All right, you caught me. I thought the Dostoevsky dust jacket would fool you, but I admit it: I am, in fact, reading Christopher Ciccone’s mordant tell-all Life With My Sister Madonna. (But it’s my wife’s copy! I swear!)

I’m not very far into the book yet, but my wife informs me one of  Ciccone's startling revelations is that his sister actually thinks she can act, despite the fact that acting, according to Stanislavski and other noted authorities, requires momentarily pretending to be someone other than Madonna.

Yet, while the Material Girl’s film roles never really stray from her four basic personas (Chanteuse, Dominatrix, Knockabout Brooklyn Gal and The “Real” Madonna), she has, technically, portrayed “characters” in more than a dozen movies over the course of 23 years, and, in the 1991 “documentary” Truth or Dare, she went down on a water bottle as if she still gave head to actual humans, drawing on sense memory (I’m guessing) from at least as far back as Sean Penn, and possibly Jellybean Benitez. So maybe she really CAN act.

At any rate, to celebrate her recent Golden Jubilee, we here at The Screengrab would like to present our very special birthday ranking of Madge’s film performances, from least embarrassing to downright painful.

1. Mae Mordabito in A League of Their Own (1992)



The closest Madonna’s ever come to consistently channeling her own personality into a distinctly separate movie identity, her wise-ass, party girl center fielder is the best thing about Penny Marshall’s distaff sports saga, an indication of the surprisingly charming character actress Ms. Ciccone might have been in some distant, ego-free parallel universe.

2. Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)



Coinciding with the first blush of Madonna Mania, Susan Seidelman’s shaggy dog indie caught a lucky break by casting Ms. Ciccone at the moment in her career when it seemed like her big screen success might parallel the success of her small screen videos and catchy dance hits. Little did we know at the time that her Susan was pretty much a one-trick pony. As brother Christopher writes in his book, “...after Desperately Seeking Susan is released on March 29...Madonna receives great acclaim for her performance –- which I still can’t help thinking is just Maddona being herself...”

3. Singer at Club, Vision Quest (1985); Hortense Hathaway, Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989); Breathless Mahoney, Dick Tracy (1990); Singing Telegram Girl, Blue in the Face (1995); Boss #3, Girl 6 (1996); Verity, Die Another Day (2002), Princess Selenia, Arthur and the Invisibles (2006)



Number three on the list is a six-way tie, because these movies all represent the (generally) best cinematic use of Madonna:  as spice in fun, no heavy-lifting pop-star cameos (like Milton Berle as comedian Milton Berle in The Bellboy, or those occasional Marx Brothers caricatures in Bugs Bunny cartoons) that briefly juice the movie while maybe giving Ms. Ciccone a chance to favor us with a song (as she did in her humorously mistimed Vision Quest cameo, where two high school buddies wander into a gritty Spokane dive bar and...hey!  Look!  It’s the most famous pop star in the world, singing her new hit single, “Crazy For You!” (And, yes, her roles are technically longer than cameos in some of these movies, but essentially amount to the same thing, although her performances in Arthur and the Invisibles and Die Another Day do indicate potentially promising future side careers as, respectively, a cartoon voice and a scary CGI robot in future Terminator movies.

4. Nikki Finn in Who’s That Girl (1987)



There are many reasons to hate this movie and Madonna’s performance in it. Most critics found her allegedly endearing portrayal of wacky street waif Nikki Finn screechy and charmless, and film snobs vomited blood at the very notion of the pop star “remaking” Howard Hawks’ 1938 screwball classic Bringing Up Baby as a cynical pop album promotion. Nevertheless (and, to be honest, I have no defense for this whatsoever, except that I was a dumb teenager when I first saw it and haven’t gone back to challenge my original assessment in my older, wiser dotage)...I kinda liked it.

5. Bruna in A Certain Sacrifice (1985) and Sarah Jennings in Dangerous Game (1993)



Okay, to be honest, I haven’t seen either of these movies. Back when I worked at Action Video in Cambridge, Mass. in the '80s, I considered taking A Certain Sacrifice home any number of nights, but the prospect of watching Madonna’s naked dugs in action was never quite motivation enough to sit through what sounded like a very silly movie about sex slaves and Satanic, y'know, sacrifice. But every young person should probably appear in at least one Z-grade exploitation film in their life, and I have to give Ms. Ciccone props for attempting to expand her range by subjecting herself to an Abel Ferrara movie (which, come to think of it, I may have seen and completely flushed from my memory...much like Madonna herself, who apparently said of the project, “Even though it’s a shit movie and I hate it, I am good in it").  Thus, these two performances wind up parked here in the number five spot, neither praised nor maligned: the free space on our little movie ranking Bingo card.

Click here for Part Two: The Stinkers