Not to diminish any of her myriad accomplishments (and I will never, ever begrudge her creative partnership with David Fincher), but it seems inarguable that history will remember Madonna most vividly as a cultural vampire: a supernatural creature (who, if not verifiably immortal, then certainly in hard-earned denial about her age), she’s sustained herself by sucking the lifeblood other artists, images, trends, cultural movements. From the punkish red scrawl of the opening credits forward (Is dotted with white Xs), Madonna’s feature directorial debut Filth and Wisdom seems of a piece with her previous work, in that it’s in some way about Madonna herself hiding behind borrowed aesthetics.

Madonna has previously namechecked everyone from Godard to Pasolini as an inspiration, but while Filth and Wisdom has traces of the invention via ignorance seen in those auteurs’ early films, that’s where the comparisons end. The influence of Shane Meadows is definitely felt, both as a love letter to the youthful romance of punk rock in poverty in the pocket of a British city, and in the presence of co-star Vicky McClure, late of three Meadows films including This is England. But Madonna gets the bulk of her borrowed essence from her star, Eugene Hutz, lead of gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello. The clumsy brilliance of Filth and Wisdom is the way it wraps material that’s clearly personal to Madonna in the irresistibly goofy trappings of Hutz’ Joe Strummer-of-the-Eastern Bloc persona and performance style. For fans of Hutz and his band, Filth has the makings of an instant music-movie classic. Fortunately for Madonna, whose major misstep as a filmmaker is the compulsion to divide her own personality traits and obsessions equally among her characters, Hutz is so likeable that he attracts a lot of fans at first sight.

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Back in Berlin, Madonna’s directorial debut Filth and Wisdom, which had something to do with cross dressers and strippers and generally drifted not far beyond Madonna’s expertise in sex and success, garnered some surprisingly positive reviews. But everyone I’ve spoken to who’s covering or attending Tribeca was planning on skipping I Am Because We Are, a documentary about Malawi written, produced and narrated by the star, based on the assumption that diagnosing international crises is just a little bit beyond the capabilities of a singer who has spent the past five years working her way through various Mouseketeers in search of renewed credibility.

I haven’t seen the film (I skipped Friday’s press screening in order to see Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, and I’m glad I did––more on that virtually perfect film later today), but out of curiosity, I went trolling the web this morning for reviews. Surprise, surprise––Madonna’s ethics as a documentary filmmaker are under fire from all sides.

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• Variety says the only American film currently locked into a competition slot at Cannes is Charlie Kaufmann’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. Steven Soderbergh’s Che epic isn’t finished, and Woody Allen’s Barcelona film is caught up in international red tape. But it looks like we can look forward to new stuff from Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Philippe Garrel, as well as a documentary on Mike Tyson by James Toback.
• Squashing rumors that the film would be exclusively distributed via iTunes, IFC has announced that they’ll release Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, in the fall, with a theatrical run concurrent with VOD as is their custom.
• Brett Ratner has been “tapped” to remake The Incredible Shrinking Man. I am only posting this story so I can screencap the incredible photo of Ratner at right. The black-on-black bow tie––who does that?

• Jurgen Fauth has nothing but praise for Heavy Metal in Baghdad (we felt pretty much the same when we saw it in Toronto), the screening of which, Jurgen says, “was so oversold that I ended up in the front row, effectively watching a distorted fun house mirror version of Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti’s documentary.”
• “Most of the European critics came down pretty hard on Petri Kotwica’s Black Ice, a film in competition from Finland,” notes Filmbrain, “But I found this deliciously dark drama about dangerous deceptions to be a good bit of trashy fun.” Mr. Grant is far less enthusiastic about In Love We Trust and Just Anybody.
• Daniel Kasman is not entirely sold on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, but he concedes “Maddin’s humor comes through perhaps stronger in this film than any other (he narrates himself, with dialog by regular collaborator George Toles), pushing an obsessive, if not repetitive, theme of the life of a city and the life of a boy being an inescapable series of traumatic, almost unreal conflicts and co-minglings of unreturnable pasts and their dream-like traces in the present.” Also at The Auteurs Notebook: an extremely memorable one-liner from Klaus Kinski’s “notorious one man show,” Jesus Christ Saviour.
• 3..2…1…and the Filth and Wisdom backlash has arrived.

A giddy-seeming Madonna leaked details of her future filmmaking plans, in an interview with indieWIRE posted yesterday:

“I have other ideas swirling in my head,” Madonna said coyly when asked what else is on tap. For now she also has a new doc, “I Am Because We Are,” that will make its way around the festival circuit this Spring (apparently with stops in Tribeca and Cannes). She is also prepping another feature that she hopes to direct. It will “take place in New York, London and Paris,” she said of the new project, before quickly turning to her publicist, and smiling, “Oops, I don’t know if I should have said that.”

See also: the Spiegel interview above, in which Madonna comes precariously close to making a “Like a Virgin” reference when assessing the rush of bringing her directorial debut to market. If I was Madonna, I’d unleash direct “Like a Virgin” references in interviews all the time––not only would it be good for back-catalogue sales, but I think I’d feel the need to remind everyone that my whole career, the whole reinvention gambit, is all about being “touched [as if] for the very first time.”

I don’t actually sit around and think about what I would do if I were Madonna. Really. I swear.

They’re calling it an exclusive, which we’re sure won’t be accurate for long, but for the time being the Times Online has the first full review of Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom. Again, this seems like a case of a filmmaker winning by vaulting over an extremely low-set bar, but as far as three-star reviews go, this one’s damn near hyperbolic. Unless we’re just talking about everyone in the same sentence as Robert Altman these days? Here’s the nut graph:

Yet despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud. Her film has an artistic ambition that has simply bypassed her husband, the film director Guy Ritchie. She captures that wonderfully accidental nature of luck when people’s lives intersect for a whole swathe of unlikely but cherishable reasons. Altmanesque would be stretching the compliment too far, but Filth and Wisdom shows Madonna has real potential as a film director.

You can check out some of Madonna’s, um, potential, in the clip above. I have no idea what the announcer is saying (and yet us know if you do), but you can make out a bit of Filth and Wisdom behind it. Meanwhile, if you were Guy Ritchie––and had run your once-promising (I mean, some of you like Snatch, right?) career into the ground by first remaking a socialist/misogynist classic with your pop star wife in the lead, then by allowing said pop star wife to infuse your next generic gangster picture with Kabbalah bullshit––how many reviews like this would you stick around for?

UPDATE: You can watch a more complete, foreign voice-over-free clip at indieWIRE. And this one has strippers! Also, I added a question mark to the headline of this post, because after watching the new clip, I think Filth and Wisdom’s Altman cred is truly up for debate.

The biggest news of the day thus far coming out of the Berlin Film Festival? Madonna’s directorial debut screened…and it wasn’t that bad. Let’s go to the Twitters:

IDrinkYourMilkshake.com mastermind Jurgen Fauth manages to squeeze a headline and a rating into 140 characters: “Berlinale Shocker: Madonna’s Filth and Wisdom not awful at all! ***” And Andrew Grant of Benten Films/Filmbrain fame more or less concurs. “Madonna’s directorial debut Filth and Wisdom could use more of both, but surprisingly it aint half bad!”

Of course, there could be some crazy festival alchemy in the works here––as we know, the critical crowds have been somewhat underwhelmed by the competition offerings thus far, and it would be hard to imagine a film for which expectations could have been any lower. But still, it’s rather heartening to hear that an aging, walking punchline of a pop star can still swoop in to an international film festival and steal attention away from an apparently mediocre issue film directed by a name-brand, Oscar winning filmmaker. Hooray for meritocracy!

Above: a sample of Madonna’s recent musical output. I saw the title and really hoped it was a cover of the Van Halen song, but alas…

Spout is, sadly, not at the Berlin Film Festival, where screenings began this morning. But we’ll be trolling the blogs for scraps throughout the course of the fest.

• Immediately after Martin Scorsese’s opening night film Shine a Light screened for the press, I started seeing insta-reviews on Twitter and Facebook. “Shine a Light: weak sauce,” wrote About.com/IDrinkYourMilkshake.com’s Jurgen Fauth. David Hudson was slightly kinder: “Shine a Light is, well, okay for what it is - a concert movie.” I imagine we’ll see full reviews tonight or early tomorrow. Mike Jones has a report from the Light press conference, where Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts grumbled about the experience of watching the film, “I hate it.” UPDATE: Filmbrain yawns along.
• The other big news this morning seems to be that two members of the Berlinale Jury, director Suzanne Bier and actress Sandrine Bonnaire, have simultaneously dropped out of their commitment to the festival. The dropouts don’t seem to be related––Bier says she has an urgent work matter to attend to, while Bonnaire has a family thing––but it does seem like a very weird coincidence. The jury will carry on with just six members, including actress Diane Kruger and editing god Walter Murch.
• Morgan Spurlock, Eugene Jarecki and Ross Kauffman are amongst the filmmakers on the board of Cinelan, a new adventure launched in Berlin today that aims to provide an online distribution platform for short (under 3 minute) non-fiction films.
• Variety has published an interview with Eugene Hutz, Gogol Bordello frontman and star of Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, which will be unveiled in Berlin. Brilliantly subverting the trade’s form-letter questionnaire, when asked to name his “dream project” Hutz responds, “Anarcho-syndicalism worldwide.” Swoon.
  

Yes, that Madonna. The one who essentially hammered the final nail into the coffin of her acting career by convincing husband Guy Ritchie to cast her in a remake of Swept Away, whose influence then led said husband to further imperil his own filmmaking career by making Revolver, which apparently amounted to “one long advertisement for Kabbalah” in Ritchie’s patented Brit-gangster clothing. Now seemingly adhering to the adage that if one wants such a thing done right, she’s got to do it herself, Madonna has directed a long short/short feature called Filth and Wisdom. According to Variety, it’ll premiere on the Panorama sidebar at the Berlin International Film Festival in February.

This story back in May described Filth as “a comedy based on the star’s own experiences,” about an “Indian chemist owner, a Jewish businessman, and a failed ballet dancer who becomes a pole dancer.” The same story said the film would likely come in at 30 minutes; according to IMDb, the current cut (which is apparently in English AND Russian) is more like 45. IMDb also informs us that the film stars Richard E. Grant and Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello, who apparently appear in the band’s entirety as themselves.

I don’t have anything else to say about this. I would rather watch the video above and just sort of guiltily sink into deep nostalgia for 1990.