ARTS Tuesday, July 31, 1934 The Michigan Daily Page 7 'Purple Rain' is no desert By Phillip K. Lawes F OR MOST of its hour and forty minute length Purple Rain suc- ceeds so well that one is tempted to take it seriously, to judge the film by stan- dards which are too stringent for its genre. Purple Rain is a latter day musical, which is to say, an elaborate music video. Judged on those terms, it comes close to being brilliant. Judged as a feature film, however, it comes up short in several areas. Purple Rain is the largely autobiographical account of the life and times of rock music enfant terrible Prince, and his Minneapolis milieu. Prince, here called simply "The Kid," is a visionary-musician whose rise to a stardom is hindered by a host of fac- tors. The Kid is involved in an intense struggle for stardom with a rival ban- dleader (Morris Day of The Time), whose music is more accessible, and who has lecherous designs on the Kid's love interest, Appolonia (Appolonia Kotero of Appolonia 6, formerly Vanity 6, a woman whose pituitary gland deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor.). The Kid's affair with Appolonia is also endangered by his desire and ultimate inability to dominate her com- pletely, as he does the members of his own band. The element which separates Purple Rain from other films of its type, and gives it a degree of substance, is its depiction of the Kid's nightmarish home life. His parents, played by Clarence Williams III and Olga Karlatos, are victims of a mad, Prince plays the Kid, an up and coming rock 'n' roll star who has to deal with a variety of roadblocks to his success in 'Purple Rain'. masochistic life, a couple whose career frustrations and marital frictions have combined to embitter them, trapping them in an endless spiral of pain. Williams and Karlatos play the parents with a superbly grim inten- sity-whenever they are on the screen, the film is brought abruptly back to painful reality, from the fantasy of the club scenes. Williams, given the more screen time of the two, is particularly effective playing the father as a man corroded and virtually eviscerated by some horrible combination of inner turmoils. The movie's great failing is that it never gives any explanation of the father's behavior, never humanizes him. We get references to him "ruining his career and his wife's," but we are never shown or told how. The parent's behavior is profferred as the cause of the Kid's excesses, and he must avoid their fate at all costs. But the parents are limited in their humanity, and the whole film suffers from that limitation. On the other end of the emotional spectrum we find Morris Day, leader of the Time and the Kid's rival. Day gives the star performance of the film playing an ostentatiously dapper letch, living surprisingly well for a man of his limited means. Day and his sidekick Jerome Benton have an assured comic touch, and real acting talent. The same cannot be said for the leads, Prince and Appolonia Kotero. Prince is easily the weakest link in the film whenever he is shown off the stage. His limited range as an actor is most easily seen when he has to show rage. He usually does this by mincing furiously back and forth across the screen, his fists clenched, and his hair billowing in his own slipstream. Appolonia's acting also needs a lot of work. Although she generally comes off better than Prince does, many of her scenes have a rather cheesy quality to them. Scenes which are shared by the two leads, however, do have a certain electricity, generated in large part by sheer erotic interest, and Appolonia's vamp/slut/queen of the jungle war- drobe. Purple Rain's best attribute is its staging of the music. Many of its songs are given the most dynamic presen- tations of music on film. The opening song "Let's Go Crazy," is performed in a blaze of light effects and jump cuts that gets the film off to a frantic start. The pace is generally kept up for most of the movie. Unfortunately, the last twenty minutes are far weaker than the body of the film. The filmmakers have miscalculated the appeal of the song "Purple Rain," and in placing it so close to the end of the narrative, they have destroyed the film's climax. The film never quite recovers from the lull into which "Purple Rain" places it, though the songs that close it out, "I Would Die 4 U," and "Baby I'm A Star," are strong, up-tempo num- bers. The film ends in a substantially weaker fashion then it started. Despite its shortcomings, however, Purple Rain is very entertaining sum- mer fare, and is well worth seeing. Prince stars as the Kid, and Apollonia Kotero plays Apollonia, the beautiful lead singer of an aspiring rock band, in the surprisingly good 'Purple Rain'.