Madonna - Madonna: The Performance Review

Cut’n’paste snippets of stuff you have

With its promise of focusing on Madonna’s career as a performer and providing rare footage, The Performance Review’s blurb raised our hopes. Perhaps we’d see some quality archive film, insider stories from Madonna’s tours, contributions from Gaultier, the dancers, set designers and crew.

Alas, no. Instead, we’re firmly back into unofficial biopic territory, opening with the tired “girl from Michigan” story and descending into a confused and tedious patchwork of clips from the widely available official videos and, yes, an array of ‘experts’ droning on ad nauseam about why gay men love Madonna, how shocking she is, yadda yadda. Mark Kamins, producer of her debut, is a worthy contributor, but the others are spurious at best.

The “rare footage” is a case of blink and you’ll miss it. Two clips might reasonably be called rare, but they last seconds. The “rarely seen photos” seem to have been pulled from books that are as widely available to anyone as Madonna’s albums.

This may be of some interest to someone who has never heard of Madonna, though they’d be better off with the Immaculate Collection DVD. And the extras? Biographies of the various nonentities who bored us rigid in the documentary and – gasp! – an “Ultimate Madonna Quiz”! No stains on the upholstery, please…

Chrome Dreams/Sexy Intellectual | SIDVD 521

Reviewed by James R Blandford
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