squaremadonna

TYPE OF MEDIA Video
APPROVED RUNNING TIME 138m 16s
RELEASE DATE 15/09/2017
BBFCINSIGHT strong language, sex references, drug references
GENRE(S) Documentary, Music
DIRECTOR(S) Nathan Rissman,Danny Tull,Steven Klein
CAST INCLUDES Madonna, Kevin Antunes, Kupono Aweau, Allauné Blegbo, Lil Buck, Derreck Bullock
CUT This work was passed uncut.

Details
Title MADONNA: REBEL HEART TOUR
Year 2017
Distributor(s) Eagle Rock Entertainment
Classified date(s) 24/05/2017
Main language English
Submitted run time 138m 16s
BBFC reference AVV352048
Remarks 16:9

This work is made up of a number of separate components. Note that since February 2001 the BBFC has measured each component separately, but older works may not have the exact details, only a list of titles

01:58:44:20
MADONNA: REBEL HEART TOUR
00:14:53:28
MADONNA: REBEL HEART TOUR – AN EXERPT FROM TEARS OF A CLOWN
00:04:37:06
MADONNA: REBEL HEART TOUR – LIKE A PRAYER

Rating information:
The version of this work detailed above is rated by the BBFC under the Video Recordings Act 1984 for use on any Packaged Media format (including DVD, Blu-ray and VHS). This classification may also be used when the same work is made available on Digital Video Platforms (including Video On Demand) provided that the platform is licenced to use BBFC ratings.

Source : Bbfc.co.uk

As the top grossing touring female artist in the history of Billboard, Madonna sure knows how to draw a crowd. Her record-breaking Rebel Heart Tour showed the Material Girl at the top of her game, taking her on a whirlwind tour of 55 cities across four continents over the course of seven months.

Luckily all of Madonna’s signature visual theatrics, extravagant costumes and awe-inspiring choreography were captured on film for the concert documentary, Madonna: Rebel Heart Tour, which initially aired on Showtime and now will be available on DVD for the first time on 15 September.

Co-directed by Danny B. Tull and Nathan Rissman, the film was recorded around the world and features both live and behind-the-scenes material, as well as previously unreleased footage culminating with performances at the Sydney Qudos Bank Arena in Australia in March of 2016.

The Queen Of Pop has also announced a new live album featuring 22 songs from the Rebel Heart Tour, available on double-CD and digital download, as well as the concert film via DVD and Blu-ray with bonus content.

The tracklist for the film and live concert album spans all decades of her illustrious career, including songs from her chart-topping Rebel Heart album to new interpretations of her classic fan favourites and timeless hits. The tour itself grossed $169.8m with 1,045,479 in attendance and reaffirmed Madonna’s pop culture dominance. Popcrush described the spectacle of the Rebel Heart Tour thusly:

“The concert is a massive all-out explosion of song, dance and depravity with vague social commentary, proving for the umpteenth time that Madonna is, was and truly always will be the Queen.”

Madonna has made a career pushing boundaries and testing the limits of what artists can and cannot do. For the Rebel Heart Tour she pulled out all the stops, whether it’s playing a Flying V for ‘Burning Up’, singing Edith Piaf’s ballad ‘La Vie En Rose’ in French or doing intricate choreography in full samurai gear, the unstoppable renaissance woman shows us all of the “blood, sweat and tears” that goes into just being Madonna.

“Women In Pop” is a new print quarterly dedicated to giving female pop artists the attention they deserve.

Focusing exclusively on female pop artists from across the globe, WIP will feature news, reviews, artist profiles, the best new talent and interviews with female pop artists from around the globe.

Madonna is on the cover of the first issue

“Nobody knows what I know and what I have seen. Only I can tell my story. Anyone else who tries is a charlatan and a fool. . Looking for instant gratification without doing the work. This is a disease in our society.” – Madonna

The studio has picked up Blond Ambition, Elyse Hollander’s script that topped the 2016 Black List, the industry ranking that tracks Hollywood’s most-liked unproduced screenplays.

Michael De Luca, who produced Fifty Shades of Grey for Universal, is attached to produce along with Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment. John Zaozirny of Bellvue Productions will also produce.

The story is set in early 1980s New York as Madonna Louise Ciccone works on her first album, struggling in a business that treats women badly, while also dealing with a burgeoning love life and the first hints of fame.

Madonna moved to New York from Michigan in 1978 to pursue dance but segued to singing and writing songs. After failing at a rock band, she switched to dance and pop. After achieving some success with a few dance singles, she began work on her debut album, Madonna, which was released in 1983. The album yielded hits “Holiday,” “Borderline” and “Lucky Star” and set the stage for her groundbreaking Like a Virgin album.

Ambition is the debut script for Hollander, who worked as an assistant to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, while he made Birdman, and Fresh Off the Boat co-executive producer Kourtney Kang. She is repped by WME, Bellevue, Ryan Pastorek and Robby Koch of Hansen Jacobson.

De Luca is coming off of producing this year’s Academy Awards and will produce next year’s as well. Ratner’s RatPac recently announced a partnership with Len Blavatnik’s Access Entertainment.

Executive vp of production Erik Baiers and director of development Chloe Yellin will oversee production for Universal. Lucy Kitada will help oversee for De Luca Productions.

Geena Davis was not aware she was making screen history as baseball standout Dottie Hinson in 1992’s A League of Their Own with co-stars Tom Hanks, Madonna, Lori Petty and Rosie O’Donnell.
When Hanks, as the gruff manager of the fictional team from the first professional all-women baseball league, called out to one of his despondent players, “There’s no crying in baseball,” it didn’t strike Davis as an immortal moment.

“We knew it was hella funny,” Davis, now 61, recalls. “But I didn’t know that was going to be a classic. That line is a signature, right up there with ‘Hasta la vista, baby.’”
League has earned its place as one of America’s best sports comedies, selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2012.

As the film celebrates its 25th anniversary on July 1 (with a new special edition Blu-ray out now), Davis recounts her memories from the League set.

Her audition was simple: Director Penny Marshall insisted League actors truly play ball. Davis’ audition consisted of demonstrating her baseball prowess in Marshall’s backyard.
“(Marshall) wanted to make sure I could throw a ball, so that happened,” says Davis. “I threw the ball to her, competently got it to her, she caught it and said, ‘Okay.’ That was the whole audition.”
Without an athletic upbringing, Davis trained intensively to flesh out her game and ultimately impressed the real baseball coaches onset.
“When the coaches would say, ‘You have real untapped athletic ability’ it was like, ‘Oh my God, I am coordinated.’ It just took me (until I was) 36 to find that out.” (She would go on to compete at the U.S. Olympic Trials in archery in 1999, two years after taking up the sport.)
Davis excelled at batting and that stare. “I wanted people to say ‘Uh-oh’ when I came to bat.”

Pitches were hard, balls were soft: Special precautions were required for close-up batting shots. Sponge-filled balls were used — not for the batters, but the crew.

“You’re actually hitting in the direction of the camera crew,” says Davis. “For close-ups, those balls were squishy. They looked like real baseballs, but they were all spongy inside so we wouldn’t clock anyone.”

Davis did the on-camera split: As catcher, Hinson pulls an acrobatic split when catching a foul ball, which Davis performed.
“Penny asked if I could do a split. I said to put it later in the shooting schedule to give me time to work up to it. It’s hard to learn that quickly. But I did,” says Davis.

She soaked in a hot tub to loosen up before the scene and nailed the split.

“The thing I did not do was get up from it. My character does a Chuck Berry split and then hops right back up,” says Davis. “There was no popping up happening. I was stuck there and had to be helped up.”

Madonna was a question mark: Davis admits she wasn’t sure what it would be like to work with Madonna, then in her prime.
“She was Madonna. We wondered if we were going to be able to talk to her. Was she going to have an entourage? Were they going to put up walls around her where she stands?” Davis recalls.

Ultimately, Madonna was a team player who trained hard and insisted on sliding head-first into bases. “That was painful. But she was so game. She was a trooper,’ says Davis.
Source : UsaToday

On Friday morning, actress Debi Mazar saw a familiar photo in her Instagram feed: a shot of herself and her late friend, artist Keith Haring, taken by their friend, artist Maripol.

 In the picture, a young Mazar peers at the camera as Haring, more clearly in focus, looks on behind her.

Mazar shared the photo on her own account immediately. “I was like, ‘Aw, Keith,’ ” she told Vanity Fair on a phone call Friday. “I think of Keith all the time, because his work is so present, and being much a part of what is so present and current in today’s climate—in terms of equality, immigration, sexuality, so many things.”
As she looks more at the photo, though, Mazar said she also thinks of the weekend in 1985 that it was taken, which happened to be the weekend of her friend Madonna’s wedding to Sean Penn in Los Angeles. Those few days marked Mazar’s first-ever trip to L.A.—and a memorable one, at that.

“We kind of had a whole weekend planned, where the wedding was one day, and another day we went to restaurants and different activities, she said. “That particular day, we went to Mr. Chow’s,” she said, recalling the site of the photo with Haring.

That stop at Mr. Chow’s was only one highlight of the weekend. The wedding itself was Mazar’s first experience with a high-profile event of that magnitude. As she and her friend Lance Loud tore down the Pacific Coast Highway on their way to the ceremony, Mazar said she marveled at the beauty before her. It wasn’t long, though, before she noticed the buzzing of helicopters overhead, making a beeline toward Madonna and Penn’s wedding: “I thought the helicopters were chasing us, even though they weren’t,” Mazar recalled, chuckling.

When she and Loud arrived at the wedding, Mazar quickly learned that she had not been given a plus-one. Mazar had to leave her friend to enter the nuptials—which boasted a guest list that included Cher—alone. Her entrance to the ceremony was less than graceful:

“My poor friend dropped me off in Malibu, at Johnny Carson’s house, and I teetered on down the driveway—alone—and I got to the wedding, and my heel got caught into, like, the wood deck, and I basically tripped into the wedding,” she said.

After the wedding, at which Mazar said she could hardly hear a thing with the helicopters roaring overhead, she got into a limousine with a host of her artist friends: Haring, Martin Burgoyne, Andy Warhol, and Steve Rubell. Then, to top off the eventful day, Rubell vomited all over Mazar’s brand new pair of Manolo Blahniks. Mazar, who was making her money as a makeup artist at the time, said they were the first pair of shoes she had ever bought with her own money—which was scarce.

“I basically probably had my electricity turned off just to buy these shoes, and Rubell vomited on them,” she said.

The memory of that weekend was one of many in Mazar’s friendship with Haring, who died of AIDs at the age of 31 in February of 1990. She told Vanity Fair that she’d known Haring even before she met Madonna, the two having come up together in New York City.

28 years ago this week, Madonna released what is not only her best album to date, but also what could be the most important release ever by a female artist. That’s not to say that Like a Prayer is the best album ever by a female artist, but it’s pretty close. After six years of being considered pop fluff and a disco dolly, Madonna was finally taken seriously by most music critics in 1989. Still, Like a Prayer deserved even more than bewildering critical acclaim.

If Madonna and misogyny weren’t practically synonyms, Like a Prayer would have not only won several Grammys in 1990 (it didn’t even earn any major nominations), but it would be widely praised for its songwriting and production 28 years later. If a man delivered the same type of vocals Madonna did on Like a Prayer, critics would note that his voice isn’t technically perfect, but distinct, melodic, and full of emotion. When it comes to Madonna, who certainly could never hit the notes of Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston, it’s just easier for people to say that she “can’t sing.”

For people (especially millennials) to understand how important Like a Prayer is to culture and music, they have to comprehend the repressive environment Madonna’s album arrived to in March of 1989. The late 1980s was ruled by the religious right, who believed AIDS was a curse God gave to the gay community. Women who were outspoken or wore revealing clothes were referred to as sluts, whores, bit**es, etc. Police brutality among African Americans was still widely accepted without much of a backlash. And interracial dating was still considered a taboo.

With all of this in mind, let’s analyze why Like a Prayer is such a milestone of an album.

The “Like a Prayer” Video

The “Like a Prayer” video has provocative imagery that caused the religious right to wet its pants. However, none of the imagery, which is used for pure symbolism, is blasphemous. Most importantly, “Like a Prayer” is a video that shows the viewer racism, sexism, and police brutality. It urges them to think and overcome it — this is something that wasn’t considered “cool” in 1989. The idea of a “Black Jesus” was also considered blasphemous to some, especially the religious right.

The aftermath of “Like a Prayer” was groundbreaking in that Madonna beat the religious right at their own attempted game of censorship. Their efforts caused Pepsi to drop Madonna as a spokesperson, but they completely failed at hurting Madonna’s success or censoring the video. The “Like a Prayer” single and video hit No. 1 and remain widely loved classics almost 30 years later. Madonna paved the way for other artists to not only challenge the religious right, but win.

The “Like a Prayer” Song

Even if you aren’t convinced that the “Like a Prayer” video is an artistic masterpiece, the song “Like a Prayer” has stood on its own. Not only has Rolling Stone and Billboard praised it as one of the best pop songs of all time, but the song has become a spiritual classic, even for those who aren’t fans of Madonna.

“Like a Prayer” became the highlight of Live 8 in 2005, and it was also one of the highlights of the 2010 Hope for Haiti concert. It was also prominently featured in Madonna’s 2012 Super Bowl Halftime show. Any live performance of the song is sure to whip the audience into a frenzy.

Express Yourself

This decade, “Express Yourself” is mostly known as the song that inspired (maybe a little too much) Lady Gaga’s self-empowerment LGBT anthem “Born This Way.” However, as Gay Times Magazine notes, “Express Yourself” has become an empowering anthem for the LGBT community as well. However, in the late 1980s, the song was mostly known as a female empowerment anthem. “Don’t go for second best baby” became a catch phrase for strong women who were sick of being treated like second class citizens from men and other women who still subscribed to the patriarchy. Continue reading “Why Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’ Is The Most Important Album Ever Made By A Female Artist”