After spending time at the Berlinale Film Festival, Madonna arrived at LAX Airport on Sunday afternoon with her three kids, Lourdes, Rocco, and David in tow.

According to an insider, “After much controversy over her adoption of David from Malawi, it’s starting to look as though it will finally be official in April.”

Meanwhile, the Material Girl is coming off of a big few weeks - as she recently hosted a star-studded party in NYC for Gucci, along with making her directorial debut for the film Filth and Wisdom.

During an interview about her movie, Madge told press, “I have always been inspired by the films of Godard, Visconti, Pasolini and Fellini and hope that I may one day make something that comes close to their genius.”

In the liner notes to Filth and Wisdom, Madonna wrote, “I have always admired the art of filmmaking and the ability to tell a good story. After almost three decades of being in front of a camera, I decided to put my money where my mouth is. ‘Filth and Wisdom’ was essentially my way of putting myself through film school.”

Source: GossipGirls

WELSH band The Storys will tomorrow perform a live version of Like a Virgin – especially for Madonna.

The Swansea-based six-piece play a post-premiere party for movie The Bank Job starring Jason Statham, a big pal of the pop queen’s husband Guy Ritchie. Madonna is expected to be there.

Lead singer Steve Balsamo said: “We’ve run through Like a Virgin a few times and will give it our own little guitar-based spin. It should be a hoot – I hope Madge likes it, along with our own material.”

The Storys play the party – in London’s exclusive Paper club – because they appear in the film and supply some tracks.

Around 500 guests will attend, enabling the band to showcase their second album Town Beyond the Trees, which comes out next month.

Legendary scriptwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have penned the Brit-flick in which Statham stars alongside Saffron Burrows. It goes on general release at the end of this month.

The movie tells the tale of a notorious 1971 London bank robbery. The Storys were called into the film because director Roger Donaldson felt their music fitted the mood he wanted to create for a nightclub scene.

Balsamo said: “We had a great time doing our bits for the film; now we can’t wait to see who’s at the party. I’m told Jason’s film buddies like Vinnie Jones, Keeley Hawes, Ian McShane and David Suchet will be there.”

Statham appeared in the Ritchie-directed 1998 Brit hit Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Source: IC Wales

Her acting has taken a critical beating, but it’ll take more than that to dampen Madonna’s big-screen blonde ambitions.

The singer – who turns 50 this summer – made her directorial debut Wednesday at the Berlin Film Festival with Filth and Wisdom, and announced she has big plans for the next 50 years.

“I will be making more music and films,” she declared at a press conference.

Then, when one journalist said the fresh-faced Madonna could pass for 21, she jokingly shot back, “That’s because you’re standing far away.”

As she prepared to helm the project – the story of a Ukrainian immigrant musician and his two female roommates – the pop star didn’t have to look far for professional advice.

The singer (who also co-wrote the movie) admitted to Germany’s Spiegel TV that she asked Guy Ritchie, her director-husband of the past seven years, for “one sentence of advice before I walk into this.”

His answer? “‘Confidence.’ That’s the most important thing you need to exude on the set. No matter what you feel, exude confidence,” she recounted. “And that was good advice.”
Perhaps the bravado was slightly misplaced. Reviews for the film have been mixed, at best. (A preview clip of the film – which includes some graphic language – is making the rounds.)

While the industry magazine Screen International called Filth a “good-humored, averagely amateurish” film, Britain’s The Guardian found it “so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewing like maltreated kittens.”

The Hollywood Reporter managed to be won over by the “oddly appealing” film. “Ragged, uneven and potholed with some dire dialogue and performances,” according to the review, “the film’s cockeyed optimism and likable leads conspire to bring a smile by the time it’s done.”

Madonna also gets plenty of love when it comes to her music, though. She’ll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next month.

Source: People

More details are emerging about Madonna’s new album. Nate “Danja” Hills and Timbaland, who co-produced Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds, are co-producing some tracks on Madonna’s yet-to-be titled album and Danja tells EW.com that the pop queen’s next effort is “very up-tempo, upbeat and urban — it’s a Virginia-based sound.” Madge was joined in the studio by another influential Virginian, Pharrell Williams, but Danja emphasizes that the album’s urban edge doesn’t mean the 49-year-old star has lost her pop cred. “It’s everything rolled into one,” he says. “It’ll be a classic album.” As previously reported here, Timbaland and Timberlake will appear in the video for Madonna’s first single, “4 Minutes to Save the World.” The album is slated for an April debut. The single drops in March.

Source: Hollywood Insider

PODGORICA — Pop superstar Madonna is expected to perform in Montenegro, according to Podgorica daily Vijesti.

The daily writes that she will hold a concert there in late August or early September during her world tour to celebrate her 50th birthday and 25-year career.

The concert is expected to take place on Budva’s Jaz beach, where the Rolling Stones played last September.

Madonna is expected to receive USD 5mn for the concert.

The daily writes that the concert was agreed upon with the pop star’s management “thanks to close ties that the Democratic Party of Socialists Vice-President Svetozar Marović has, whose idea it was to bring today’s most extrovert pop icon to Jaz beach, following last year’s spectacular Rolling Stones concert.”

“Marović convinced Madonna’s managerial team to accept Budva’s offer,” the daily writes.

Source: b92

Madonna´s directorial debut, “Filth and Wisdom,” premiered this week at the Berlin Film Festival, and the early verdict?

The international superstar doesn’t embarrass herself.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Ray Bennett sort of compliments the film and sort of slams it, writing, “Ragged, uneven and potholed with some dire dialogue and performances, the film’s cockeyed optimism and likable leads conspire to bring a smile by the time it’s done. Barely feature length at 81 minutes, it will likely appeal to Madonna’s fans for its echoes of various threads of her own life story and the grunge style of ‘Desperately Seeking Susan.’ To many, however, it will remain an oddity.”

Sheila Johnston in the Telegraph also has mixed feelings. Her review reads, “Madonna describes ‘Filth and Wisdom’ as ‘essentially my way of putting myself through film school,’ and it is an extremely canny assessment. The movie is — disappointingly, perhaps — not an outright embarrassment; there are even a couple of intentional laughs in it. It’s not an entirely unpromising first effort. But the director would do well to hang on to her day job.”

And the trend continues over at the London Times, which ultimately recommends the film. The paper’s review concludes, “despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud. Her film has an artistic ambition that has simply bypassed her husband, the film director Guy Ritchie. She captures that wonderfully accidental nature of luck when people’s lives intersect for a whole swathe of unlikely but cherishable reasons.”

At the very least, the film stands to bring more attention to the music of the eight-piece Gogol Bordello. Lead singer Eugene Hutz plays the narrator/main character in “Filth and Wisdom,” a wannabe musician who ends up trafficking in the bondage trade, and falls for his neighbor, a wannabe ballerina-turned-stripper.

The music of Hutz and Gogol Bordello supposedly dots the film, and the band’s gypsy punk is a bit removed from the music associated with Madonna. Gogol Bordello mixes songs of politics, religion, sex and booze with an Eastern European flair and a rebel’s attitude, and the act’s “Super Taranta” is the place to start.

Source: The Envelope

One of Europe’s most prestigious film festivals welcomed a new director last night, a first-timer who counts Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard as her inspirations.
Madonna, the queen of reinvention, has done it once more by arriving in Berlin as the director, co-writer and executive producer for the world premiere of an 80-minute film called Filth and Wisdom.

Everyone was expecting a turkey from the woman whose previous movie experience has included starring in Swept Away and Shanghai Surprise, and by general consent, it was. Despite her lofty ambitions, the first morning screening was greeted by a smattering of applause and a general sense of disbelief.

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One of the first Grammy Awards to be handed out on Sunday went to the Queen of Pop, Madonna. The singer won for Best Long Form Music Video for her ‘Confessions’ tour at the pre-telecast ceremony. Congratulations to Madonna! I’m sure that once her new album comes out, she would get a lot more awards considering who she worked with on the album. Justin Timberlake and Timbaland have already proven how much of a powerhouse duo they are behind the sound boards and it’s sure to bring Madonna a good edge for next year’s awards.

Source: VIP Chain

It’s been over a year since Madonna, arguably the world’s biggest pop star, began the process of adopting infant son David Banda from an orphanage in the African nation of Malawi, but the controversy surrounding the adoption only continues to grow. And now, a high-ranking Malawian official has come out in support of the singer.

“This country owes her so much,” Information Minister Patricia Kaliati explained to Reuters news service on Monday. “Very few famous people would take their time off to rally other celebrities to raise money for a poor country like Malawi, which very few people know about.”

Just last week, Madonna hosted an A-list charity event in Manhattan that drew the likes of Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Rihanna, Demi Moore, Chris Rock, and many others, and which raised millions for Unicef and Madonna’s orphan care projects in Malawi.

The singer, already a mother to two children, is slated to appear before a Malawian court in April before a final decision is made about whether the adoption is legal or not.

“It will be wrong for Malawi to even dare deny this wonderful woman all the rights to be a parent of David and many more Malawian children,” Minister Kaliati said.

Source: OK Magazine

Madonna said: “I would like to welcome all of you here tonight and thank all of you for coming. I would especially like to thank Gucci and UNICEF for making this evening a reality for me. I don´t think we´re on the grounds of the UN by chance, and there´s something poetic about the fact that we´re no longer in America, but we´re on a piece af land that belongs to the world. I decided to investigate for myself and ended up going on a journey of a lifetime. In the last two years I have witnessed unbearable suffering and loss, but I have also witnessed the resilience of the human spirit”.