Madonna: Truth or Dare

Koko: Madonna is a real bitch. I can't tell whether letting a bunch of strangers document that fact constitutes supreme courage or total self-indulgence. But I guess that's the point: what says "Like a Virgin" better than its author glibly slapping stagehands and yelling about umbrellas? And even though I felt awkward not knowing whether what I watched was candid or staged, secret or just sordid, I felt even funnier liking it. I enjoyed not knowing. Art that places its appreciator in moral ambiguity can do wonders, like make rapturous a five minute scene of some woman getting her hair dressed. You're a whore, Madonna, and a waddling shrew, but I like you, so keep it up. In a few more years, you'll be Andy Warhol with a lobotomy.

Slothrop: What Koko said. The film per se does an impressive job of avoiding cliche. It is thoughtfully filmed, sequenced, paced and never dull. Everything in it, like the content, is a performance and a smart one. I remember one of my college music professors, a man whose specialty is classical music and who wrote his undergraduate thesis on Elisabeth Bishop, telling my class that she is one of the most innovative musicians we have the pleasure of seeing perform. I'm not sure she's a whore, exactly, because we don't know fact from fiction. Maybe we can call her a fantastical strumpet. Regardless, I think Dan Bern said it best:

"I got a friend whose goal in life
Was to one day go down on Madonna
That's all he wanted
That was all
To one day go down on Madonna
And when my friend was thirty-four
He got his wish in Rome one night
He got to go down on Madonna
In Rome one night in some hotel
And ever since he's been depressed
'Cause life is shit from here on in
And all our friends just shake their heads
And say, "Too soon, too soon, too soon,
He went down on Madonna too soon
Too young, too young, too soon, too soon."