Madonna Turns Fifty Today

People have been talking about Madonna’s age and the state of her body for so long, I almost feel as though her chronological age should be higher, oddly enough.  Heck, she’s only eleven years older than I am.  (I reflected upon my thirty-ninth birthday — and music — one week ago.)

Next year, I say it’s time for a momentous, thirtieth-anniversary rerelease of Madonna’s first film, A Certain Sacrifice, in which she plays a Lower East Side resident living with three love slaves (one transgendered), who help her exact revenge on her rapist, leading to a bloody, Satanic death ritual.

Or they could just do a remake.  I’ve been talking about covers and remakes a lot lately, and in the era of Tarantino retro-stuff and Saw movies, a slicker, bigger-budget A Certain Sacrifice seems like a no-brainer.  Cast Madonna in the Madonna role, and maybe get David Fincher, who directed films like Seven and the “Express Yourself” video, to be the director.  Tell me that wouldn’t make some money.

And in a special cameo: the Bigfoot baby.

On a slightly more serious note, I’ve been surprised more than once over the years to discover in what high esteem even the most marginal punk-type young people generally hold Madonna.  I recall hearing some borderline-homeless club-type kid speak of her reverently back in the mid-90s, and it  was the first time I ever realized that she isn’t just regarded as a mainstream, bland pop product by the fringey types but more like one of them who hit the bigtime.

The thing that makes this sort of poignant is that they must largely just like her for being an oversexed club-hopping rebel, since the music alone certainly can’t justify feelings of profound cultural kinship — though I like “Into the Groove” and “Ray of Light,” the latter somehow over a decade old now.