According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Mike:

This past June 24th marked the twenty fifth anniversary of the greatest soundtrack ever recorded specifically for a movie. Man oh man, is Purple Rain ever an amazing soundtrack! “When Doves Cry”? That song is awesome. “Let’s Go Crazy”? Even awesomer, especially when Prince gets all Hendrixy at the end of the song. “Take Me With U”? Holy shit, that song is so awesome they don’t even have a word to describe it (you could probably describe it by calling it “Really, really, really awesome,” but that’s four words). “The Beautiful Ones”? “Baby, I’m a Star”? “I Would Die 4 U”? Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yes, there is no doubt about it; Purple Rain is one totally awesome record. Case closed.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the movie for which the Purple Rain soundtrack was recorded (did I mention how awesome that soundtrack is?), which celebrated its own twenty fifth anniversary this past Monday. Purple Rain: the Movie stars Prince as “The Kid”, a wunderkind musician who lives in his parents’ basement and creates music deemed too weird for First Avenue, the Minneapolis club where Morris Day and the Time draw huge crowds by playing music almost exactly like that of The Kid and his band, the Revolution. Except it’s not as good. The Kid meets aspiring singer Apollonia, falls in love with her, and lets her know this by tricking her into jumping naked into a lake. In Minneapolis. In the winter. Shooting her in the back would have been an equally romantic valentine, but then I guess we wouldn’t have gotten to see her boobs. Despite The Kid’s sadism, Apollonia is unable to resist the pubic hairs glued to his chest (or his purple pirate costume… or his Batgirl Cycle…), so she buys him a guitar. When Morris Day gets wind of the budding ingénue, he swoops in to turn her into his personal protégé. The Kid reacts to this news by punching Apollonia in the face.

Prince on his Batgirl Cycle…

Batgirl on her Prince Cycle…

Back at Casa de Purple, trouble is a-brewin’ as The Kid’s equally personable dad slaps around his mom before jamming out on an upright piano that sounds like a $35 Casio keytar. There is also discord in The Kid’s band, where Revolutionaries Wendy and Lisa must contend with their tiny leader’s massive ego to convince him to play a new song they wrote… a new song called “Purple Rain”, that is!

Will The Kid win back the love of Apollonia by making her leap into a bonfire while wearing nothing but a gorilla mask? Will The Kid turn into his evil father, fulfilling his worst nightmares and risking a lawsuit from George Lucas? Will he best Morris Day and the Time at the big Battle of the Bands? Will the water be warm enough for Wendy and Lisa? All this and so much more are revealed 2 U in Purple Rain.

I’m being a wisenheimer because that’s what it takes for me to enjoy Purple Rain, which is often really bad. With the exceptions of Wendy and Day, who has a definite smarmy charm, the acting is uniformly awful. The script is amateur hour and the film is twenty minutes too long. The Kid’s bedroom, with its porcelain drama masks and satin-clad harlequins, is creepier than all the sets in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre combined. There’s also that discomforting misogynist streak. Like the scene where The Kid humiliates Apollonia at Lake Kookamunga, the one where Day asks his crony, Jerome, to body slam a girl into a dumpster is played for laughs. Such mean-spirited moments aren’t fun, but Prince acting out a psychodrama with a puppet is. So is the ridiculous dialogue (Morris Day: “I wish you could see my home; it’s so exciting. In my bedroom… I have a brass… waterbed.”) and the way Jerome holds up a giant mirror so Day can check himself out on stage. Purple Rain may be the only feature film to ever benefit from being shot and edited like a music video, and all of those stunning performance sequences can be thoroughly enjoyed without a wisp of irony. No disrespect to the recently deceased Jacko, but Prince really was the greatest all-around entertainer of his generation. The guy’s got a forty-octave vocal range and can make his guitar sound like a crash-landing UFO just by licking it. Best of all may be the grossrotic grand finale in which Prince jerks off his guitar and blasts spooge all over the audience. It’s a scene worthy of John Waters. That final shot in which His Purple Badness looks coquettishly over his shoulder and directly into the camera is even sleazier, possibly because by breaking the fourth wall, Prince is tacitly telling the viewer, “Take heed… I’m cumming 4 U next.” Be gentle with me, Prince.

Mike gives Purple Rain… 8 coquettish Princes!

Next up, Jeffrey blasts his critical spooge all over U!

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