Word: classics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...attired in flash-happy lingerie. But Prince has dispensed with performing in his leopardskin skivvies, and for the movie camera, dresses up in high-heeled boots, ruffled shirts, brocaded jackets. If anyone notices the similarly suited ghost of Jimi Hendrix floating about, so much the better. Hendrix's classic Purple Haze has left all sorts of echoes around Prince's neighborhood, and not just in the music. Prince has both mastered the Hendrix style and contemporized it; he has become something of a past master at haze in general...
...Purple Rain were the "classic love story between a struggling musician and a beautiful singer dancer" its publicity insists on, it might as well join this year's slush pile of sensitive adolescent nonentities in leg-warmers and dance shoes. But if you accept it as a celebration of pure sleaze music, transcendent narcissism, and of course Prince. Purple Rain reveals consummate nerve and an unnerving energy level. Though laden with a number of obvious flaws, Purple Rain somehow rises above all that murk--that kid from Minnesota just may be on the way to doing for leather, sweat...
...CLASSIC hero-villain conflict of the movie is, however, somewhat problematic. Morris Day and his sidekick--ex-roadie, ex-football-player Jerome Benton--are hilarious as a self-caricaturingly "sharp" twosome, complete with Abbott and Costello routines. They enjoy dressing up, abusing women--in one of the first scenes they dump a troublesome one into a trash can--and being generally vicious. The Kid spends his time dressing up (though in spike-heeled white boots rather than two-tone shoes), mistreating women, and being generally misunderstood and abusive. Quite a contrast...
...because of the Reagan Administration, "the rules are rigged" against too many Americans. "It isn't right that a woman should get paid 59? on the dollar for the same work as a man." Turning to cuts in student-loan funds, Ferraro bluntly addressed Reagan: "You fit the classic definition of a cynic; you know the price of everything, but the value of nothing...
...human worlds, making the confrontation even more pointed. This is a Tempest of clarity, strength and purpose - exactly what was lacking in the Royal Opera's Turandot. The cross-cultural irony is inescapable: the English company presenting the Italian opera had failed, but the Italians staging an English classic had made a glorious success...