The Official World Premiere Is TONIGHT !!!

Good luck M for tonight cant wait for tomorrow's paper's!!

Madonna arrives in a boat for the press conference of her movie W.E. at the 68th edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice

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She's looking great.

Early Press Reviews

Telegraph 3 out of 5 stars

 

A film directed by Madonna that deals in part with the love affair between King Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson? A curious notion, and not truly an enticing one. Yet W.E. is rather better than expected; it’s bold, confident and not without amusing moments.

 

Still, it’s undeniably a strange concoction. Madonna (who also co-scripted with Alex Keshishian) has fashioned a split-level story of two couples: the Windsors, and the growing attraction between Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a contemporary Manhattan woman, and Evgeni (Oscar Isaac), a handsome Russian working security at Sotheby’s.

 

Wally, married to an eminent shrink who isn’t above slapping her around, desperately wants children. (He doesn’t.) Worse, she has inherited her mother’s and grandmother’s obsession with the Windsors (Andrea Riseborough, James d’Arcy) and doggedly researches their lives, seeking clues about how to live her own. In extreme moments, Mrs. Simpson actually appears to her.

 

W.E. skips around in time, tracing the Windsors’ budding romance, the scandal and abdication. Meanwhile Wally’s affair with Evgeni blossoms. Who is he, she asks a girl-friend? Turns out he’s a Russian intellectual slumming as a security guard. They’re a dime a dozen, apparently.

 

Madonna presents these intertwined stories with the emotional level cranked up to 11. Abel Korzoniowski’s crashingly loud music thrums repetitively like fevered heartbeats before yielding to a heartbreaking violin figure. Our director’s familiarity with pop videos is evident from her focussing on arresting images: a teardrop in close-up, welling from an unblinking eye.

 

It all looks good, or at least glossy, in the manner of high-end cosmetics commercials. Exotic locations (Portofino, Cap d’Antibes) are visited and luxury brand names (Moet, Cartier, Schiaparelli) tossed around. Wally pays repeatedly visits an auction of the Windsors’ possessions; W.E. often feels like an extended infomercial for Sotheby’s New York.

 

Occasional flashes of wit intrude. “Your Majesty, you know your way to a woman’s heart,” Wallis says. “I wasn’t aiming that high,” he replies. But such moments are rare.

 

Yet Riseborough and Cornish acquit themselves well, and W.E. may appeal to younger women with an eye for fashion. One suspects Madonna views the Windsors primarily as style icons; her version of their lives is a fantasia that will not trouble historians. Yet oddly, that’s a relief after so many stale, plodding TV documentaries about this unlovely couple.

 

Guardian 1 out of 5 stars

 

Madonna’s jaw-dropping take on the story of Wallis Simpson is a primped and simpering folly, preening and fatally mishandled

 

Whatever the crimes committed by Wallis Simpson – marrying a king, sparking a constitutional crisis, fraternising with Nazis – it’s doubtful that she deserves the treatment meted out to her in W.E., Madonna’s jaw-dropping take on “the 20th-century’s greatest royal love story”. The woman is defiled, humiliated, made to look like a joke. The fact that W.E. comes couched in the guise of a fawning, servile snow-job only makes the punishment feel all the more cruel.

 

Or could it be that Madonna is in deadly earnest here? If so, her film is more risible than we had any right to expect; a primped and simpering folly, the turkey that dreamed it was a peacock. Andrea Riseborough stars as Wallis, the perky American social climber who meets Edward VIII (James D’Arcy) in London, where she is drawn like a magnet to his pursed lips and peevish air. Yet Madonna has also taken the decision to run Wallis’s story in tandem with the story of Wally (Abbie Cornish), a trophy wife in 1990s New York, who totters in and out of the drama like a doped pony. Wally, it transpires, was named after Wallis and is obsessed by the woman to a degree that struck me as deeply worrying, but which Madonna presents as evidence of impeccable good taste. From time to time, the ghost of Wallis even pays Wally a call to dispense beauty tips or comfort her when she’s lying injured on the bathroom floor. “I’m here,” coos Wallis. “I’ll always be here.” And seldom has a promise sounded more like a threat.

 

Madonna wants us to see these two as spiritual twins, in that they are both dazzled by expensive trinkets and searching desperately for love. We know instantly that Wallis’s first husband is a wrong ‘un because he drags her from the bath and beats her, and we are invited to take a similar view of Wally’s spouse when he starts claiming that Wallis and Edward were Nazi-sympathisers, which is patently absurd. “They might have been naive,” Wally scolds him. “That doesn’t mean that they were Nazis.”

 

What an extraordinarily silly, preening, fatally mishandled film this is. It may even surpass 2008?s Filth and Wisdom, Madonna’s calamitous first outing as a film-maker. Her direction is so all over the shop that it barely qualifies as direction at all. W.E. gives us slo-mo and jump cuts and a crawling crane shot up a tree in Balmoral, but they are all just tricks without a purpose. For her big directoral flourish, Madonna has Wallis bound on stage to dance with a Masai tribesman while Pretty Vacant blares on the soundtrack. But why? What point is she making? That social-climbing Wallis-Simpson was the world’s first punk-rocker? That – see! – a genuine Nazi-sympathiser would never dream of dancing with an African? Who can say? My guess is that she could have had Wallis dressed as a clown, bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower to the strains of The Birdy Song and it would have served her story just as well.

 

WhatCulture 3 out of 5

 

Madonna? Oh, wait yes, Madonna made this move. That was actually my prevailing thought at the end of W.E. which played this afternoon at the Venice Film Festival, a well acted two-tiered romantic drama that marks her second feature after the notorious 2008 movie Filth and Wisdom. And it’s a credit to the former pop sensation that I was able to forget the major elephant in the room that was the woman behind the camera and enjoy almost every minute of the it. Yes, I say almost as the third act is a painful sequence of events that show she didn’t really know how to finish her story and I wouldn’t be surprised if a re-cutting or even re-shoots are ordered before the film gets a theatrical release in the U.S. this December.

 

W.E. magically intertwines present and past & reality and fiction as a 90?s New York trophy wife Wallie Winthrop (played by a charming and loving Abbie Cornish), compares herself and her own love story reflected in the unlikely romance that King Edward VIII and American socialite Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) shared when they fell for each other in the mid 20th Century. Wallie is rather obsessed with Wallis, with whom she was named after and shares something of a spiritual relationship with.

 

As you know from history (or those old enough to remember it!), a few months into his stint as the King of England in 1936, Edward abdicated the throne, turned his back on the British monarchy and caused a constitutional crisis when he proposed to marry an American who had already been married twice (and indeed was still married to her second husband with whom she was in the process of divorcing) and would eventually have to live out the rest of his life in France.

 

Last year we saw the Oscar winning The King’s Speech that also depicted this historical moment but did so from another perspective. This time Madonna shows us the love and romance of David, King Edward VIII, played by James D’Arcy, showing us what is dubbed as “the 20th-century’s greatest royal love story”.

 

Both women are going through tumultuous changes in their love life: they need their husband’s love, their protection but cannot have it. Yet they keep forgiving them, allowing the men in their life to wrong them over and over again until the moment they see what true love really is. That’s all it really is about, a search for love, a quest for the right thing to do, the right person to fight for, the courage of being left alone, but knowing you are fighting for something more important than what other people think of you: your own liberty.

 

The film feels a little long and that is a problem for a movie that runs only for two hours. Other than that it was very interesting to watch. Visually stunning, with great set decorations and costume design that brought back to life the splendor of those years, Madonna seems at ease in both worlds, the past of the old aristocratic England and the present, set in a New York that only serves as a set and doesn’t really take part in the story.

 

The story is supported by an amazing soundtrack that is an integral part of the film and melts together with the story and allows us a journey filled with emotions while we watch the events unfold. It also keeps you focused during those moments where all you can think of is: ok, we’ve seen this, can we move on to the next scene?

 

One last thing needs to be said, Madonna’s direction has nothing to envy to other famous directors and if you thought that she was only able to sing, think again. She can definitely do better, but I am quite sure she will.

 

More reviews to be posted as soon as they come out!!.

Madonna at The Press Conference Today!

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More Pictures...

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Even More..

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thanks for posting all these pics i have read a few more reviews on digital spy it seems a few reviewers cant seem to get out their heads that it was Madonna who directed this film!

That kinda thing makes me laugh, what do they think she has been doing lol.

Madonna At The Official Premiere

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Her face in some of those photos :o

 

 

"I absolutely loathe hydrangeas!" AMAZING. What a bitch.

Kinda looking forward to seeing this film I must say.

Edited September 2, 201113 yr by JakeWild

Madonna thanks exes for encouraging movie career

 

Pop star Madonna thanked her ex-husbands for encouraging her to take up a career in movies, as she arrived in Venice on Thursday for the world premiere of her lavish royal drama "W.E."

 

The 53-year-old American has been married to actor and director Sean Penn and British film maker Guy Ritchie -- and has spent much of the last few years behind the camera rather than on the stage.

 

W.E., her second feature film, appears at the Venice film festival outside the main competition, but the presence of one of the world's biggest celebrities inevitably dominated the attention of the world's press.

 

The film re-tells the story of American divorcee Wallis Simpson, whose affair with Britain's King Edward VIII led him to abdicate the throne.

It does so through the eyes of another American Wally Winthrop, played by Abbie Cornish, who lives in New York in the 1990s and becomes obsessed with the life of a woman with whom she bears an uncanny resemblance.

 

"I am and was attracted to very creative people which is why I married Sean Penn and Guy Ritchie, two very talented directors," Madonna told reporters after a press screening of W.E.

"They both encouraged me as a director and as a creative person to do what I did, and they were both very supportive," added the singer, who wore a short-sleeved black dress with white trim.

 

There was applause for the movie after the first screening and one early review, in the Daily Telegraph, gave W.E. three stars out of five.

 

Madonna said she saw parallels between herself and Simpson, a woman who was vilified by many for her role in a constitutional crisis but who is sympathetically portrayed in W.E. by Andrea Riseborough.

Like Simpson, Madonna is a woman who lives her life in the public glare, and is also an American who moved to England for several years while married to Ritchie.

 

"I identified with her in that I think it's very common when people become celebrities or public figures or icons that we are often reduced to a soundbite and that you're given a few attributes and then you're not allowed to have anything more than that," she said.

"I did go through periods of feeling like I was an outsider when I first moved to England."

"I certainly didn't feel like that by the time I'd lived there for 10 years. And I feel, since I moved there, that I feel very welcomed by England."

 

Asked why she chose Simpson as a subject, Madonna replied: "I was deeply and utterly swept up in trying to understand the reason that this man, King Edward VIII ... would relinquish this great position of power for love."

 

She added that she hoped the success of "The King's Speech," set at the same time and in a similar world to W.E., would help, not harm her project.

"I was a little bit nervous, because I thought, 'oh dear, if someone else is making a movie about the same time-frame, then who would be interested in my movie?' "But then I saw the film and I saw that it was from a completely different point of view and I view the success of that film as sort of laying the groundwork for my movie. "So there is a little bit of history and a little bit of knowledge and we are not starting with a blank slate."

 

From Reuters.

A 5 minute piece was on bbc one's 6pm news tonight. There was clips of Madonna's ONLY british interview for the film.. Clips from the film.. Her attending the premiere last night too.

Here's A Picture from that interview. The bbc's site has the segment

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An interview to Belgian newspaper Le Soir during the promotion of "W.E." in Venice brings us what it seems the first - and super smart - Madonna comment about Gaga in ages.

 

Here's how it goes:

 

Le Soir: "Dans W.E., vous filmez la romance de Wallis Simpson à travers le regard contemporain dune jeune femme admirative, Wally. On pourrait y voir le regard de vos fans sur vous. Voire celui de Lady Gaga? "

 

Le Soir: "In W.E. you filmes the Wallis Simpson love story through the contemporary eyes of a young woman who admired her, Wally. Could we see in that the way your fans look at you? Or the way Lady Gaga does?"

 

Madonna: "De mes fans ? Disons que ce qui mintéresse avec le regard de Wally, cest darriver à percer la vérité sur Wallis Simpson. Et sapercevoir que rien nest jamais tout blanc ou tout noir. Vrai ou faux. La vie est de couleur grise. Et on ne peut enfermer personne dans une case. Quant à Lady Gaga, je nai pas de commentaire à faire sur ses obsessions ayant trait à moi, parce que je ne sais pas si ça repose sur quelque chose de profond ou de superficiel."

 

Madonna: "Of my fans ? Let's say that what interests me in Wally's approach is to arrive to percieve the truth about Wallis Simpson. An realize that nothing is completely black or white. Truth or false. Life comes in gray color. And you can't put a human being in a box. Speaking of Lady Gaga, I have no comments about her obsessions related to me, because I don't know if they are based on something profound or superficial."

 

Let's keep in mind this is a printed interview with chances of more than a little something being lost in translation back and forth, but perhaps it's finally time to hear some words of wisdom about this... Liz, can you hear me?

More Promotional Stills Released

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W.E. will have its UK premiere at the 55th BFI London Film Festival on Sunday Oct 23rd at 19.00, Empire Leicester Square

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I must admit I do wanna go for that.

I'm gonna be theree!

W.E. Will make it's north american debut in Canada at Toronto's International Film Festival Tonight!