Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

April 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 50

Total Comments: 20

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Purple Rain / USA / 1984

Baby,

Baby,

Baby,

Baby,

What’s it gonna be, baby?

Do u want him?

Or do u want me?

Cuz I want u.

Proof enough that a film can be genuinely effective in spite of an astonishingly thin plotline, dreadful acting, and even worse dialogue (“God got Wendy’s periods reversed. About every 28 days she starts acting nice.”). Most of the film consists of Prince dressing and behaving strangely and Morris Day hilarious mugging with his sidekick Jerome. But when the performances kick in — and there are many of them — the paper-thin characterizations and very tenuous plot-threads suddenly become credible and even touching. This is thanks, first, to Prince’s simply being Prince and, second, to some very smart sequencing of songs, with “The Beautiful Ones” (see above) and “Darling Nikki” revealing The Kid’s emotional and professional unhinging far more succinctly than the script. And, of course, the ominous words of The Kid’s Dad are translated into The Purple One’s squealing pop awesomeness in “I Would Die 4 U” … “darling if u want me 2!”

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Warner Bros. DVD
23 Apr 2007 5:00 PM | Comments (2)

Comments / 2 total / Submit Comment

  1. Andrew / 23 April 2007 / 10:52 PM

    I still get emotional when Prince sings “Purple Rain” at the end of the film. It is still the most chilling and touching music performance ever put on film.

  2. leo / 24 April 2007 / 9:56 AM / URL

    Undeniably. I was thinking that “Purple Rain” itself goes without saying, but why not say it anyway? The outfit, the hair, the cutaways to the crowd and Billy Sparks, the guitar solo, the “Honey, I know, I know” line, the kiss on Wendy’s cheek. And aside from being an incredibly bad-ass performance, it’s also the zenith of narrative economy in that it magically ties up every story thread in the film: it remedies his tumultuous relationship with Apollonia, smooths over the rift between him and The Revolution, definitively outdoes Morris Day & the Time, and, most of all, immediately makes him a pop icon. And then, of course, he comes back on stage and suggestively shoots some kind of liquid out of the end of his guitar and onto the crowd.

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