Hütz scrubs off Filth.
friend out of the maid-of-honor slot, sleeping with the best man after an AA meet-cute, and trading punches with her own mother (Debra Winger) before wrecking the Volvo. The extended meltdown makes for convincing melodrama, but it’s capped by a sequence, as fun as it is incongruous, depicting an epically fabulous wedding reception. The juxtaposition of horn solos and samba dancers with Kym’s flashy sulking almost makes the conclusion feel about as authentic as the chicken dance.
Filth and Wisdom ★★★★ EUGENE HÜTZ, HOLLY WESTON IFC, NOT RATED
Madonna’s first legit music video flickered up in 1983: The song was “Burning Up,” the costume involved a dog collar, and the choreography implied she’d like to do it on the road. Now, a quarter century into an unmatched career in image manipulation, Ms. Ciccone’s sexy and superficial directorial debut samples fashion-spread surrealism, postfeminist soft porn, and shock-art provocation to cast an excitingly icy spell. More tightly styled than a Wes Anderson film, it projects a voice that’s magnetizing even when it’s talking utter rot.
Which it often does, particularly when charming narrator A.K. (Hütz) starts dropping philosophy: “Life is a paradox—but is it really?” Really. A.K. fronts a fledgling rock group played by Hütz’s own band of Gypsies, Gogol Bordello. His love interest, Holly (Weston), trains as a dancer (barre, mirror, and leotard, a classic MTV tableau), and their roommate, Juliette (ingenue Vicky McClure), works in a pharmacy, looking like Annie Lennox as shot by Stanley Kubrick. But, as A.K. says, “There is duality in everything.” He makes a living by sexually dominating men, while Holly hesitantly takes her act to a velvet-lined strip club. And Juliette
steals so many pills that her bathroom cabinet resembles a dreamscape display case.
Like a music video, Filth and Wisdom makes very few demands on reason—only assaults—and it argues strenuously in favor of music-video morality. “Without filth,” says A.K., “there is no wisdom.” Madonna’s visions of decadence require ridiculously jagged story lines. At one point, Holly loses heart
RocknRolla ★★★
TOM WILKINSON, GERARD BU TLER
WARNER BROS., R
Mr. Madge hangs with more
wacky English scofflaws
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the
Madonna household, husband
Guy Ritchie has been tinkering
with another underworld-
set amusement-park ride.
London crime lord Lenny Cole
(Wilkinson)—a juicy villain,
rabid with malice—falls out of
favor with a Russian zillionaire
and his goons, a promisingly
nasty situation that owes partly
to the derangement of Lenny’s
stepson, a smackhead rock
star who’s just faked his own
death. Very nearly embracing
self-parody, Ritchie sends genial
hoods named Mumbles, Archie,
and One Two gallivanting
through an elaborately prepos-
terous story that he has no idea
how to tie up. RocknRolla thus
unfolds as a stylish exercise
in gangster chic. Give the film
credit for its clever heists, too-
clever chase scenes, and spiffy
brutality. Dock the director cool
points for one subplot that
finds Jeremy Piven and Ludacris
having not enough fun as
music-biz players and another
that gives Thandie Newton
nothing to do but glare like a
wicked sphinx.
and quits her job, only to strut back into the club awhile later dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl. With ten layers of tremendous wit, Madonna has Holly shake it to “...Baby One More Time”—that’s it, end of story. The resolution is cheap and the “message” blissfully amoral, and since you’ve actually been believing in the character, it comes as a visceral surprise. This movie is about watching Madonna pour her entire sensibility into a startling feature-length ad for self-indulgence, and that is an absolute hoot.
Rachel Getting
Married ★★★½
ANNE HATHAWAY, ROSEMARIE DEWITT
SONY PICTURES CLASSICS, R
Nuptial bliss yields bad behavior
from the family alcoholic
Brooding like Natalie Portman
in troublemaker mode,
Hathaway mopes to the fore
as Kym, a chronic mess who
ditches rehab for a weekend to
celebrate her sister’s wedding.
Kym operates with the efficiency
of a practiced train wreck,
jostling Rachel’s brittle best
Religulous ★★★★
BILL MAHER, LARRY CHARLES
LIONSGATE, R
Real Time host’s wicked doc
asks true believers to get real
A propaganda film built on
skeptical sound bites, improv-
comedy zingers, and outright
sneering, Religulous represents
an attempt to turn atheism
into a movement. Maher
admires the teachings of Christ
but finds scant evidence that
they’ve sunk in as he interviews
holy rollers from the Midwest
to the Middle East. With
director Charles employing
much the same travelogue
structure that served him very
nice in Borat, Maher takes his
anticlerical interviewing act to
a fundamentalist theme park,
a creationist museum complete
with animatronic dinosaurs
and cavemen, and even some
venues where making the
faithful look foolish is not as
easy as shooting Jesus fish in
a barrel. Arguing that even
the most well-meaning follow-
ers of all creeds enable those
fundamentalists who’d
rather see Doomsday sooner
than later, the film preaches
disbelief as humanity’s only
means of saving itself, offended
sensibilities be damned.
R SPOo T c LIGkHn T ORN o THlElMaUSIC OF
If the attitude of RocknRolla were distilled into an actual rock song, it would sound like a punky soul jam, perhaps an extra-fuzzy “Green Onions” with a theatrical sense of yearning. Witness the wickedness of its soundtrack—the dub drone of the Clash’s “Bankrobber,” the witchy rockabilly of Wanda Jackson’s “Funnel of Love,” and the air-raid rush of the Subways’ “Rock & Roll Queen,” its guitars zooming with a raw enthusiasm that the film’s action scenes are always racing to match.
The Subways
Rachel’s Jerome LePage, Winger, and Hathaway
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filth_and_Wisdom#External_links
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