The new movie from Madonna: a sympathetic look at the life of the nazi-sympathizing, adulterous, Royal-family-destroying parasite, Wallis Simpson. A rare one-star review in the Guardian. Can I please meet the people who invested in this hopeless project? I want their money...
Whatever the crimes committed by Wallis Simpson – marrying a king, sparking a constitutional crisis, fraternising with Nazis – it's doubtful that she deserves the treatment meted out to her in W.E., Madonna's jaw-dropping take on "the 20th-century's greatest royal love story". The woman is defiled, humiliated, made to look like a joke. The fact that W.E. comes couched in the guise of a fawning, servile snow-job only makes the punishment feel all the more cruel.
Or could it be that Madonna is in deadly earnest here? If so, her film is more risible than we had any right to expect; a primped and simpering folly, the turkey that dreamed it was a peacock.
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12 comments:
And here I was worrying that we'd never be able to top the rubber vomit story.
Well, there is a meeting of the minds between manufacturer and buyer in the case of rubber vomit.
According to the Daily Mail, quoted on Wikipedia, the budget for this movie was $38 million. The Weinsteins have the domestic rights so that we will all have an opportunity to see it in the theaters as it was meant to be.
There's an essay to be written (or actually probably looked up) about the blinding power of celebrity to attract cash.
Minds apparently stopped meeting as the firm closed.
How to unload all that unsold plastic puke? Find a business that might want to print its logo on them and hand them out to customers. Weinstein Company?
Redundant, given its desire, at all costs, to relive the glory days of the 90s. If it weren't for Quentin's loyalty.....
And whatever happened to Dragon Dynasty? Still going strong, or was that a favor to Tarantino?
See what I mean? This is our longest comment thread in about two weeks. How does ASdam Roberts do it, liberal simp putz that he is?
If either one of us were a Hugo-neighborhood, London based critic and novelist, we'd have comments too.
Roberts gets a name check in the acknowlegements of the truly good new Joe Abercrombie novel.
Besides, I certainly could never come up with the following, even though the concept is one I've thought about for decades: (From Roberts's review of a new novel by Christopher Priest)
We’re talking, really, about what the critics call Ergodic literature, a phrase coined by the Norwegian critic Espen J. Aarseth; or to be a little more precise, we're taking about novels that stir interesting patterns out of the mix of traditional narrative, and more freeform ergodic structures (many critics interested in ergodic narrative structures trace them through video games and hyperlink texts). The key thing, though, is books that 'produce a semiotic sequence which may differ from reading to reading'. 'Ergos' from 'path', you see. We often think of narrative as a kind of path. The Islanders presents itself to be read linearly, from start to end, and that's certainly how I read it. But the elements of the various narratives are not laid out in a linear sequence; they appear here and there, and I fitted them together into my larger sense of the story, having to revise my sense of what was going on and how people really were as I went (that creative tension between sjuzhet and fabula that's technically quite hard to do but which can be immensely satisfying to read) -- a little like Ford's The Good Soldier in that way, although much more kaleidoscopically rendered.
For the uninitiated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabula_and_syuzhet
The fabula is "the raw material of a story, and syuzhet, the way a story is organized."[2] Since Aristotle (350 BCE, 1450b25) narrative plots are supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end. For example: the film Citizen Kane starts with the death of the main character, and then tells his life through flashbacks interspersed with a journalist's present-time investigation of Kane's life. This is often achieved in film and novels via flashbacks or flash-forwards. Therefore, the fabula of the film is the actual story of Kane's life the way it happened in chronological order; while the syuzhet is the way the story is told throughout the movie, including flashbacks.
Food, too?
http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2011/08/nyc_food_writer_adam_robe.php
When does he sleep? [smily face]
The Roberts review reads almost like a parody of high-toned academic drivel designed to show off the writer's splendidness.
I find I no longer fall for this sort of thing, at least not to the extent of trying to fake being just as smart, and that I am happier for it.
"Patterns," though. He does mention patterns.
This is cited in one of the comments: http://www.ryman-novel.com/
Created with Tulk in mind?
Oh, I don't know. I think the accusation of "showing off" is almost always wrong. It mostly means that the critic is either using the technical vocabulary of critical schools with which one disagrees or simply reacting in an way that one finds overelaborate..
Fine to say that. But ad hominem is not the way to go.
For my part, I'm mostly interested and amused to find that these new (really about forty or fifty years old) critical systems sometimes provide a more precise way to say things than my more old-fashioned commonsensical vocabulary.
In this case, I was delighted to find a precise way of describing the pleasures of the complex narrative structures of books like 2666 or Conversations in the Cathedral and movies like Amores Perros.
In fact, you yourself were praising "Good Soldier" for exactly the same thing.
You're right.
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