baby i’m a star
by Douglas Messerli
I think anyone
who knows me realizes that I have never pretended to be knowledgeable about
popular music outside of the major performers of my generation, The Beatles,
The Rolling Stones, and David Bowie. I must have, at one time or another, heard
one of Prince’s songs, but I don’t think I ever saw him perform. With his death,
after ingesting painkillers, on April 21, 2016, however, I was moved to watch
his famed movie, Purple
Rain.
Because of the great popularity and the
performer, however, Netflex told me that it would be a “long wait” before I
could get my hands on the DVD. It took about a month, accordingly, before I
received the film. The short review below is my response.
Albert Magnoli’s 1984 film Purple Rain is a near disaster, with
some truly embarrassing acting, at times murky plot twists, and, the overall
feel of a long music video instead of a coherent cinema. Despite that, the film
is absolutely amazing due to the various songs it contains and to Prince’s
sheer energy as guitarist, pianist, dancer, and singer. As he leaps, spins,
tumbles, splits, playing a mean guitar while singing remarkable songs such as
“Take Me with U,” “The Beautiful Ones,” “When Doves Cry,” and, most
particularly, “Purple Rain,” Prince as The Kid exudes so much androgynous
sexual energy that anyone with ears and eyes simply has to drop his jaw in
wonderment.
Forget the fact that beautiful Apollonia
Kotero can hardly act or, for that matter, even sing; or that Morris Day is
more of an old-fashioned in-line strutter than a dynamic musical performer; or
even that the relationship of Prince’s battling parents—played in the film by
Olga Karlatos and Clarence Williams III—is only tangentially explained. Ignore
the film’s ridiculous inconsistencies, where one moment the actors are clearly
in the City of Lakes and the very next in Los Angeles. One, perhaps, can even
ignore the absurd trope of the plot that the Kid and his group, the Revolution,
are in danger of losing their gig due to the greater popularity of The Time,
Dez Dickerson and the Modernaires, and the new all-girl group, Apollonia 6. Any
viewer immediately knows that the only actor that truly matters here is the
great purple one.
Los Angeles, June
24, 2016
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