Word: kids
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 and narcissism what Warhol did for the Campbell's Soup Can. Neither is nice, but they...
Purple Rain's barely disguised protagonist is Prince as Prince--alias the Kid, a Milwaukee post-adolescent with a decidedly un-Midwestern penchant for the badder things in life. Supposedly modeled after the friends' garage where the young Prince carried on his musical and sexual experiments, the Kid's room looks like Jodie Foster's den in Taxi Driver...
...movie opens with a sweat-dripping scene of the Kid and his band "Revolution"--who are dressed like an amalgam of Errol Flynn and Donna Summer and make Bette Midler's antics look angelic--onstage at the First Avenue Club & 7th Street Entry, a Minneapolis club where Prince also used to play. In the middle of "Let's Go Crazy," enter Apollonia, a New Orleans singer trying desperately to make it in the business. While success continues to elude her, she soon finds both the Kid and his worst enemy, the smoother-than-oil, quintessentially villainous Morris...
Apollonia Kotero as Apollonia manages to carry off a remarkable yardage of black leather and five-inch heels without coming across as a cardboard pin-up. Supposedly ambitious and bright, she is also quite vulnerable, particularly in her relationship with the Kid, a seductive imp who insists on a Kid-centered universe and turns nasty when his supremacy is threatened. The love between the two frequently reenacts the relationship between the Kid's parents, a failed-musician Black father whose frustration leads him to beat his white wife viciously. When Apollonia announces that she plans to accept a place...
...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...