Deadline has the news:
The signs are always the same when any studio knows it has a bomb. Executives won’t commit any opinion to email. Instead, phone calls from them pledging to “explain everything” are promised but never come. The suits deny up and down any truth to the inevitable leaks about a troubled shoot or creative friction or bad buzz. But when the studio is financially on-the-fence The Weinstein Co, and the film is Madonna’s first feature-length directorial effort W.E. about Walllis Simpson, and its debut is at the unforgiving Venice Film festival which has panned far bigger and more influential big names in filmdom, then not even the PR maestro Harvey Weinstein can downplay crushingly lousy reaction and reviews.
Fact is that the international press and its U.S. counterparts are having a field day killing Madonna’s movie in what can only be seen as the latest “Death In Venice”. Or maybe the more accurate way of saying this is “Death By Venice”. The Times of London claimed madonna had made an inadvertent comedy “screamingly, inadverdently funny in parts [that] had ‘em rolling in the aisles at Venice” The Guardian review was truly vicious under the headline, “Madonna’s jaw-dropping take on the story of Wallis Simpson is a primped and simpering folly, preening and fatally mishandled”. Only the Daily Mail gave it a thumbs-up. But my guess that probably has more to do with that newspaper’s long and troubled history with Madonna who in 2009 won a multimillion dollar lawsuit again the Daily Mail and whose legal reps have been threatening the paper repeatedly of more to come because of its nearly always negative coverage of her.
