Madonna: Innocence Lost (1994)

Much akin in terms of unintentional comedic content to Showgirls (1995), the made-for-tv docudrama Innocence Lost never gleaned the cult following Elizabeth Berkley's vehicle did, though it's as rich a source of hilarious quotables ("One day you'll be opening doors for me.").

Also entertaining is its 90s slant on 80s fashion.  Though leather jackets, mini-skirt-over-leggings, and enormous hair bows keep popping up, it's all done up quite 90210.

Of additional value are the songs, all of them presumably pre-Like a Virgin --that single's release being the movie's culminating moment.  None of these songs are recognizable and strangely feel like slightly altered versions of other hits, just adding to the film's weird fun.

Madonna look-alike Terumi Matthews' performance is just ok, not nearly as laughable as Showgirls' Berkley precisely because Matthews (unlike Berkley) is expected as Madonna to play it over the top.   In terms of delivery and conviction, she really owns it.  Nevertheless, much as Matthews gyrates, mimicking trade mark moves by rote, she can't shake the performance free of an underlying current of sadness, the sort that Hollywood Boulevard Michael Jackson impersonators sometimes evoke.

Wendie Malik as Camille Barbone, Madonna's first manager, is a refreshing presence, somewhat legitimizing the film's acting calibre, even as she finds herself awash in bizarre trappings of cloying dykiness --the short, spiky, jet-black hair, the jealous treatment of Madonna, the dogs!-- though that's part of the movie's good fun and charm, of course. 

All in all, Innocence Lost delivers light, silly fun, and would make top choice for perfectly mindless entertainment.

3 Días (aka Before the Fall) 2008 | is this the best way to spend one's last hours on earth?

Remember when Spanish horror was all the rage in the 2000's ?  From the vanguard days of [Rec] (2007) and El Orfanato (aka The Orphanage) (2007), comes the very-well-made 3 Días (aka Before the Fall) (2008), a story sandwiched neatly twixt the announcement of a last-minute, life-ending meteor impact ("there is no hope for survival," as per the Orwellian newscasters),  and the actual time of impact, a mere 72 hours later.

The film handles the greater psychological parameters surrounding the breakdown of society quite well, the whole thing playing like a character in and of itself, lending a tone of exasperation, nihilism, cosmic futility to the action.

The story, in turn, is a revenge plot involving escaped child predator Lucio (Eduard Fernández) who returns to cause havoc with the family of Alejandro (Víctor Clavijo), a reluctant hero spurred to action upon suffering personal tragedy, who finds himself rising to the occasion to defend his nephews and nieces. 

The killer, played at first frighteningly disturbed becomes strangely comical, his final act of violence given the candy treatment in the style of La Cité des Enfants Perdus (aka City of Lost Children) (1995), the character evoking slightly the Joker of Batman fame --none of it making the violence any less perverse or horrific.

A tightly woven flick --not a stitch out of place, no sound left to chance-- this is certainly a satisfyingly classic Hollywood piece through and through.

dir F. Javier Gutiérrez

Fahrenheit 451 (1966) | who needs the book when you have the movie?

Based on the novel by Ray Bradbury, this Truffaut film --his 1st color film and 1st and only English-speaking film-- follows the lives of the literary protagonists, sharing glimpses of the Orwellian, totalitarian future the novel is a warning cry against. The film having been made in the mid-Sixties, one would expect to and does find the usual trappings of the era heavily influence the cultural look of the future --Julie Christie's hair, everyone's costumes, the set design-- and yet something should be said of Truffaut's ability to sublimate these surface cues to favor instead the unfolding story.

Such gravity is lent to the economic and political landscape the film inhabits, as when Bernard Hermann's intense score plays during moments of book burning, betrayal by citizen informants, or general censorship and information control. Truffaut passes on from the book the dire sense of the danger we're capable of falling in, betraying a palpable, alarmist bias against totalitarian and dictatorial mores. Inferred comparisons of Oskar Werner's character Guy Montag, with his thick German accent, to Hitler, are irrepressible . The retro-looking uniforms outfitting the firemen, of whose militaristic hierarchy Montag is a small part, become less silly, no longer kitchy, and more ominous and insidious, apropos this SS-like, state-run thought police.


dir François Truffaut

11:28 interview with Ray Bradbury discussing his take on the film adaptation.