Word: madonna
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...film, directed by video phenom Alek Keshishian, trails Madonna through Japan, North America and Europe as she pursues her hobby (rock star supreme) and her full-time job (do-it-yourself mythmaker). This is show biz, remember, where image elbows achievement out of the frame. Madonna knows this. She is the most self-aware, perhaps the sanest, of celebrities. So Truth or Dare doesn't dwell on what she has done. We know she has done plenty, done well and, in her AIDS-relief fund raising, done good. Keshishian shows us what Madonna thinks she is -- and what she, driven...
...great performer, for starters. More than Julia Roberts or Meryl Streep, Madonna is the modern movie star because she has created her own roles: boy toy, Marilyn Monroe avatar, Penthouse pinup, sly feminist, scandal magnet. With docile avidity, the world has eyed this procession of Madonnas, each one an incendiary variation on the last. The gag is that despite some fine screen work, she has never quite made it in Hollywood, a failure of the moguls, who haven't figured out how to channel her charisma. She is not one to wait for other people to do her a favor...
Work and play, lovers and family are the touchstones of Truth or Dare. Madonna sweats bullets to make her tour sensational, and she bustles behind the scenes too. She leads a group prayer before each concert; she bastes the broken hearts of her staff. Like many strong actress-singers, Madonna has a fervent gay following, and most of her dancers are gay. To them she is a doting den mother, turning stern only when things get bitchy. It's a tough job, juggling dozens of fragile egos along with her armored one, but she has balls enough for everybody...
...adoring daughter, honoring her father with a fond, wet rendition of Happy Birthday. But in the family scenes, among many others, one gets the sense of an actress playing, so coolly, with a moviegoer's expectations. Watch the star at the grave of her mother, who died when Madonna was five. Dolled up in modified Marilyn, she kneels and kisses the tombstone. Then she says she wants to be buried next to her mother and stretches out, comfy, on the ground. What's going on here? Is this a cemetery or a campsite? Spontaneous emotion or a piece of avant...
...verite, the genre Truth or Dare fits into, is supposed to mean movie truth, but it's all about exhibition. The camera doesn't reveal who people are; it shows what they are trying to be. If they are adept at using themselves and others, they will shine. And Madonna -- who has played more roles in a decade of camera courtship than Katharine Hepburn has in 60 years of movie stardom -- radiates luxe, wit and common sense playing a semi-real character based on a fiction named Madonna...