Jandy's Clippings

"What vexes me most about “Filth and Wisdom” is the economics. Madonna has been a global star for decades. She has amassed a fortune, much of which presumably remains intact. She can’t have spent all of it on jodhpurs and conical bras. So why, when it came to launching herself as a film director, did she limit her budget to $365.23? Such, at any rate, is my estimate for the funding of “Filth and Wisdom.” If the actors were paid according to their talents, they cannot have cost more than forty bucks. In the case of Richard E. Grant, the one sizable name in the cast, his performance as a tweedy, sightless poet is so embarrassing that I trust he took no payment at all. The only major expense was the lighting: a toy flashlight, I would guess, placed carefully in the corner of each room and angled upward—hence the capering shadows that Andriy casts on his living-room walls. In technical terms, more professional productions than this are filmed and cut on iMovie, by ten-year-olds, a thousand times a day."