Post by ForgottenOne on Sept 24, 2013 13:12:56 GMT -5
Lamedonna's Secret Reject is out today (yesterday?).
A low quality version is up on Youtube and its bad. Really bad.
I only watched three minutes before turning it off. It's boring and her acting as always, is forced and cheesy.
Of course, there are good reviews to follow!
Madonna's Art For Freedom project launches with prison dance film
[/ul]
Radical Chic: Madonna Unveils Short Film secretprojectrevolution
[/ul]
A low quality version is up on Youtube and its bad. Really bad.
I only watched three minutes before turning it off. It's boring and her acting as always, is forced and cheesy.
Of course, there are good reviews to follow!
Madonna's Art For Freedom project launches with prison dance film
- [*]Monday night Madonna screened her Secret Project Revolution film guerrilla-style at locations all over the world, including here in Toronto where a crew reportedly set up at the Distillery District.
Meanwhile, the website Art For Freedom, claims to be a “platform to give people around the world an opportunity to answer the question: what does freedom mean to you?” Madonna previously said of the film that, “My goal is to show by the example of secretprojectrevolution my creative commitment to inspire change in the world through artistic expression.”
An alert viewer at the screening that took place in Berlin has uploaded the film to YouTube. The film, co-created with Steven Klein, runs 17 minutes and features Madonna playing both a prisoner and a jailer (and sometimes looking like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS) being thrown into a cell, then shooting fellow decoratively draped prisoners. There’s some beautiful dancing and it’s all in black and white, which signals how SERIOUS she is about saving the world.
Madonna wants to save the world from oppression by wearing leather coats.zoom
As the good-looking violence happens on the screen, Madonna says things like, “Democracy doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Freedom of expression sounds like a catch phrase” and “This will be the revolution of thinking for yourself. Of having your own opinion.”
She lost me when she spat “burn, baby burn” and a baby stroller spontaneously caught fire.
Madonna has been very vocal in, for example, her support of the members of Russia’s pu55y Riot and her heart is probably in the right place. Unfortunately, this comes across as a blend of well-meaning high school theatre, un-scintillating bondage and the camera lingering unrelentingly on, yes, Madonna.
Towards the end, the film runs in reverse, making it look like she resurrects the prisoners she’d previously shot.
Then she says, “I know what you're thinking: if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. (Spoiler alert: that isn’t what I was thinking at all, but thanks for the suggestion.) But it’s too late. I’m in the kitchen and the burners are on full blaze.” Oooooh. We’d better all be careful we don’t burn our fingers or that our baby carriages don’t get cooked.
Madonna also tells the audience, “the revolution won’t be an app, won’t be available on the Internet” and then ends the film with the address for Art For Freedom.
The film, which is a co-production with VICE, will be released today (Tuesday) to BitTorrent Bundle.
[/ul]
Radical Chic: Madonna Unveils Short Film secretprojectrevolution
- [*]In his 2004 film The Raspberry Reich, Bruce LaBruce declares that "Madonna is counter-revolutionary." Of course, it's one of many parodies of political sloganeering in the film; in the real world, the impact of the pop-diva doyenne's work, particularly in terms of post-feminist sexual agency, is unmistakable. Notably, Madonna's American Life album—which dropped a year before The Raspberry Reich and finds the singer posing on the cover like a cross between Che Guevara and Patty Hearst, two revolutionary icons who figure prominently in the film—proved that Madonna's politics are best delivered with tongue in cheek. When she's ventured beyond sexual politics (or, say, the Catholic church, her qualms with which are ultimately about se.x and gender anyway), she's stumbled perilously close to the brand of radical chic LaBruce satirizes in his film.
This fact hangs over Madonna's latest poli-art endeavor (don't call it "artpop"), a "secret project" that she and frequent partner-in-crime Steven Klein have been hyping on Instagram and Twitter for months now. During a cheeky exchange with fans on Reddit last week, the superstar called the project "ambitious" and "more important to me than anything i [sic] have ever done before." A short film co-directed by Madge and Klein, secretprojectrevolution marks the launch of Art for Freedom, an online global initiative curated by VICE and distributed by BitTorrent designed to, in Madonna's words, "fight oppression, intolerance and complacency." The public is encouraged to contribute original artwork and writings using the social media tag #artforfreedom, while the film, which premiered at pop-up screenings in select cities around the world last night, is being made available for download as a free BitTorrent Bundle starting today at 9 p.m. PST.
Presumably inspired, at least in part, by the Russian all-female punk band pu55y Riot's arrest and conviction for "premeditated hooliganism" last year, which Madonna and others publicly condemned, as well as her experiences traveling the world for her MDNA Tour, during which she faced threats for speaking out on gay rights in Russia, secretprojectrevolution is an attempt to, according to Klein, "[question] our governments and our collective thought patterns." There's little in the way of narrative; instead, the 17-minute, black-and-white film is driven by Madonna's musings on censorship and civil rights, accompanied by images of the singer wielding a pistol, metaphorically silencing her fellow artists with bullets to the head, and being thrown in prison (either for that act or for her creative expression—it's unclear).
The film is beautifully shot, art-directed, and costumed, with shades of "Vogue," "Die Another Day," and X-STaTIC Pro=CeSS, her 2003 art installation with Klein, evident throughout. Madonna looks as svelte and as sexy as ever, donning a platinum wig with bangs coincidentally not unlike that of Susanne Sachsse's über-militant in The Raspberry Reich. The entire project, at least aesthetically, recalls the artist's peak of provocation in the early '90s, a fact only reinforced by the scratchiness of her speaking voice, evocative of the raw vocals on her 1992 magnum opus, Erotica.
Unlike that Madonna, however, today's Madonna tempers her revolution with vague, quasi-new-age platitudes about love. And like almost every Madonna project, contradictions abound, some likely intentional ("This revolution will not be…on the Internet...You won't be able to download it," she says at one point) and others not so much (she laments "corporate branding" despite her recent Material Girl clothing line, Hard Candy fitness centers, and Truth or Dare fragrances). She samples Martin Luther King not long after dubiously asking, "If I had black skin and an afro, would you take [my revolution] seriously? If I was an Arab wielding a hand grenade, would you take me seriously?" Fortunately, or sadly, her post-feminist point is the still-salient one she's been making for three decades now:
"Instead, I'm a woman, I'm blond, I have tits and ass, and an insatiable desire to be noticed." Thus, she should just shut up and show us her ass.
Like LaBruce, Madonna has often conflated the sexual and the political, and like the underground filmmaker, she's always seemed to understand that humor goes a long way toward making one's hard-to-swallow point. It's been an essential, if not always apparent, component of her most effective works. So while, on the surface, secretprojectrevolution embodies every aspect of her career (film, dance, fashion, se.x, politics, music), a sense of humor is lamentably, perhaps even fatally, the one element that's missing from her latest (r)evolution.
Watch the trailer for secretprojectrevolution below and download the BitTorrent Bundle here.
[/ul]
).
