re: Madonna On Film: Screengrab Celebrates Her Top Ten "Best" and Worst Performances (Part One)

WatchfulEye — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:45:58 GMT

Phil- get a life.

re: Madonna On Film: Screengrab Celebrates Her Top Ten "Best" and Worst Performances (Part One)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:42:12 GMT

Can't agree about "A League of Their Own." My own opinion about this performance--which is, I freely admit, stolen from Camille Paglia, partly because until I encountered Paglia's take on it I had no opinion about it whatsoever--is that Madonna, the nonactress and professional shapeshifter, finding herself cast in a supporting role in this "comedy", decided to imitate her co-star Rosie O'Donnell, and she did it just imperfectly enough that the she was able to function as O'Donnell's straight woman, which is about as close as she's come to acting since "Desperately Seeking Susan".

The big problem with Madonna's movie career in general isn't that she's a celebrity instead of an actress but that she's a celebrity whose career is based on her ability to keep her image in constant rotation so that she's been able to strike the people who write about celebrities as constantly "relevant" in the face of changing times. Which means that she's spent most of her career impressing magazine editors and interviews by giving them an excuse to write about whatever important topic her current image seems designed to spotlight. (Whatever it is, she always seems to regard her interest in it very seriously, which in turn makes people feel that they must be very serious for giving her the ink.) So her main constants for most of the last couple of decades have been her shallowness and her self-importance, which in movies makes for a dull combo. The reason her best movie appearance was in "Desperately Seeking Susan" is that it's a memento of a time when she was milking the image that was designed to make her a star in the first place. That image was pitched at an audience of teenage girls instead of magazine editors and interviews, which meant that she had to act if she were more interested in having fun than in being seen as having come to save our world. Teenage girls are smarter than most magazine editors and interviewers because they're more interested in identifying with someone who's having fun than in promoting someone who must have a reason for seeming so impressed with herself.