A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Sunday, March 1, 2026

Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1993)

Madonna in Body of Evidence

Cast: Madonna, Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Anne Archer, Julianne Moore, Jürgen Prochnow, Lillian Lehman, Frank Langella. Screenplay: Brad Mirman. Cinematography: Douglas Milsome. Production design: Victoria Paul. Film editing: Thom Noble. Music: Graeme Revell.

Perhaps the only effective performance and convincing characterization in Uli Edel's Body of Evidence is that of Lillian Lehman as the judge presiding over a tawdry trial, who is rightly pissed off at the nonsense taking place in her courtroom. The film was a vanity project, designed to make Madonna into a major movie star. She plays Rebecca Carlson, a gallery owner in Portland, Oregon, who indulges in BDSM but winds up on trial for murder when one of her partners, a wealthy older man, dies after having sex with her after, leaving her $8 million in his will. Rebecca's sexual tastes are "explained" by a passing reference to childhood abuse, but her anything-goes approach to sex seems to stop short at bisexuality: She broke off with another partner when she found him in bed with a man. It would take an actress more adept at nuance than Madonna to make sense of such an ill-conceived role. There are some fine actors in the movie, including Willem Dafoe, Joe Mantegna, Frank Langella, and Julianne Moore (who has expressed regret at taking her role in the film), but the screenplay, filled with "surprise twists" that land with a thud, does them no good. Body of Evidence bombed with critics and audiences, and it holds favor today only with die-hard Madonna fans. 

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