Madonna and the Breakfast Club

Madonna and the Breakfast Club is ostensibly a documentary about Madonna's days as a starving artist in New York with her first band, the titular. However, it plays out more like a kind of patriarchal retrospective revenge/twisted psychosexual fantasy — it certainly gives new meaning to the Madonna-Prostitute complex.

The interviewees, all of the male persuasion, paint a portrait in which the singer alternates between an "adorable" little animal (specifically a squirrel or a "baby bird") "writing her little songs," and a sneaky sexual predator who needs to be constantly surrounded by men (other than the narrator, there is only, and briefly at that, one other woman in the film; apparently Madonna didn’t have any female friends) vying for her attention — to the point that she literally pits brother against brother. Dan Gilroy, former Breakfast Club vocalist, comes off particularly badly; much of the footage that appears in the film takes the form of photos and clips recorded by Gilroy while he and Madonna were romantically involved — this has the unfortunate effect of making it seem as if, eons later, he still hasn't gotten over her (and I doubt that has done wonders for the rest of his love life; no woman likes you to keep mementos of an ex, much less if the ex happens to be Madonna).

The content of these recordings is so bland — preserving for posterity such inane questions as “why are rats ugly and mice not?” — that the only possible reason for Gilroy to have saved it all this time is so he could play her voice over and over again during those dark, cold nights.

It’s writer/director Guy Guido, though, the one with a really unhealthy obsession with Madonna. In 1978 she posed nude for a photographer because she needed money; Guido recreates these sessions, and even produces the guy who took the pictures, who assures us that “My pictures were very statuesque, there was nothing sexual about them” — be that as it may, what does have everything to do with sex...