all about Madonna

Madonna is considered one of the hottest performers around for many reasons.
Physically, she’s in great shape and, professionally, her latest album, “Confessions on a Dancefloor” is No. 1 in 29 countries, including Japan, where co-anchor Harry Smith recently had an exclusive interview with her.
In Part One of the interview, seen on The Early Show Monday, Madonna and Smith chatted about how driven she still is to be the best she can possibly be and give her fans all she has to offer.
In the portion of their talk shown Tuesday, Madonna explained to Smith how she stays so physically fit.
“It’s hard work, bro,” she chuckled. “I exercise. I take good care of myself. I get facials. I get massages. I eat very healthy. I stay out of the sun. I don’t drink very much, except when I come to Japan. And, I don’t know. It’s ” it takes a lot of work.”
Told by Smith her new album is perceived to be “frothy,” meant to be danced to, and fun, Madonna came up with some descriptions of her own: a celebration, and ebullient.
Smith read the lyrics of one of the new songs: “It’s funny. I spent my whole life wanting to be talked about. I did it; just about everything to see my name in lights. Was it all worth it?”
“Yop,” quipped Madonna.
“And how did I earn it?” Smith continued. “Nobody’s perfect. I guess I deserve it.”
“That’s celebratory,” Madonna said.
“That’s celebratory?” Smith said. “There’s meat inside the “”
“Of course,” Madonna said. “But that’s why it’s called ‘Confessions on a Dance Floor.’ Because, somewhere in the, what you call froth, is truth. And they’re rhetorical questions. I mean, hopefully, what I like to do is make everybody ask those questions. But, at the end of the day, you know, I have to be grateful for all the choices I made, because they landed me where I am.”
Smith noted that Madonna’s 36 top-10 singles ties her with Elvis. Madonna said: “I think I’m in good company.”
She added that she can’t name them all.
When asked which are her favorites, Madonna cited “Holiday,” but Smith noted that it only got to No. 16 on the charts.
Madonna said she also particularly likes, “Like a Virgin,” which went to No. 1.
She pointed to “Material Girl” as another favorite of hers. It hit No. 2.
Another fave? “Like a prayer,” which also became a chart-topper.
Smith told Madonna two of his favorites from Elvis are “Heartbreak Hotel,” which Madonna called “a good one,” and “Kentucky Rain,” which Madonna agreed “is a beautiful one.”
“I like his ballads,” Madonna said.
When Smith referred to Madonna’s daughter as a “budding ballerina,” Madonna said: “She wants to do her own thing, and she doesn’t want me coming to her rehearsals either. She’s in ‘The Nutcracker’ in a couple of weeks, actually, in a week. And her whole thing has been, ‘Please don’t come to the rehearsals. I wanna surprise you. I wanna surprise you.’ And she’s very dedicated to what she does. She has a very clear idea of what she wants to do. She doesn’t wanna be a singer.”
Madonna, Smith said, has some “very clear ideas” about child-rearing. Her kids aren’t allowed to watch TV.
“If they don’t watch television, they use their imagination,” she said. “They read. They interact. They play interactive games. They get outside of the house. They have hobbies. And we have discussions. It’s not like, oh, you know, ‘TV’s terrible. It’s a drug. Turn it off.’ It’s just not something anyone does in our house.”
Smith held up Madonna’s first two albums, which were on vinyl.
He asked Madonna if, at the time, she saw herself where she is now and she shot back, “Absolutely not. No way. I never imagined what my life, how it would unfold, and how my career would take shape and the journeys I would go on and, you know, the fact that I would be living in Europe. I couldn’t even have fathomed it in a million years. I was just so grateful to make one record.”
And, 36 top ten hits later, Madonna said, “I’m very lucky.”
She says she’d like to make another movie, or step behind the camera and direct.
She’d like to be part of another big musical like “Evita.”
source : cbs

Top Albums :
01. Extraordinary Machine – Fiona Apple
02. Wind In The Wires – Patrick Wolfe
03. Confessions On A Dance Floor – Madonna
Madonna’s American Life was a bona fide folk album, a record filled with literal protest songs by an artist who’d evidently forgotten she’d been making candy-coated ones throughout her entire career (”Holiday,” “Express Yourself,” “Music,” et al.). Confessions On A Dance Floor, her 10th non-soundtrack studio album, was purported to be a return to her club roots. Sure, the album might be pure dance, without a trace of a live string arrangement (blame the death of Michel Colombier, Madge’s arranger of choice since 2000), but Madonna hasn’t written in such an orchestral manner since, well, maybe ever (credit producer Stuart Price, whose parents were classically-trained musicians). The bridges and ascending chord progressions of songs like “Jump” and “Sorry” are reminiscent of Madonna’s collaborations with Pat Leonard, who helped bring a musicality to some of her best work. The album’s 12 tracks work better as a whole, not as individual singles, and not just because one track segues into the next. It makes sense that songs like “Hung Up” and “How High” were sprung from the loins of what was originally intended to be a musical score; the album could easily be adapted into a musical”albeit one best kept to the tour stage, where Madonna has always aimed for a theatre experience anyway”and performed in sequence beginning with her arrival at a club and ending with blissful revelation the following morning. But with Confessions, an album sparked by the singer’s desire to invoke “ABBA on Ecstasy,” Madonna doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, she simply rolls with it.
04. Arular – M.I.A.
05. Anniemal – Annie
06. I Am A Bird Now – Anothony And The Johnson
07. Takk – Sigur RA3s
08. … And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Worlds Apart
09. The Emancipation Of Mimi – Mariah Carey
10. The Cookbook – Missy Elliott

Top Singles :
01. Since U Been Gone – Kelly Clarkson
02. We Belong Together – Mariah Carey
03. Mr. Brightside – The Killers
04. One Word – Kelly Osbourne
05. Galvanize – The Chemical Brothers
06. Hung Up – Madonna
“Hung Up” uses a ticking clock to represent fear of wasted time, but Madonna isn’t singing about careerism (or even bringing the people together), she’s talking about love. The track embodies the past with its pitched-upward vocals, infectious arpeggio sample from ABBA’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight),” and decidedly unironic, archetypical key change during the bridge. “Hung Up” is destined to become one of those songs where the video images are, in classic Madonna fashion, forever tied to the song. Directed by Johan Renck, the clip juxtaposes Saturday Night Fever-inspired garb and dance moves with the patently modern style of krumping (the video was originally slated to be helmed by David LaChapelle, director of the acclaimed krumping doc Rize), a fact that will likely become more fodder for cultural critics interested in the artist’s continued appropriation of black culture. But Madonna herself doesn’t crump in “Hung Up” the way she vogued in “Vogue” 15 years ago. Dressed in a hot pink Olivia Newton-John-style leotard, Madonna instead stretches impossibly and practices her disco moves in an empty studio, distancing herself from the young street dancers and providing further evidence of her precarious position as an outsider. But the same disco dance that seems awkward and dated (yet compulsively watchable) in that setting comes to vibrant life when performed en masse with the krumpers at a Japanese arcade. Maybe music does indeed bring the people together.
07. Feel Good Inc. – Gorillaz
08. Gold Digger – Kanye West
09. Why Do You Love Me – Garbage
10 . La Tortura – Shakira

source : slant

Madonna’s latest album, “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” has already sold over 4 million copies worldwide.
As part of the promotion, Madonna made her first trip to Tokyo in 12 years, and she asked The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith to come along for an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at things.
Wherever she goes, Smith observes, it’s an international event. Photographers catch her every move.
The Japanese journalists wanted to know every detail, from what Madonna missed about their country, to what she likes about herself.
On the former, she said, among other things, “I’ve missed the heated toilet seats.”
As for the latter, she told the Japanese press corps, “I’m resilient. Does that translate, resiliency? No, not stubborn, resilient; that’s the wrong way to describe it.”
But, says Smith, Madonna is the ultimate performer, and her latest album is a celebration of dance.
The highlight of the trip was a special club show, and Smith caught up with her backstage, before she went on.
“The invitation that I got was, I could come to Tokyo as long as I would dance,” Smith reminded Madonna.
“Are you ready to do your disco roll?” she asked Smith.
Then, Madonna showed him some basic moves, and Smith responded by rolling his arms.
“You gotta pump your hip. Go, Harry!” Madonna implored Smith. “Just wave your hands in the air and wave ‘em like you just don’t care.”
Smith admitted he didn’t get “the whole thing with the hands” but, undaunted, Madonna pressed on, showing him some more moves.
Getting serious, Smith asked what it means to her to “go out in front of 12 or 13 or 14 or 15 hundred people. This place is just jammed tonight.”
“I like that,” Madonna replied.
“They’re here for really, literally, a once in a lifetime experience,” Smith asserted.
“I like these gigs,” Madonna said. “I like these small, tiny, intimate gigs, where I can feel everybody.”
Madonna told Smith she “always” rehearses, and had gone through the entire show earlier in the day.
Turning to the camera to address viewers of The Early Show, Madonna kidded, “There’s a rumor going around that I’m a perfectionist. But it’s just a rumor.”
Of a performance the night before, Smith remarked, “You blew the doors off the place. Literally, when I was watching you onstage, I thought to myself there, ‘You put everything you have into that performance.’ ”
Madonna concurred.
“There’s nothing left to decide,” Smith said.
“It’s true,” Madonna confirmed. “Yes. This is true. I push myself ’till there’s nothing left.”
Noting that Madonna’s been at it more than 20 years, and this time around with an album that’s No. 1 in 29 countries, Smith wondered, “What’s inside of you that says, ‘I still have to put every ounce of what I have on the stage?’ ”
“Well,” Madonna answered, “I mean, the fact that my ” my record is No. 1 in 29 countries is ” it means that I’m connecting to people. So, when I go to a city and I do a show, I’m gonna give them my all. ‘Cause they’re giving me their all, by buying my record.”
Smith says he’s come to know Madonna as someone who “Leaves nothing to chance, who lives every day as if it’s her last day on earth.”
“Well,” responded Madonna, “that’s the way I should be living my life. I would love to get to the end of every one of my days and think, ‘Did I do everything I meant to achieve? Am I happy this is ” if ” if this were the last day of my life on Earth, would I be happy about it?’ I’d say, 75 percent of the time I’m ” is a ‘Yes.’ But 25, ‘No.’ ”
Where does that come from?
“Being aware; being more conscious of the way I am with people; being more responsible for myself, and how I interact with people, and being more grateful. I think that’s the main thing: being more grateful and appreciative.”
What is she most grateful for?
“What am I most grateful for?” Madonna repeated the question. “My family. Yeah. ‘Cause my family keeps me grounded, and keeps it all real.”
“Yeah,” Smith said, “in a sense, you’re also grateful for this response to this record.”
“Oh, yes. I’m grateful for that too. Yes.”
“From the standpoint that you’re an artist,” Smith said. “You work. You clearly put everything you have into what you do. Sometimes it’s wildly successful.”
“And,” Madonna interjects, “sometimes it’s not. And I’m grateful for the ability to be able to ride that, ride the waves, ride the rollercoaster of ” success because, you know, there’s another side to success. And that’s, well, what’s perceived as a failure. But I don’t perceive it that way.”
Madonna’s previous CD, “American Life” was, by her own admission, “the worst-selling album of my career, but one of my favorite records ever. But what I’m grateful for is the ability to just keep ” keep doing what I do. And OK, people weren’t, you know, people didn’t accept that. Fine. Pick my crown up off the floor, put it back on my head, and keep going,” she laughed, “It’s alright.”
Madonna says there’s a good possibility she’ll do a scaled-down concert tour next summer.
On Tuesday, Smith will have much more of his conversation with Madonna. She’ll talk about parenting, and what she has in common with ” Elvis.
source : cbs

Madonna is back in Japan for the first time in 12 years to promote her new album “Confessions on a Dance Floor.” The album is already a big hit around the globe and has taken over the #1 spot in charts in 28 countries, including Japan.
A rare opportunity was given to the press to meet with the 47-year-old so-called queen of pop and throw questions at her during her stay in Japan.

What is the concept for the album?
I wanted to make a record that people could put on when they are getting ready to go out, having a party, working out, and driving in a car. From beginning to end, you just want to keep dancing for one hour non-stop.

Why is it a glittery disco?
I wanted to make a dance record. I don’t think the songs are superficial. I think there are a lot of songs especially towards the end that are quite insightful and confessional. If you look from the surface, you might think that it’s superficial, but if you listen to lyrics all the way through from beginning to end, I don’t think you will have that opinion.

There is a noticeable European influence on this album. What were the inspirations?
I take my inspiration from everywhere. In this record in particular, I was inspired by the music of Giorgio Moroder, Abba, Chic, Pet Shop Boys, Cerrone, and a lot of other people, but those are the main inspirations and I guess most of those artists are Europeans.

Do you think about fans when making music? Or do you just do as you want?
My music and my ideas for my music come from inside and from whoever I am collaborating with. It’s not that I sit around consciously thinking about my fans. On the other hand, I do think when I am writing music ” Will people understand this? Will this appeal to people so that it touches their heart? Will it inspire them? So I am somewhere in the middle between being true to myself and thinking about what the outside world would think about.

There is a rumor that your husband, Guy Ritchie, walked out of the room when he heard the single “Hung up.”
My husband did not walk out of the room when he heard the song. That is a lie. He likes the song very much.

There is the line “Gomennasai” (sorry) in the song. Why did you pick Japanese? Are you interested in Japanese or Asian cultures?
I’ve always been interested in the Japanese culture. The line “Gomennasai” comes from my Japanese cook. I just asked him how to say I’m sorry in Japanese. I’ve always been influenced in many ways. Some of my videos and some of my performances on stage have been inspired by Japanese cinema, martial arts, music, fashion, and food. So I could say honestly that it’s been a big influence in my life in many areas. My work has always been influenced by Japanese culture.

It’s been a very long while since you last came to Japan, 12 years. What makes you feel you are back in Japan.
I’ve missed the heated toilet seats.

What are some things you want to do during your stay in Japan?
I would like to buy presents for my children at Kiddyland. The best toys are in Japan.

Have you eaten Japanese food?
I’ve only eaten Japanese food. I love Japanese food. I have a Japanese cook in London that travels with me everywhere. I probably eat more Japanese food than you do.

If there ever will be any star like you to come in future, it would be your daughter without a doubt. Do you have any plans for your daughter?
I don’t need to teach my daughter how to be a superstar; she’s already acting like one. My daughter loves to dance. She studies classic ballet. You could say she’s a diva already. She doesn’t say to me she wants to be a singer. She tells me she wants to be an actress and ballerina. I encourage her to do those things as long as she takes it seriously and works hard and has a lot of discipline.

Is there anything you keep in mind or a certain way to act toward your children to keep them in the right direction?
I like to teach them the things that I believe in, that is, we are all responsible for our actions and words. So we need to think before we speak and before we act. Once you accept that responsibility, I think you become more a conscious person. And so to say that is the first thing. I try to remember that myself and teach it to my children.

Are you planning any movie-related work?
The next thing I want to do in regard to film is direct. It would be a love story that will inspire many people.

Are you planning any tours in near future?
If I go on tour, I will come here. Hopefully it would be around the end of the summer.

Any last words for your fans in Japan?
I just want to say thank you for all of your support throughout the 20 years of my career. I hope you can forgive me for staying away for so long. And I look forward to come back very soon.

source : japantoday.com

The thunderous sound of foreheads being slapped across the globe met Madonna’s statement that she wants to become a director.

“I would love to direct a film,” she told Channel 4 news on Sunday night, where she was promoting the latest documentary to feature her, I’m Going to Tell You a Secret. “I felt very inspired making this movie … I would like to do it on my own next time.” The juicy soundbite is one way, of course, to garner a little extra publicity for Secret. But let us suppose she is for real. Is any film-making adventure she undertakes guaranteed to end in humiliation and disaster, as one might assume? Or is she, in fact, likely to make a better job of it than her husband, Guy Ritchie?

For almost as long as she has been a pop star, Madonna has clearly nurtured ambitions to make it in the movies. Selling vast numbers of records hasn’t been quite enough. The music industry is a young person’s game, and Madonna, in her late 40s, is perhaps on the verge of losing her creative dignity. The film world represents a different, more established kind of elite, and one where an artist can age gracefully.

Madonna hasn’t always been terrible in the movies. (Nor, it should be remembered, has Ritchie, whose first two films were actually funny.) With a good script, sensible direction and a functioning sense of humour, Madonna has managed to put two bona fide good films on to her acting c.v. Admittedly, they were both a long time ago: Desperately Seeking Susan, from almost the dawn of her career in the 1980s, and Dick Tracy, from the Warren Beatty period in 1990.

Most of her other acting work has resulted in unalloyed humiliation, from her Sean Penn collaboration Shanghai Surprise to Swept Away, which played a central role in the immolation of Ritchie’s own filmmaking career. Whoever she has allied herself with – whether romantic partners such as Penn, Beatty and Ritchie, or credible directors such as Woody Allen (Shadows and Fog), Abel Ferrara (Dangerous Game) and John Schlesinger (The Next Best Thing) – the result has almost always been bad.

You might think it obvious that her forays on to celluloid should end in disaster. In his excellent article on why musicians make such terrible film stars, Joe Queenan advances the idea that the very qualities that make someone a successful pop star – acting like a maniac, treating everyone like dirt, being overweeningly arrogant and accustomed to hugely exaggerated performing styles – work directly against what it takes to come across well on screen. Many others have tried – Jagger, Sting, Prince, Dylan, Elvis – and failed. Only those with modest cinematic ambitions, such as David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, Tina Turner in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Tom Waits in Down by Law, have got away with it.

Fewer have had the temerity to sit in the director’s chair. Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics made a complete pig’s ear of Honest, the All Saints movie, which, with some justification, can be nailed as the film that brought down the lottery-era British film industry. Bob Dylan had a couple of gos in the 1970s, with unhappy results. Prince is credited director of the indefatigably self-serving Under the Cherry Moon and Graffiti Bridge. White Zombie’s Rob Zombie has indulged, fairly successfully, in his personal taste for nauseating slasher films. Richard Jobson, one-time punk, is turning out one film after another, to mixed receptions.

The truth is that musicians are generally artists used to working alone, or with small teams of highly committed technicians. Film sets, with their battalion-sized crews and rudimentary privacy arrangements, are not the environments in which they flourish best.

But one aspect of Madonna’s output – music videos – gives us some hope. Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to hire David Fincher, Jonas Akerlund or Luc Besson to promote your music, but many others with similar purchasing power have done a lot worse. And though it’s easy to put too much emphasis on competence in the music video arena (Dave Stewart is one of many who have conspicuously failed to trade upwards), Madonna has some claim to have developed a certain cinematic style in her videos.

This doesn’t necessarily mean interesting narrative content – Like a Prayer, probably her best-known effort in this department, has school-play level acting and camerawork – but her evolving thematic obsessions have found convincing visual expression in one music promo after another. At one end of the 1990s, Vogue and Justify My Love did a good job in evoking Hollywood golden-age glamour and sleaze; at the other, Frozen and Ray of Light made simple but effective use of the advances in digital effects that the decade had seen. Interspersed between these high points are oddities such as Music, starring Ali G, or Beautiful Stranger, the song from Austin Powers, which confirm Madonna’s astute eye.

She certainly has the strength of will to become a film-maker, too. Akerlund is the credited director of You’re the Next Best Thing, but you can’t imagine a single edit got in without Madonna’s approval. And she knows the worth of a good photographer and art director, which is half the battle of film-making.

With her relentless drive, Madonna would have no trouble cutting the mustard as a producer – like her near-contemporary Michael Stipe, who has credits on Being John Malkovich, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing and Saved!. Putting yourself into the creative arena, however, is a step of a different magnitude.

Most successful musicians have decided they have too much to lose. Madonna, if she has any sense, will feel she doesn’t need the pressure. But the siren call of the opening title may be too much to resist: A film by Madonna.

source : guardian.co.uk

With ‘Hung Up’ at number one and her new album also set to storm to the top of the charts, Madonna has taken back her crown as the undisputed queen of pop. Simon Garfield talks to her about her faith, her family and her ever-changing image. And she explains why, at 47, she has returned to her disco roots

‘Have you brought three machines?’ asks Madonna as I get out my tape recorder.

No, why?

‘In case they don’t work.’

In fact, there is recording equipment everywhere. Madonna is sitting on a stool in her producer’s tiny home studio in West Kilburn, London, her feet resting by cables, her hands within reach of the keyboards and guitars and microphones that made her new album. She can also touch Stuart Price, the English producer who converted his loft into this studio a few years ago with the money he got from a publishing deal. He says that the walls are so thin that Madonna’s new record may accidentally contain the sound of a neighbour weeping.

Price is 28, 19 years younger than Madonna. They started working together four years ago, when Madonna was looking for a keyboard player for a world tour and heard the DJ/remixing work Price conducted under the names Jacques Lu Cont and Les Rythmes Digitales. He then became her musical director, rearranging studio tracks for live performances, and they wrote a song together, called ‘X-Static Process’, that appeared on her last album. ‘Writing is a very intimate thing,’ Madonna says, ‘especially when you write lyrics and sing them in front of someone for the first time. It’s like a really embarrassing situation. To me, singing is almost like crying, and you have to really know someone before you can start crying in front of them.’ She looks at her collaborator. ‘Before now I just didn’t feel that I knew you well enough. I wasn’t 100 per cent confident in your songwriting skills, if I may be so honest.’

Stuart Price: And you were right.

Madonna: I liked this space, but I didn’t think you were ready. The amount that you’ve grown from that record to this one is huge. But I only intended to write a few songs with you. I intended to do the bulk of the record with Mirwais [Ahmadzai, the producer of her last two albums Music and American Life], and then it turned out to go in the other direction, because the first song resonated so monstrously.

SP: ‘Hung Up’.

M: And that song made up my mind in which musical direction to go in. Until then I had done an entire soundtrack to a musical called Hello Suckers, and that didn’t pan out because I decided I didn’t want to do it. Then I decided to write a musical with Luc Besson, with him doing the screenplay. So I started a whole new chunk of songs, and then I read the script and I hated it, and I thought, ‘That’s crap, let’s scrap that’. And then I was exhausted. We finished the tour, and my record company was like, ‘You owe us an album’, and I was, ‘I don’t have any more ideas, I’m tapped out’. So I came over here to work experimentally, and because that song turned out so great, I said, ‘OK, that’s it, I’m making all dance music’.

She is wearing a black suit with pinstripes, and pointy black leather boots. Her hair is parted in the centre and straight, but the next day it will be made to look like Farrah Fawcett for her video for ‘Hung Up’. People asked me afterwards whether I liked her, and I really liked her. She was in a great mood and laughed a lot. Some of the time she performed stretching exercises with her hands, which she said was an attempt to get back into shape after her recent riding accident.

M: The entire time I was recording the album I was also editing a documentary film that I’ve just finished, and that was a very painful… It’s called I’m Going to Tell You a Secret and it’s not a conventional documentary. It’s cinematic, it’s like a journal. I was flying to Stockholm every other week to work on the edit, then coming back here, and it was very difficult, taking 350 hours of film and putting it into two hours. I was so wiped out by it.

SP: So working on the record came to be a respite.

M: It was the antidote for the stress of that film. It was, ‘I want to dance, I want to feel free, buoyant, happy, placated’, and so I’m going to come up to this little white room with lots of cables and I’m going to do that.

OMM: The new record sounds modern, but there’s a lot of your early years in the New York clubs that have gone into it. That dance floor hitting you when you were… how old?

M: God, 20, 21. Yes, my original impulse was to make music in the first place. I used to go to this club in New York, Danceteria, and I kept bringing my demos to the DJ, so all music for me begins with the DJ taking my first record, ‘Everybody’, and thinking it’s good enough to play to everyone to dance to.

When I first moved to New York I wanted to be a dancer, I danced professionally for years, living a hand-to-mouth existence. I never tapped into nightlife, all I knew was dancers, we went to bed early and got up early and went to free concerts at the Lincoln Center and Shakespeare in the Park. Then I met this guy, as one does, and he brought me to a nightclub and I was like, ‘Wow’.

It was called Pete’s Place. In one room was John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards and all these guys who looked like Forties movie stars, and all the girls looked like Fifties movie stars and had perfect eyeliner, and I was like wearing my dance clothes, and I brought a book with me, just in case I got bored. It was an F Scott Fitzgerald book. I thought, ‘You never know…’. And that was my introduction to dance music. I thought, ‘Oh my God, are there other places like this?’ I didn’t know you could just walk into a club and start dancing by yourself. I thought someone had to ask you.

OMM: What an innocent girl you were.

SP: Hard to believe.

M: You can just dance for six hours and nobody will bother you and you don’t have to drink. I felt an incredible sense of liberation, and I felt happier. That sense of freedom and feeling independent. I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn’t care, I was free. There was nothing fun or glamorous about my life and I needed some excitement. And believe me, there were a lot cooler people there than me. They were wearing black and not moving much, and I was giving everyone the retarded tingles.

The new album is called Confessions on a Dance Floor, and the tracks have been sequenced together to run as one continuous piece of music. The idea was to create a record that resembles the score of a musical, with recurring themes, combined with the feel of an hour at a nightclub. The predominant marketing image on the album artwork and advertising spreads is of a Seventies disco glitterball and a pop star keen on the Jane Fonda workout look. She sings about the usual things, which inevitably means singing about the saga of being Madonna: her quest for understanding, for a deeper truth beyond the trappings of fame, for a spiritual light in the darkness. There aren’t many ‘confessions’, but there’s plenty of self-assertion. The record is the closest Madonna has got to a concept album, and the concept is simplicity.

M: I tried to do some other stuff with Mirwais but it didn’t resonate. I always kept wanting to run back to Stuart’s studio.

SP: The escape pod.

M: Yes. You meet somebody, and you’re already going out with somebody else, so you say ‘Hi’ and you have this fantastic date with them, and when you go back to this other person you’re with all you can do is think about that other new person. I couldn’t stop thinking about how fun it was to work with Stuart. It took me a minute to decide which boyfriend I wanted to have.

Have you ever met Mirwais? Jean-Paul Sartre comes to mind. He’s very intellectual, very analytical, very cerebral, very existential, very philosophical. You have to be in the mood for it. I didn’t want to over-think things too much. I don’t want to be complicated now.

OMM: You feel that happened with American Life?

M: Yes. It didn’t happen when we first worked together, on Music, but on American Life we both got into a sort of…

SP: Vortex.

M: We both got sucked into the French existentialist vortex. We both decided we were against the war, and we both smoked Gauloises and wore berets, and we were against everything. No, it’s about the universe conspiring. With the last album I was in a very thoughtful mood, a very angry mood, a mood to be political, very upset with George Bush.

OMM: But now you’re happier?

M: It’s just that I did that already. I don’t need to be going on about the war in Iraq. I made a lot of political statements in my show and in my film. I don’t want to repeat myself, so I moved to another area and that’s ‘God, I really feel like dancing right now’. It was too intense. It’s not just a reaction to what I was doing work-wise, but also a reaction to what was going on in the world. I just wanted some relief.

OMM: Fuck Art, Let’s Dance?

M: What?

OMM: Used to be on T-shirts in the Seventies.

M: It’s fuck everything, let’s dance.

OMM: There seem to be a lot of references to your earlier records on it.

M: Really? Please tell us which ones. We listened to a lot of other people’s records when we were making this – obviously Abba and Giorgio Moroder – so to me it’s more of an homage to other people’s records than mine. If there are references to earlier records it’s probably done unknowingly, part of our molecular structure, it comes out again and again, hopefully not too boringly and repetitive.

I couldn’t have made this record anywhere else but up here. Where you record is very important. It can’t be too nice, it can’t be too expensive, it can’t have a view to an ocean or a field. I’d rather be in a prison cell with Pro Tools. I don’t want to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. I want it to be exactly as it was when I wrote my first song. In a small space with hardly any frills, I want it always to be straightforward. I can’t deal with the pressure of how much things cost. Otherwise I think, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to turn out 12 number one hits to justify how much the space costs.’

OMM: If I heard that from anyone else I might believe it.

M: What can I say? That’s how I think. I loved lying on that couch with my notebook writing stuff and then crawling over to do the vocals. Every vocal I did here we also tried somewhere else and it didn’t work. Other people who contributed to this record, we’d meet in this much larger, characterless space in Primrose Hill, and I would be totally missing the vibe that was necessary, and so I’d take what I did there and say ‘thank you very much’, and then run back here and say, ‘Stuart, you’ve got to help me fix this. Help me’.

All the songs are to a lesser or greater extent biographical. ‘How High’ is obviously asking the question, how important is fame and how much does it matter? And what really does matter?

OMM: These are questions you must have asked yourself for 20 years. Have you reached any conclusions?

M: Sure, although my point of view and philosophy continues to change and grow. As the years go by you go through this evolution. You think, ‘Oh my God, having a song on the radio and being number one is the most important thing in the world’, and then that happens for a while and then you get the shit kicked out of you and you think, ‘I can’t deal with this’, and you go into introspection mode and then you come through the other side. You realise that having a number one record and being loved and adored isn’t the most important thing in the world. But at the same time, I don’t have a problem with it. What I’m trying to say is, I’m not a reluctant pop star. I’m very grateful and happy for everything that I have and for things when they go well. On the other hand, I’ve had enough of the other side to know that if it doesn’t, I will survive that and life goes on.

At the end of the day when I’m standing at the golden gates, I’m sure God doesn’t give a shit how many records I’ve sold or how many number one hits I’ve had. All he gives a shit about is how I behaved, how I treated people. So understanding that, and still doing my best making records, is the conclusion I’ve come to. I think about that more now than I used to.

OMM: Do things hurt you still? You’ve had…

M: Anything and everything written about me. Honestly, I don’t read newspapers, magazines, whatever. They’re just not part of my lexicon. I don’t want to be manipulated, or manipulated about other people’s work. I don’t want to be told how I should think or how I should receive things, and even when you know that the press writes a lot of shit about people, you’re still tainted and influenced by it. I’m trying to remove that from my life. Also, I don’t want to see pictures of myself with sarcastic quotes underneath. Even if it just pinches me for 30 seconds, I don’t want it.

Before doing any interviews I like to know who I’m meeting with and get a bit of an idea of their sensibilities, so consequently I’ve read lots of reviews of my last tour, and all of them were really negative. They were, ‘Oh it’s not very good, not very exciting, not anywhere near as good as Blonde Ambition’, which I’m sure they slagged off. Now I couldn’t give a shit, but thank God I didn’t read it when I was on tour.

OMM: Elvis Costello said that the worst thing would be to read something by an influential critic and then let it affect what you do. So if they don’t like a particular direction you’re going in, you think, ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t be doing it’. And then you realise: why on earth is this guy deciding my career path?

M: Exactly. You have this inner struggle within yourself all the time, this pendulum that swings between you caring [what people think] and not caring. It’s not important, but on the other hand the media is something that affects a lot of people, so you’re constantly trying to strike a balance between respecting something and not caring about it. Let’s talk about economics: I know there’s a lot of competition in the world of magazines and newspapers and we have to make headlines and be sensational and sell, and saying bad things about me is going to sell more papers than writing good things about me.

OMM: But does it have an affect on you still?

M: It used to have a huge effect, but I’m so used to people slagging me off. Since the beginning of my career I’ve been told I have no talent, I can’t sing and I’m a one-hit wonder. That was 22 years ago.

OMM: You really seemed to surprise people with your performance on Live8.

M: Lots of people called me. I was kind of surprised. I mean, it wasn’t the first time I’ve ever done a show.

SP: It was the only time the backstage area cleared out to watch someone.

The studio door opens. Angela Becker, her personal manger, has bought drinks from Starbucks.

M: This is Chai Latte. I’m off coffee now because I’m on homeopathics. For my eight broken bones.

OMM: All healed now?

M: Not all. I have one rib that has not formed a union, as they call it in the mysterious world of orthopaedics. But all my other bones – there’s cellular fibrous tissue that has joined them together, but my collar bone is still a bit of a problem. I can’t lift my arm over my head yet, but I’m doing lots of rehab. Lots. I can’t lift it above here…but I can still slap you.

OMM: It’s like that Tommy Cooper joke. You know, quaint English humour.

M: I like quaint English humour.

OMM: You know Tommy Cooper?

M: The comedian.

OMM: Yes, died on stage and everyone thought it was part of the act. Did terrible magic tricks. And he used to tell this great joke; man goes to a doctor and says, lifting his arm a bit, ‘It hurts when I do that,’ and the doctor says, ‘Well, don’t do it then’.

M: Uh. [Tumbleweed.]

OMM: So where were we?

M: Talking bollocks.

OMM: That song on the new album, ‘I Love New York’.

SP: That was written on tour at a soundcheck.

M: After an excellent police escort. The song is ironic! I love London. Please embrace my irony.

OMM: You diss London and LA and Paris. ['If you don't like my attitude, then you can eff off/ Just go to Texas, isn't that where they golf?/ New York is not for little pussies who scream.']

M: Funnily enough, I live in all those places. Well, I don’t live in Paris, by the way. But let’s face it, with New York, it’s like putting your finger in a socket. When I walk down the street anywhere people say, ‘Oh, there’s Madonna’, but in New York the cops are like, ‘Hey, you’re back’. It feels like I’ve come home.

OMM: What happens when you walk around here?

M: Here? I don’t walk around here! I live in Marble Arch, and everyone’s Saudi, everyone wears a veil and nobody pays any attention to me. If people notice me in London they don’t make such a big deal about it.

SP: Oh, believe me, they notice you.

M: In New York they shout, ‘I don’t like the hair colour!’ Here, they’ll make their judgments but keep them to themselves.

I’m Going to Tell You a Secret will be shown on Channel 4 in December and then made available on DVD. It combines a backstage journal of the last tour with meditations on her spiritual quest for a good way to live her life. It ends with Madonna’s trip to Israel last year to learn more about Kabbalah, and the closing shot is of an Israeli child and a Palestinian child walking down a road together. It’s a political and revealing movie, and it provides a less artful insight into her world than her last tour movie Truth or Dare more than a decade ago.

It is particularly revealing about the scenes Madonna has chosen not to remove, not least the sequences with her children and husband Guy Ritchie. In one scene, Madonna and her kids are trying out the bed in her suite at the George V hotel in Paris: ‘Who’s the Queen, Rocco?’ she asks her five-year-old son. ‘You, you, YOU!’ Rocco replies. In another, Lourdes, who is eight, teaches her mother how to say ‘let me tell you a secret’ in French; Lourdes tells the camera she’s looking forward to the tour ending so she can see more of her mother. In a limo after a show, Madonna is upset that her husband has attended so few of her gigs, and doesn’t believe his explanations. ‘I got married for all the wrong reasons,’ she says. ‘My husband did not turn out to be the person I imagined him to be… There is no such thing as the perfect soulmate. Your soulmate is the person who pushes all your buttons, pisses you off on a regular basis and makes you face your shit. It is not easy having a good marriage, but I don’t want easy.’

Stuart Price, who is in the film as much as Ritchie, appears in an early scene telling Madonna a joke, which she loves: ‘What’s so great about fucking twenty eight year-olds?’ Answer: ‘There are 20 of them.’ Later, Madonna asks: ‘What’s the difference between a terrorist and a pop star? You can negotiate with a terrorist.’

‘Hopefully people will see the film,’ Stuart Price told me after a screening, ‘and realise that M is actually one of the kindest and most personable people you could hope to meet, and not the lunatic most people think she is.’

OMM: It’s interesting that you’re not slowing down.

M: Hell no. It’s probably the sign of a very sick person. Part of it is a true desire to grow and a searching, and part of is just good old-fashioned obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Everyone who knows me thinks I’m a bit of a work Nazi.

OMM: And you’re keen to ensure that your children aren’t slowing you down. You know that Sylvia Plath or Cyril Connolly or Cyril Knowles quote about the pram in the hall being the enemy of creativity and promise?

M: There’s a thing I say in the film when I’m with all the musicians and dancers and it’s the last show and I’m saying goodbye, and I’ve got my eyes closed and I start crying. Where I cry is when I say I feel the pull between my family and my creative life, and the struggle to keep it all balanced and to do it all right. It’s a struggle, and I know where Sylvia Plath is coming from, to a certain extent, though I’m not as depressed as her. I was obsessed with her when I was in high school. The Bell Jar is my bible.

OMM: So if you didn’t have kids…

M: My work probably wouldn’t be as good. Having children made me go down a road of serious introspection and self-examination. I think it’s informed and hopefully enhanced my creativity.

OMM: How do they like your music?

M: My son likes songs here and there. He’s really into Usher and he likes R&B. He does the bump to it in the playroom. He’s actually quite a good dancer. My daughter is a fan of mine but she doesn’t want to be too obvious about it because I’m her mum and it’s not cool. So she loves Beyonce and what’s that boy group that every English girl’s obsessed with?

SP and OMM: Backstreet Boys? McFly? Blue? Westlife?

M: No, get with it. This is pathetic.

OMM: What about your husband? He doesn’t seem to me to be a Disco Queen.

M: No, he’s not. In fact, he stormed out of the room when I played him some of these tracks. He thought it was ’shit’.

OMM: What does he like?

M: He likes Irish folk music, OK? I don’t know the names of it, it’s not something you hear on the radio. He likes songs with stories, pub music.

OMM: What do you listen to now?

M: I like film soundtracks. Incessantly I listen to Talk to Her, 2046, Frida and The Hours. I like the soundtracks better than the movies.

OMM: Did you see the Frida Kahlo show at Tate Modern?

M: Yes. Two of my paintings were in it. I’m waiting for them to come back.

OMM: But they don’t say ‘Property of Madonna’ in the way that some of the Edward Hopper paintings had ‘Property of Steve Martin’ underneath?

M: Perhaps they should say ‘Property of a Pop Star’. I think they just say ‘Private Collection’. I did go to the show – kind of depressing.

OMM: Presumably there will be a tour next year?

M: Probably the Confessions Tour or Confess Your Sins Tour.

SP: In a live performance you realise within 30 seconds whether something’s working or not. In a studio you can disappear into this intellectual, er…

M: Wank.

SP: Wank, yes. You can think you’re making something really meaningful but in a live arena it just won’t translate. So when we were working on stuff here I would play the tracks when I was DJing and nobody would know what it was and you could see how things were actually working from the reaction.

M: That was one thing we did on this record that I haven’t had the luxury of doing before. Because Stuart DJs all over the world we tried it all out – dub versions so they wouldn’t know it was me or there would only be a strain of my vocal in the background. I even made him film things for me on his telephone so I could see the crowd reaction.

SP: It just looks like Sodom and Gomorrah. If the reaction wasn’t instant we’d go back and change the tracks.

M: If only I could do everything like that – anonymously.

OMM: What do you want the new album to achieve?

M: I just want people to hear it and go ‘Oh my God’. I want it to lift people up and get them dancing round their house, driving round in their car until the record’s finished. It’s really simple. I just want to make people happy.

A few weeks after we spoke, with her bones healed, she emerged from beneath a glitterball to sing ‘Hung Up’ at the MTV Europe awards in Lisbon. The dance routine left her a little breathless, but she was clearly having a good time. Later in the show she gave Bob Geldof an award for his humanitarian work, and her presentation speech was as genuine as these things can be; Geldof had found a way to make a difference beyond music, something Madonna wished to do herself.

But for the time being, there was a disco album to promote, and when the MTV show was over she turned her attention to an intimate gig in Mornington Crescent, north London. Koko, formerly the Camden Palace, was the venue for Madonna’s first appearance in the capital in 1983, and on her return on Tuesday night she performed as though there might still be things to prove. ‘It is so fucking good to be back,’ she said, not long before she started headbanging.

It was a great little show. Her clothes were mauve, the glitterball spun, Stuart Price and the other musicians looked like a Seventies covers band in their white suits. She started by singing ‘Hung Up’, her new number one, and followed that with three other songs from the album, which at that point in the week was outselling its nearest competitor three-to-one. She introduced ‘I Love New York’ with the explanation that it was where she learnt to survive. Ultimately, Madonna said, ‘it’s all about survival.’

The queen of pop: then & now

1990

· The 32-year-old Madonna was at the peak of her popularity and powers.

· Her Blonde Ambition tour, featuring costumes designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier (including the notorious gold cone bra), travelled the world. During ‘Like a Virgin’, she humped a bed on stage, rubbing herself in an entertaining act of faux masturbation.

· She starred, too, in the film Dick Tracy, alongside her new lover, screen legend Warren Beatty. That year, Beatty is rumoured to have proposed marriage, but their relationship soon burnt out.

· In November, she released her greatest hits package, The Immaculate Collection, which contained eight chart-topping songs. It went on to sell 18 million copies worldwide.

· The album also contained a new song, ‘Justify My Love’. MTV decreed that the accompanying video was ‘religiously and sexually offensive’ and promptly banned it.

· In 1991, a documentary charting the Blonde Ambition tour was released Truth or Dare (retitled In Bed With Madonna in the UK). The film included scenes of her fellating a wine bottle.

2005

· The 47-year-old Madonna is at the peak of her popularity and powers once more.

· Her Live8 performance was considered one of the highlights of the show at Hyde Park. She appeared on stage with 24-year-old Birhan Woldu, a victim of the Ethiopian famine that inspired the original Live Aid.

· She has been married for almost five years to Brit-flick director Guy Ritchie. They have a five-year-old son, Rocco, while Madonna has a daughter, Lourdes, nine, from her previous relationship with Carlos Leon.

· This month, she released her 11th album, Confessions on a Dancefloor. Produced by Stuart Price, it features the chart-topping single ‘Hung Up’, and signals a return to her Eighties disco roots.

· Madonna now lives principally in Britain, with a house in London and a country manor in Dorset. She is a keen horse-woman and wearer of Barbour jackets.

· Next month, her latest documentary, I’m Going to Tell You a Secret, will be screened in the UK. The film covers her 2004 Re-Invention tour and includes much discussion of her faith in Kabbalah.

· ‘Confessions on a Dance Floor’ (Warner Bros) is available now. ‘I’m Going to Tell You a Secret’ is on Channel 4 on December 4.

source : the observer (thanks to hector)

Summertime, and the living is easy . . . so naturally American Vogue prints a photo-shoot of the English countryside, showing how the cream of English society disports itself during our brief but ravishing belle saison.
Now, who is this patrician figure, clad in buttermilk chiffon and cashmere, her wheat-blonde hair curled into immaculate waves, laughingly enacting a Petit Trianon charade of feeding her flock of happy hens from a dainty porcelain bowl, while in the background there looms the rose brick frontage of some small but perfectly formed English country house?
Here she is again, on horseback this time, dressed in hacking jacket, breeches and a slightly peculiar pair of boots. Last and prettiest of all is the set piece with evening dress and small children. A flowing silk skirt, the creamy smile of a woman who knows that she has fulfilled her destiny in every possible way, and two angelic moppets, a little girl in fairy frills, a small boy in chain mail, brandishing a sword as big as himself.
So go on, who is she, the girl in the pictures? Matriarch, countrywoman, grande dame. I give you one guess. The hens are the clinching detail. It’s the Duchess of Devonshire, isn’t it? Archive pictures from the Thirties, showing her at the height of her beauty. Odd about wearing chiffon to feed the poultry, but that’s eccentric Brits for you, right?
Wrong. The rose-and-blonde aristo, posing so charmingly with hens, hunter and lovely home is, in fact, none other than the Material Girl herself — Madonna, fetchingly got up for the photographer from American Vogue as Our Lady of the Manor. Fancy that!
Not, it is true, that Madonna’s latest incarnation comes as a total surprise. Between her dizzying variety of personae — the nasty-mouthed dominatrix in spiky fetish gear, the studious seeker after Kabbalistic knowledge, the sweet, Prada-clad librarian of her book launches — Madonna has been offering for some time periodic glimpses of herself in tweeds and wellies as the Country Wife.
Still, isn’t it a trifle rum that she chooses to offer up this vision of herself as an English gentlewoman at a time when the English gentry has never been more unfashionable or more energetically reviled? Do you think she’s losing the keen edge that has kept her ahead of the game for so long? Well, no, of course she isn’t. In fact, I think what she has done is to take a long, keen-eyed look into the future to see what awaits her there, and come up with a wonderfully pragmatic solution.
I’m always amazed when I read the things that fat, ugly, balding male journalists allow themselves to write about Madonna, their fabulously well preserved contemporary. “Menopausal” and “the old girl”, were a couple of the milder descriptions that appeared after her performance at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park. Yeah, right, Mr Love God, and just look at you, I always think, on reading the painfully misogynistic prose of these barrel-shaped boobies.
However, I suspect that the secret of the Madonna phenomenon is a certain restlessness which ensures that she doesn’t sit around fulminating about patronising press but is instinctively always moving on to the next thing, and the next, and the one after that. The trouble is that, at 46, you begin to run out of next things.
However fabulously well preserved, an intelligent woman (and Madonna is certainly that) knows that there is no mileage after a certain point in pretending to be luscious. The result is simply sinister, as a brief tour d’horizon of Botoxed and desperate former beauties will confirm. So, what’s the alternative?
In the States there is no alternative. Unless you’re Barbara Bush, you just carry on getting thinner and thinner, more and more wide-eyed, sadder and madder, until you vanish altogether. You’d think Madonna might have been able to thrive in France, where allure is reckoned to be ageless, but the French are so intolerant of eccentricity (and their music scene is so peculiar). Besides, she’s married to an Englishman.
So, what have the Brits to offer a 46-year-old rock star — apart from an unpleasant claque of paunchy, sex-starved male journalists? Actually, more than you’d imagine. One always thinks of Latin nations as being supremely matriarchal, but in Britain we entertain a long and robust tradition of pale, willowy beauties who deal with the transition from flower-like nymph to middle age and older by becoming Formidable.
Even luckier for Madonna, our version of Formidable comes in an assortment of incarnations. There is Rock Chick Formidable, as modelled by Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull and Jane Birkin, all of whom are quite as much adored now — wrinkles, shattering life experiences and all — as they were in their dewy prime.
But if Madonna is too grand for that slightly down-at-heel form of celebrity, luckily we do a fabulous line in straight-up Dowager Formidable, which might suit her down to the ground. Consider the picture of the 50-year-old Queen Mary, or (to bring the matter up to date) Lady Annabel Goldsmith. Observe the wonderful posture, the ineradicable self-belief, the immense quantities of diamonds (or glitter of some sort, at any rate), and tell me if you don’t see there the very pattern of the Material Girl in later life.
Looking again at those Vogue pictures, I think Madonna has made a clever choice. At 46 she is still pretty enough to conceal the power behind the charm. Catch her again in 30 years’ time and she’ll have turned into one of P. G. Wodehouse’s aunts. Rock chick, bellowing to rock chick, like mastodons across the primeval swamp.

source : timesonline.co.uk

Commanding a fee of around $20 million per film, actress Julia Roberts is the most powerful actress in Hollywood. She is also the third most powerful in the US entertainment industry, according to the trade paper The Hollywood Reporter. The actress won an Oscar for her performance in “Erin Brokovich” a decade after she was first nominated for her title role in “Pretty Woman”. Her box office status rivals those of male stars like Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks and she derives her power from the “ability to get projects made”, said the paper. The list was topped by Universal Pictures chief Stacey Snider, followed by Sherry Lansing, head of Paramount Pictures.
The only other performer on the list was Madonna.
The list of Hollywood’s five most powerful women:
1. Stacey Snider: chairman, Universal Pictures
2. Sherry Lansing: chairman, chief executive of Paramount Pictures motion picture group
3. Julia Roberts: actress, head of Shoelace Productions
4. Gail Berman: president of entertainment, Fox Broadcasting Company
5. Nancy Tellem: president, CBS Entertainment
source : newkerala.com

Two words Madonna never heard from director Tod Williams: You’re hired!
The man behind the camera for the upcoming film “The Door in the Floor” met with Madonna and “just about every other actress in the world over 40,” he says, for the coveted role of an older woman who seduces her teenage summer helper.
“Madonna really wanted to do the part,” Williams said. “I wasn’t really even considering her, but I called her in because I just wanted to meet Madonna.”
So how was it?
“It was a strange meeting,” he says. “She asked me about techniques, how all the shots would happen in the movie.”
Williams met withother A-listers, each of whom had their own problems with a role that includes seducing a teen, lots and lots of nudity and passionate lovemaking scenes. “I very seriously considered Kristin Scott Thomas,” says Williams. “But she wouldn’t even stand on the beach in a bathing suit in this film, let alone get naked.”
He thought about Frances McDormand. “She really knows what the heck she’s doing, but I wasn’t sure about casting her. The part calls for someone who is stunningly beautiful.” What about Susan Sarandon? “”She’s just so sexual to me,” Williams says. “She owns her sexuality. She’s connected to herself in that way. This character — a mother grieving the loss of her child who has this affair — isn’t so sure of herself.”
Sigourney Weaver was dubbed “interesting” by Williams. So was a Chicago legend. “Joan Allen is a great, great actress,” Williams says. “But she didn’t seem right.” He liked Michelle Pfeiffer and Robin Wright Penn. “Both loved the script, but they were uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping with a young man.”
Not so for Kim Basinger, who eventually got the coveted role and now is enjoying early Oscar buzz. “She was fearless during the nude scenes,” says Williams. “Yes, she was scared of the darkness of this role, but because it scared her, she did it.”
source : suntimes.com

It was a sweet moment in what was a truly spectacular show. Yet, the entire joyously breathless affair had the feel of that dedication to the fans.
The hits-laden, 105-minute visual feast was like a mash note to everyone who’s followed the twists and turns and avant garde detours on her trip from “boy toy” to Esther.
A stylish tip of the cap to the people who ponied up the ridiculously high price of $300 for last night’s top ticket, to those who defended her notorious “Sex” book, went to see her movies and who have loved her in all her brash glory as well as her self-indulgent missteps.
It was firmly the former on display last night as Madonna kicked off her four-night stand with style and grace, giving good face and even better voice.
In fact, Mrs. Guy Ritchie, the first to admit that she’s not the best singer, has never sounded more solid and self-assured even as she was in constant motion on moving catwalks, sliding conveyor belts and hoofing it alongside her cadre of precision dancers.
If she denied fans the hits last time out, “The Re-Invention Tour” is virtually nothing but, from the sleekly choreographed opener “Vogue” to a singalong of the enduringly cheeky “Material Girl” to the unbound closer “Holiday.”
And in a neat trick that only Madonna could pull off, the 45-year-old singer gave the people what they wanted while reworking a few to suit her tastes.
That meant a little more electric guitar fire during “Burning Up,” a more organic, acoustic take on the rapturous “Like a Prayer” and a burlesque reworking of “Deeper and Deeper.”
An almost constant barrage of images accompanied the music and dancing on mammoth video screens on and surrounding the stage.
They ranged from photos of children in wartorn and poverty-stricken nations as she sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” to Hebrew symbols during a rapturous “Like a Prayer.”
source : bostonherald.com