Word: musicians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...black and dance charts. Purple Rain had already sold nearly 2.5 million copies before the movie was released last Friday. This is serious business. So is the movie, a short-circuited psychodrama that grafts snazzy performance footage onto the fictive fever chart of an angst-ridden musician called The Kid and played by Prince himself. The movie has been pulling down real tub-thumper reviews, the sort of hot-seat hype that gives some indication of the way Prince can generate fever and keep the temperature high...
...also been provided, like his real-life doppelgānger, with a black father and a Mediterranean mother. In the movie, Dad cuffs Mom around a good deal: he is a frustrated musician, which explains these bouts of violent temper; she shrieks and screams a lot, which presumably demonstrates her ethnicity. If women are sexual baubles in Prince's songs, in his movie they are tarnished angels who love to have their wings clipped. Apollonia (the "baptismal name" of Newcomer Patricia Kotero, 22) strips down and jumps into an icy lake to win The Kid's approval...
...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...
...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 in Morris's band, the Kid slaps her, and she walks out--as do the girls in his band, tired of the Kid's boundless megalomania...
...lawyer, essayist and. . .oh, yes-a terrific musician...