Madonna film: ‘calamitous’
There’s been a fresh glimpse at the Madonna-directed W.E. this week, as it begins screening on the film festival circuit.
The movie was critically panned at the 68th Venice Film Festival at the weekend, with reviewer Xan Brooks from The Guardian newspaper barely holding back with contempt:
“What an extraordinarily silly, preening, fatally mishandled film this is. It may even surpass 2008’s ‘Filth and Wisdom,’ Madonna’s calamitous first outing as a filmmaker. Her direction is so all over the shop that it barely qualifies as direction at all.”
The two-tier romantic drama focuses on the affair between King Edward VIII and American divorcée Wallis Simpson, and a contemporary romance between a married woman and a Russian security guard.
It stars Australian actress Abbie Cornish, Andrea Riseborough, James D’Arcy and Oscar Issac, and will also be screened at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival this month.
According to recent interviews, Madonna said the first single for her new album will be released in February or March 2012, with the full album due in the autumn. Better luck to her with that project.
Watch the clip from W.E. below and let us know if you think it looks like a stinker:
Well, who knows? This is all predicatble press, after all – and we’re going off four – FOUR – bad reviews (plus a couple of good ones). The critics no longer have any connection to the mainstream and what it dounds liek is she may have scored something that can work on a maisntream level. Most films at the top of the box office are critically panned. Let’s wait and see it for ourselves and not go off four snob reviewers maybe?