Sacro e profano

As a director Madonna's understanding of subtlety and nuance is akin to a stiff punch to the gut. She doesn't get it at all. Incomprehensible at times and pretentious in others, there isn't that much reason to watch it. I skipped some of the more arduous scenes that were hard to get through. Doing this made the movie easier to watch.

The immigrant storyline which takes place in London is mildly interesting. The problem is that Madonna doesn't know how to bring her ideas and observations together in a way that makes enough sense. This lack if comprehension for the story she is trying to tell coupled with her inexperience as a director leads to on screen confusion and annoyance.

If you're a Madonna fan, you'll probably be disappointed with this one. And i guess there are a lot of non-fans out there who can hardly wait to disparage the movie. Nevertheless, Ms Ciccone did a good job in her directorial debut.

Filth and Wisdom is clearly not a masterpiece, yet there is nothing wrong with this movie. It is the matter of personal preferences whether you like it or not. Besides, it features Eugene Hutz, whose role confirms everything you thought about him while listening to his band Gogol Bordello.

I assume the story is partially based on Madonna's experience as a struggling artist after her arrival to New York. More than that, i see it as a subtle competition with her then-husband Guy Richie, since some aesthetic similarities with RocknRolla (2008) are visible, apart from the setting. She proved him she can direct a movie, divorced him and moved on with her life...

Jesus wept. I wish that was all I could say about this blundering, self-indulgent idiot of a movie. I am still reeling from the public humiliation meted out to Eugene Hutz and Richard E Grant in this, as another commenter so aptly described it, car-crash of a movie.

The script they were handed and the movie they ended up embroiled in was the equivalent of them being packed into a bright pink Lada, tweaked up to the gills on meth and viagra, naked, before being forcibly driven at top speed into an oncoming bus-load of school children, with a haul of child porn sitting conspicuously on the back seat.

Madonna's unmistakable, drooling brand of pretentiousness is smeared all over this particular steaming pile of waste. Although pretentiousness might be a bit generous, as that would suggest at least an entry level modicum of intellect with which she had to work with; this is unadulterated idiocy.

Watching this movie I was constantly reminded of that scene from A Fish Called Wanda where Klein, after being accused of being stupid, responds indignantly 'Do stupid people read Russian philosophy?'. Curtis' answer kept running laps around my attention span: 'Yes, they do, they just don't understand it.' This sums up the driving force behind the pretentious, empty-headed fumbles this movie attempts to make in an effort to inject it with some kind of profundity, the like of which will no doubt appeal to people who have never experimented with thinking before, but alas will leave anybody who can spell the word 'wheelbarrow' without spell check smacking their heads off the nearest hard surface with contempt for the foolishness being hurled in steaming handfuls at their functioning brains.

They spray-painted Richard E Grant's hair gray for crying out loud. Not content with humiliating the man through the woeful string of drivel that was disingenuously entitled a script, they physically marked the man's person to make him look as foolish as the movie itself. There should be some kind of association for prevention of cruelty to actors set up if you ask me, Madonna would surely get the chair for what she did to Hutz and Grant. For shame...

I've given this movie 1 point because I like Hutz and Grant, 1 point because I like Gogol Bordello who provide much of the music and style evident in the movie, and I would give it another point for the car-crash quality that kept me glued to it in disbelief, reveling perversely in how progressively terrible it kept getting by the second.

It's that kind of morbid fascination you get if you smell a really bad fart, disgusting, repulsive, but morbidly fascinating that it can actually be that bad and actually be getting more repellent. But since there are clearly people commenting here who insist on over-rating this nonsense, waste-of-time testament to Madonna's failed education, I will withhold that third point.

If you like Grant or Hutz, avoid this movie at all costs; it's like watching them ritually humiliated by an idiot in the crudest and most unfortunate of fashions for a length of time that could qualify for a human rights violation. You will weep for them. I wouldn't be surprised if Guy Richie decided to distance himself from his missus on the strength of having seen this movie alone.

I cannot ever recall writing a review on this site before, but I felt compelled to after looking up the average rating out of curiosity and seeing a score of 5.1. Generally for any given film I can put my own taste aside and guess within half a point what the IMDb general consensus will be. I'd have gone here for something like 7.4 ... (and rated it 7 myself). Maybe as some other reviewer's have suggested, people's judgement has been affected by the hype and media around this film. I was fortunate enough to watch it knowing nothing about it and enjoying the ride. I found Eugene Hütz's character completely believable and felt the film managed to steer way clear of being pretentious yet telling an amusing story. OK, so it's no Trainspotting, but then again it is something different and in my opinion, worth a watch!

OK, so let me just say that I came into this as a huge fan of Eugene Hutz and Gogol Bordello and while I don't enjoy her music, I like Madonna's persona and was very excited to see the film.

On the upside, this movie did have some interesting ideas on, well... filth and wisdom, sex work and art. Unfortunately, the story-telling vehicle meant to get us to these ideas was so appalling that Mr. Hutz had to narrate them to us fairly explicitly. For ideas to work in a film WITHOUT an engrossing storyline, those ideas better be pretty profound (which these aren't) otherwise it just looks like the amateurish work of an angsty teen (which this did).

To make it all the more disappointing, the character set ups were GOOD. I wanted to like and know about each of the three protagonists and their relationships to each other. Unfortunately, everything goes downhill after we meet them. Their back stories are only hinted at, their motives and personalities one-dimensional and their stated relationships lacked the slightest chemistry. The secondary characters were worse.

So, what happened and who do we hold accountable for ruining this film? Someone was handed a great cast to play exciting characters, a nice little premise and some passable thematic ideas and yet it bombed. The real achievement of this film is that it managed to be as unwatchable as it was. The only real reason to sit through this pile is for the the sheer erotic thrill of seeing Eugene Hutz as a male dominatrix, and if that doesn't get you rocks off, then I'd just skip it all together.