Purple Rain (1984, R)

Welcome to today’s extra-long post.  The review will be coming, I promise, but bear with me while I get some Prince ramblings out of the way first.  For me, Prince’s death was a lot like David Bowie’s.  I’ve never been a “fan” on his – not because I don’t like him, but just because I’ve never really sought him out.  I was more aware of him as a cultural icon than anything else.  I knew that he was weird and wonderful, I knew about the love symbol, and I knew that he was a Minnesota boy, which I loved.  Truth be told, my familiarity with Prince was even thinner than my familiarity with Bowie.  At least with Bowie, I knew a handful of his more famous songs, and I knew his voice well enough that I could probably recognize him on songs I didn’t know.  But I can honestly say that the only song I knew that Prince wrote was “Purple Rain,” and 1) that’s only because I’d heard of this movie and 2) unless I heard the title in the chorus, I wouldn’t have known that’s what it was.  We’re talking very little Prince exposure, people.

But it still hit me hard to hear that he’d passed.  Like Bowie, he seemed like the sort of person who wasn’t really meant to die, a strange, ethereal creature who would just glide off to the stars when his time came (granted, Bowie hit the “alien” button a lot harder than Prince ever did, but it’s still much the same idea.)  And so, I smiled sadly when I heard about the 35-W bridge in Minneapolis being lit purple all weekend, and I read tributes and remembrances online, and I found videos to give me a better picture of this icon beyond the ruffles and heels.  This last point is the important one, because if you loved Prince, you won’t be surprised to learn that what I heard blew me the hell away. 

One of the first clips I found was his Superbowl halftime show from 2007, where he brought the house down in pouring rain.  As I looked for more, I heard about SNL’s “Goodnight, Sweet Prince” special, so I watched that on Saturday night.  I’d remembered the old “Prince Show” sketches with Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph (it occurs to me now that these are probably where most of my original Prince education came from,) and the performance clips cemented a few things that I’d already strongly begun to suspect from my YouTube browsings.  First, Prince could put on a show.  SNL musical guests can be hit-or-miss for me, even if I’m a fan of the band in question, and it feels like many have a show-up-play-go-home vibe.  But each Prince appearance was a full-out performance, delivering excellent music, stunning visuals, and infectious energy.  Second, I’m pretty sure the name of the game with Prince was “versatile.”  Everything about him – from his writing style, to his singing voice, to his multi-instrument talents, to his signature fashions – was so varied and wide-reaching.  (Also, his guitar solos are so badass.  I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now, and there’s no other word I can use to describe them.  Such displays of his immense talent, blended with such amazing musicality.)  By the time the special got to the clip of his impromptu performance at the after party for SNL’s 40^th anniversary and I watched the celebrities in formal wear filming Prince on their phones because they were so blame excited, I was full-on grinning behind watery eyes.

This is around the time that I heard my local cinema was doing special showings of Purple Rain.  By this point, I’d pretty much decided that, if I wasn’t currently a Prince fan, I really needed to be, so I ordered my ticket and saw the movie on Sunday night.  Again, my only prior knowledge of the film was that it was a movie starring Prince with lots of popular music, which he wrote.

Plot first.  The Kid is an aspiring musician working at the Minneapolis club First Avenue.  He has an arresting androgynous style, colossal talent, and, per the club’s owner, a difficult time keeping butts in seats.  A rival musician, the smug, slimy Morris, wants to supplant the Kid by producing a new girl group, and the club owner has warned the Kid that he’s out if Morris’s group takes off.  Meanwhile, the Kid has an instant connection with Apollonia, a young singer and dancer who’s new in town and dreams of making it big.  However, for these two, music, stardom, and love are all battling for their affections, and it isn’t clear which will win out for either of them.

We’ll get the obvious critques out of the way first.  Virtually all the acting is patently ridiculous, much of the dialogue is ludicrous, and the story is nothing to write home about.  The movie deals with some heavy subject matter that’s handled with all the subtlety of high melodrama crossed with an afterschool special.  But none of that is the point.

The point is, of course, the music.  By the time I saw the movie, my Prince searching had led to a couple of the most famous numbers – namely “Let’s Go Crazy” (which I now love a lot) and “Purple Rain,” both of which were even cooler in the context of the movie.  Most of the others were completely new to me, although I’d heard many of their names in online chatter about favorite Prince songs/memories.  Throughout the movie, whenever I’d get to a chorus and heard a recognizable title line, I’d think, “Oh, so that’s‘The Beautiful Ones’/‘When Doves Cry’/‘I Would Die 4 U’!” each seemingly catchier and better performed than the last.  Because, major “duh” moment, Prince is fantastic here, as a singer, instrumentalist (mainly amazingguitar, but some nice piano, too,) and electrifying stage performer.  He’s so infinitely watchable that any gripes about the acting or the script don’t matter. 

I also like how thoroughly the movie drives home the point that he’s fabulously androgynous, stunningly odd, andperfectly sexy, all at once.  It’s interesting to see the way he took looks that were allegedly the complete opposite of male sexual appeal and proved, in essence, that the haters don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.  His dressing and visual performance are very much about inviting the female gaze, and it’s no surprise when Apollonia’s finds its way to him.  (On this subject, probably the most genuinely intriguing moment in the script, for me, is when the Kid runs off with Apollonia and Morris, perceiving the Kid as having “stolen his girl,” shouts after him that he’s a faggot.  Even though he’s just run off with Apollonia.  Who’s he’s obviously into.  Who’s obviously into him.  And Morris obviously feels threatened by him.  Having a little trouble reconciling gender expression with sexual orientation, are we?)

RIP, Prince, an incredibly original and versatile talent who left us too soon.  I wish I’d known just how wonderful he was years ago, but I have a lot of catching up and a lot of unquestionably great music to look forward to.

Warnings

Sexual content, language, drinking, violence (including spousal abuse,) and thematic elements.

Oh Doctor! (1917)

Before we get down to business, slight retraction from last week’s Buster Monday.  I’d said that Fatty assumes Buster’s winking is a signal to serve some on-the-sly Prohibition-era liquor, but Prohibition didn’t start until 1920.  So, it seems the secrecy is just down to alcohol not being on the traditional soda-fountain menu.  I guess I’m so used to the Prohibition nods in Buster’s movies that it didn’t occur to me that some silent comedies take place before that was a thing.

Anyway, on to Oh Doctor!  At the horse track with his wife and young son (played by Buster, just ‘cause,) Fatty, a doctor, meets and falls for a beautiful woman (Alice Mann.)  Unfortunately, the new object of his secret affection is involved with a bad sort – namely, her criminal boyfriend played by Al St. John.  After Alice enters his sphere, Fatty gets mixed up in gambling and general sneaking-around, and there’s thievery and police chases aplenty.

I’d call this middling for a Fatty Arbuckle short.  The plot is a bit all-over-the-place, but I like that the slapstick is a little heavier on chases and tumbles than on knock-down drag-outs.  In particular, Buster has some really nice tumbling from Fatty pushing him around.  There are also some fun gags, including Fatty “anchoring” his car by tying it to a small rock, an amusing pantomime sequence wherein Fatty tries to flirt with Alice without his wife overhearing, and a good bit involving Fatty disguised as a police officer.

No lie:  the idea of Buster playing a bona fide child is ridiculous, but he commits to it 100%.  His kid mannerisms, like the way he tugs on Fatty’s jacket or rocks on his heels, remind me a little of when he stands in for the monkey in The Playhouse.  Even though it’s blindingly obvious that he’s not reallya kid/monkey, he mimics their actions so well that you could nearly fool yourself into believing otherwise.

Because he’s not exactly a cherub, Buster gets plenty of tough-love manhandling from Fatty, strong on “tough” and light on “love.”  I’ve said before that I especially love the scene where Fatty pushes Buster into a table and he somersaults backwards across it before landing neatly in a chair on the opposite side.  In the time it takes Fatty to cross the room, Buster has propped his feet up on the table and settled in with a book, as nonchalantly as if he meant to do it all along.  Very funny, and the standout moment of the short for me.

However, Buster-as-a-kid doesn’t take being shoved around as stoically as regular Buster.  He has a lot of exaggerated fake-crying reactions (not in the table scene, luckily,) and as Buster learned as an actual kid in vaudeville, he’s always funnier when he reacts less.  As such, even though the tumbling is impressive as usual, it’s not nearly as funny as it is with the stone face.  It feels hokier, more self-consciously “silent movie acting,” and that’s not really what Buster’s about.  Fortunately, while Buster experiments with his demeanor throughout the early Fatty Arbuckle shorts (The Rough House and His Wedding Night both have a few pulled faces,) I think next week’s Coney Island is the last before he settles more permanently into his classic deadpan.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, gambling, and some fairly tame adultery.

Character Highlight: Sky Smith (The Sarah Jane Adventures)

It’s hard to know if I would have grown to love Sky as much as the rest of the Sarah Jane gang.  Due to Elisabeth Sladen’s sad passing and the show’s subsequent end, we only got six episodes with Sky, and she spent most of the first one as a baby.  Still, I enjoyed what little we saw of her, and I liked what she brought to the group (a few basic Sky-related spoilers.)

The show’s final season opens with Sarah Jane acquiring a new child in the way only Sarah Jane does – unexpectedly, through alien shenanigans.  While Luke was constructed by aliens out of human DNA, Sky is a bona fide alien herself, deposited on Sarah Jane’s doorstep as an infant to shield her from an interplanetary war.  Of course, Sky had a little early-phase genetic tampering going on as well.  Like Luke, she’s brought into being with the intention of using her as a tool to further her species’s less-than-savory goals.  In Sky’s case, she’s a living bomb; inert in her infancy, Sky’s major-piece-of-work Fleshkind mother artificially ages her up to a tween as a means of priming her, but with the help of Sarah Jane and co., Sky rejects the path set out for her and is able to disarm.  She stays on Earth under the guise of being Sarah Jane’s new foster child.  (Point of interest:  between Luke and Sky, one thing is clear – if the show hadn’t ended prematurely, Sarah Jane would have eventually acquired a third anomalous child and named him Walker.)

Sky’s role in the series occupies a lot of the same space as Luke, who at this point is off at university.  Clyde and Rani(and before them, Maria) are the Awesome but Ordinary characters, the everyday boy and girl next door who, it turns out, fight aliens in the free time.  Sky and Luke, however, are Definite Sci-Fi characters, the alien or alien-adjacent ones with skills that regular people don’t have.  For Sky, that means electrical extra-sensitivity left over from her time as a bomb (as a baby, she could blow fuses when she was upset,) and although she doesn’t have Luke’s off-the-charts intellect, the combination of her alien biology and her forced aging allows her to remember everything she saw and experienced when she was a baby.  She’s also immune to anything that specifically targets humans, which comes in handy big-time in “The Curse of Clyde Langer.”

Also similar to Luke, Sky doesn’t quite fit in to everyday life.  Her learning curve has a double-whammy, since she’s only been alive for a very short time andshe’s from another planet.  She has her reluctant or self-conscious moments (she’s very nervous about meeting Luke for the first time when he comes home to visit,) but in general, she delights in new things and excitedly bombards Sarah Jane, Clyde, and Rani with questions about life on Earth.

Being only much younger than the rest of the gang (she’s around 12 or 13, while Clyde and Rani are more like 17,) Sky brings a different vibe to the show.  The kids have always been one another’s contemporaries, but Sky is like a kid sister; while Clyde and Rani (and Luke, in the finale) spend time with her and include her, she’s also viewed a bit separately from them, someone to look after.  Fortunately, though, she never really feels like a tagalong, and the show avoids a Cousin Oliver dynamic.  I imagine she was probably brought on as a way to return a little to the roots of the show, aiming for that younger demographic, but when the series was forced to end, that wasn’t able to bear out.

More Thoughts on Prejudice in Zootopia

Last time I talked about Zootopia, I looked at the nuts and bolts of how prejudice works within the film, the overall setup of prey vs. predators and the size-based social strata at work.  The big picture’s been taken care of, so now, let’s get down to some of the specifics (contains spoilers.)

It’s easy for Zootopia to think it’s doing well.  Look at their predator mayor!  The police department just hired their first bunny – so progressive!  And on the surface, everyone seems to get along; Judy thinks moving to the city will get her away from small-minded ideas about both prey and predators.  But the cracks are there.  Clawhauser, the only animal at ZPD who doesn’t resent Judy for daring to think she can be an officer, patronizes her (turns out, only bunnies can call one another “cute.”)  Store owners exercise their right to refuse service when they don’t like a customer’s teeth, and how could a fox cub ever think prey would play beside him without fear? 

And just as in life, prejudice sneaks up on the characters.  Judy thinks of herself as enlightened; she groans at her parents’ belief that all foxes are dangerous, but in her time with Nick, her hand reaches more than once for the Fox Repellent Spray her dad foisted on her when she left for the city.  It’s more than an unconscious fear response.  It goes deeper than Judy realizes (I reeled when she complimented Nick for being “articulate.”)  I really like that not just “bad” characters are susceptible to bias.  Judy is a delightful, lovable character, but she’s also been shaped by broken ideas in her society, and she’s unaware of how much they affect her.  In this way, the film is a story about bigotry rather than bigots, which is a vital distinction.  Words like “racist” and “sexist” put people on the defensive, and that “Nuh uh, not me!” reaction closes them off to constructive dialogue.  It’s important that Judy is a well-intentioned bunny with unconscious issues, and that during the movie, she learns to take a harder look at herself and work on them.

Prejudice can be directed internally as well.  Judy initially sets out to tout her belief in Nick and her insistence that his being a fox doesn’t make him a bad animal, but when she realizes that he’s a grifter who conned her, she thinks he’s just like everything she’s ever been told about foxes.  But that’s intentional; years of being dismissed as untrustworthy and feared as dangerous have left their toll on Nick, and after a traumatic experience with bigotry in his youth, he didn’t see the point in trying to convince animals of what they refuse to believe.  And so, he gives himself over to their ideas of him, being the good-for-nothing con-fox because no one expects anything better.

With all this simmering tension, it’s no wonder the city erupts into fear and profiling when the news comes out that the missing predators have in fact “gone savage,” regressing to their pre-evolved ways.  Judy doesn’t mean to start the maelstrom, but as prey, she doesn’t think how it will sound when she explains to the press that every one of the “savage” mammals is a predator (shades of “I’m not saying all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims!”)  That’s when things get really chilling.  The words “biology” and “DNA” get thrown around, suggesting that predators are innately, uniquely susceptible to this regression, that it’s in their nature.  Then it all explodes:  increased arrests, loss of employment, protests, xenophobic jeers, prey edging away from predators on the subway, hate, ad infinitum.  It resonates strongly, the way a community crawls toward progress/unity, and then the actions of a few individuals turn the tide in an instant.  Everything that’s built up gets swept away, and everyone is reduced to their smallest definitions.  Much respect to Zootopia for not shying away from this complex dynamic.

News Satire Roundup: April 17th-April 21st

Sunday, April 17 – I loved the story on Putin’s annual televised Q & A – so bizarre, so funny.  What do you say to a president who blames drowning victims for being too determined to drown?  The high farce in Parliament was excellent too, with one stuffy British politician scolding another for his flagrant use of the insult “Dodgy Dave.”  Turkish president Erdoğan got in on the fun as well; with the announcement that Erdoğan is attempting to prosecute a German comedian for making fun of him, John supplied numerous reasons why he’s so mockable.  The main story was on lead, going far beyond Flint to the millions of homes whose lead-based paint puts people in danger.  The sheer refusal of Congress to give the agencies that address this issue anywhere near the funding they need is just disgusting.  At least Elmo is on the side of not poisoning children!

Monday, April 18 – A “smart” mattress that texts you if it’s used when you’re not home is so ridiculous; Trevor had some great jokes on it.  Less funny was a story on a man removed from a planeafter speaking Arabic, but the commentary was good and biting.  I like that Trevor tied it to anti-Muslim statements made by Cruz, Trump, and the like.  This hate isn’t spoken in a vacuum – it screws with people’s lives.  Hasan had a fun follow-up piece, a satirical preflight instructional video for Muslim passengers.  I was lukewarm on Desi’s field piece riffing on Cruz’s derisive comment about “New York values.” I liked her outrageous questions to tourists (asking if “all the abortions and everything” kept them from getting Hamilton tickets,) but it felt like something was lacking. Guest Ellie Kemper was her usual ray of sunshine.  I don’t know how she remained adorable talking about laughing until she wet herself, but she pulled it off.

Tuesday, April 19 – Trump saying “7-Eleven” when he meant “9/11” was low-hanging fruit, but the show had to go there.  I loved the crack about no one confusing the Boston Massacre with Boston Market.  Good story on the current scandal(s) inBrazil.  My favorite bits:  a Brazilian politician expressing himself with confetti and Trevor wondering what it’ll be like in the future when Big Renewable Energy has everyone in its pockets.  Guest Ben Carson got two segments.  The interview was weird, not just because of Carson’s pacing issues.  I think Trevor could’ve gone much harder than he did, and my eyes nearly rolled out of my head when Carson talked about compassion and America benefitting its people being from “every nation” as part of his argument for why Trump is the man for the job.  The third segment, a debatebetween Carson and his “twin brother” Dr. Ken Carson (Trevor doing his dynamite Carson impression,) was fun.

Wednesday, April 20 – I feel dumb that it never occurred to me that Black men would celebrate Harriet Tubman being put on the $20, but of course it makes perfect sense.  I liked Trevor’s prediction that Black people will only use $20s for years to come.  The coverage of the New York primary was good, from CNN’s bizarre color-coding to the media’s extremely low bar on Trump acting “presidential.”  The fake movie ad jumping on the ‘90s nostalgia bandwagon (a la Confirmation and The People vs. OJ Simpson) was goofy but fun; once they started tossing in every notorious ‘90s personality possible, it took off.  (Side note:  I like that the show has no qualms about casting the correspondents in racebent roles.  In this sketch, I noticed Ronny dressed up as both Dr. Kevorkian and Monica Lewinsky.)  Musical guest this time, Sturgill Simpson.  No real opinion here – he didn’t hold my interest at all.

Thursday, April 21 – More on the changes to the $20.  I do not get people who are so beholden to Andrew “Indian Removal Act” Jackson.  What exactly is worth commemorating about him?  If they’re just trying to explain their opposition in a way that doesn’t sound racist and/or sexist, they should probably try again.  I liked Roy’s apprehension about it all, particularly his worries that the anti-counterfeit measures on the new $20s will be endless.  In light of the Panama Papers, we got another stock-tips segment from Hasan, this time talking about shell companies in the U.S.  Hasan does a great job with this bit – the weird energy is perfect, and I love how he delivers such outrageous lines with total sincerity.  The guest, Howard Dean, was pretty good.  He and Trevor compared his compaign in 2004 to the current election in a “what’s happening to the world” sort of way.  The Moment of Zen was a tribute to Prince – lovely and apropos.