. Based on her directorial debut, Ritchie should get the filmmaking career.

To be fair, "Filth and Wisdom" is slightly better than most movies made by celebrated pop musicians, a hall of shame that includes Bob Dylan's "Renaldo and Clara," Prince's "Graffiti Bridge," and the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour." There's a narrative and some actual acting, and Madonna's long-established obsession with the power dynamics of sex and freedom gets a workout.

On the other hand, the quality of the writing and performances in "Filth and Wisdom" are of the let's-put-on-a-show variety, and the filmmaking is self-indulgence itself. Worst of all, the movie's simply not very shocking. Madonna has made a career out of toying with image and ego, but this is a vanity project in the smallest sense possible.

Her Nibs doesn't appear onscreen, but lucky for her she has a leading actor of real charisma: Eugene Hutz, frontman for the rollicking gypsy folk-punk collective Gogol Bordello and an occasional actor. (He was Elijah Wood's tour guide in "Everything Is Illuminated"). Hutz plays A.K., a Ukrainian immigrant musician in London who makes ends meet doling out gay S&M humiliation to paying clients. Rangy and unkempt, cigarette forever dangling beneath a resplendent handlebar moustache, A.K.'s a proudly foul-minded sybarite. Basically, he's Madonna as a man.

For all his nihilistic charm, though, he's madly in love with Holly (Holly Weston), a ballerina who turns to stripping to pay the rent. (The scenes in which the statuesque dancer tries to come to terms with the men's club pole are rather sweetly amusing.) Their friend Juliette (Vicky McClure) works for an unhappy Indian pharmacist (Inder Manocha) and yearns to help starving children in Africa. In the apartment below A.K. lives Professor Flynn (Richard E. Grant), a blind gay poet mired in depression.

Madonna pushes these characters this way and that - Grant, the most talented actor, fares the worst - trying to make vague statements about overcoming inhibitions and going for your dreams. Secondary characters, like one of A.K.'s clients (Elliot Levey) and his shrewish Jewish mountain of a wife (Hannah Walters), are caricatures out of a music video. "Filth and Wisdom" drops references (Gandhi, Juliette's Jean Seberg haircut) and Madonnian bon mots ("If you want to be saved, you've got to go to hell first") like self-consciously artistic rabbit pellets. It's a bit of a slog, innit?

After a while, even Hutz's sardonic gypsy act starts wearing thin, although the few glimpses we get of Gogol Bordello in action give the film a necessary lift. A.K. is fond of saying things like, "In my country, we have a saying: He who licks the knives will cut his tongue." In my country, we have a saying: Pop stars who make movies should stick to what they know.

[Tanuki]

she sucks.. after i saw that picture of her kid with the yankee jersey on.. i just felt so bad for her husband.. that is low. she is an ego maniac.

[longwave]

not even remotely interested in it.