A picture of Madonna, and all but worthless as documentary except in the sense that Cocteau once noted: that all movies are documentaries -- documents, records, remembrances -- of themselves. What it documents, in that sense, is the feature-length advertisement it has opted to be instead of the full-blown documentary it could have been. It begins to lose its worth as documentary on first glimpse of its image, which isn't grainy 16mm black-and-white for the reasons that, say, 1962's Lonely Boy (the National Film Board of Canada portrait of Paul Anka as a young pop star) was also grainy 16mm black-and-white: namely, because it was less expensive to make it that way and because grainy 16mm black-and-white was the accepted verité style of the day. Truth or Dare is grainy, etc., for the reasons a TV blue-jeans commercial might be: because it's arty, outré, recherché. The movie takes a further drop in documentary value with each snippet of concert footage from the ongoing "Blond Ambition" tour, not so much because this is contrastingly shot in high-gloss color (rationale: the glamorously "public" Madonna as opposed to the grittily "private" one), but more because it's shot and edited in the mode of music videos (in which director Alek Keshishian, not too surprisingly, is well experienced). Up-tilted camera angles, slow-motion, dissolves, snappy cutting in time to the music -- the standard bag of tricks. But maybe, to restate the proposition more accurately, the movie began to lose its worth as a documentary from the moment that the subject of the documentary took it into her head to be the executive producer of it: a potential conflict of interest, surely. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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