Purple Pain

I think I can be forgiven for having missed certain things.

I missed the landing on the moon because I wasn’t born yet. I missed Nixon’s resignation from the White House because I was only two and not much interested in television that I couldn’t drool on. I missed the original release of "Xanadu" mostly because I don't grasp the significance of roller skating AND singing.

I'm just not that deep.

I also missed Prince’s “Purple Rain” because I’m not gay or a 15 year old school girl.

Did everyone get that first part? I'M NOT GAY, DAMNIT!

I have since made up for that last one. Not that I’ve suddenly come out of the closet (please refer to all-capped statement above) or taken that quick jaunt to Trinidad, Colorado, the sex-change capital of the United States.

Please don’t ask me why I know about Trinidad; let’s just simply say that I have a sordid past.

My first, and God-willing only, viewing of the 1984 iconic movie was due more to boredom than anything else and occured about a month ago.

And by "iconic" I mean easily mocked.

And by "movie" I mean visual torture-chamber.

I've just now come out of the shock induced coma to report my findings to you, my loyal readers. In retrospect, my time would have been better spent forcing bamboo shoots into my eyelids and burning them. Repeatedly.

At least my eyes would have hurt less, and the scaring might be repairable.

As it is, I’ve had to resort to treatments of bleach. And not the gentle bleach like Clorox 2 with Stain Guard. No, no, this is the painful and burning bleach that will take the color out of rainbows. The label (and bottle) is etched in steel, since plastic would melt, and includes a skull, cross-bones, several X's, and a powerful Egyptian locking-spell.

It's only for your serious bleach users.

Purple Rain, for those of you who are, gladly and blissfully, ignorant . . . and let me caution you to remain that way . . . tells the story of The Kid, played by the diminutive, purple-and-Victorian-lace-clad Prince and his on-again-off-again-on-again girl Apollonia, played by . . . Apollonia. In fact everyone who’s in the movie is played by themselves, so this movie is supposedly a semi-auto-biographical-MTV-music-video.

The problem with this movie, and no, there isn’t just one, is that it makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

Keanu Reeves could make a better movie on his worst day acting . . . which is pretty much every day of his life. And that’s the point I’m trying to make!

Get this, The Kid (Prince), who apparently has all this talent, so much talent that everyone talks about it, and worries about it and schemes to hold him back, is about to lose his job.

Further, The Kid's nemesis comes in two forms: his wife-beating father, after whom The Kid mirrors some of his life, and the self-centered, self-serving Morris Day.

You know you’re having a bad day when you’re battling for the “new girl in town” (who takes her clothes off 20 minutes into the movie) against the guy who sang “Jungle Love”.

Oh, but the fun doesn’t stop there. Not only no, but hell no!

There’s still this whole “plot” thing to work out. Apparently, despite shots of a room filled with people singing and dancing along to every tune, The Kid just isn’t packing them in. Apparently, "packing them in" means "so little room that sardines would want to sublet."

Not like Morris Day packs them in (though the crowds look to be the exact same size, and consist of the exact same people), and not like Apollonia will be (after Morris helps her out, of course). And The Kid's band isn’t overly happy with him either. Why, you ask? Well, it’s not because of the brooding montages wherein Prince alternately rides his motorcycle and writers music that apparently no one understands (note to Prince: they’re about sex and YOU AREN’T THAT DEEP). It seems that they, too, want to see The Kid express his true potential and skill on the stage . . . or play some of their music, either way.

Yeah, what a pickle.

How ever will our hero get through this? Will he win back Apollonia’s love after smacking her around? Will Morris Day ever get that a mirror the size of his supposed ego on stage? Will Prince write that one song that would win him back the fickle love of the mob?

Will we ever know "Who shot J.R."?

Well, I won’t give away the ending. After all, this movie ranks up there with Sixth Sense and The Crying Game on “don’t tell but . . .” endings. It’s classic and you’ll never see it coming. Especially if you burn your eyes out with bleach before hand.

And let me make that as part of this movie’s recommendation. In fact, I think I will start a petition that bleaching eyes accompany every copy of this movie now being sold.

Whoa! It's and Article

The man, the myth, and someday (God willing) the heavily medicated.

Keanu Reeves.

The bane of my existence.

It’s not so much that I hate Keanu. Oh, alright, I hate him. But it’s not anger. It’s a general loathing, and fear that someday he will be “honored” with a lifetime achievement award. I’m fairly certain that is when the Seventh Seal will open, and Apocalypse will quit messing around with all that fire and famine and begin some earnest devastation of Biblical proportions.

I will also win $20 as Keanu declares himself the anti-Christ.

Or the Beast.

Either way, I'm $20 to the good.

Granted, this is small consolation in the “I Told You So” category. But by that point, with the Earth in ashes and most of my friends already translated and demons running amok, I’m willing to take whatever small comfort I can get.

Keanu “burst” on the movie scene in Youngblood, a Rob Lowe vehicle in which he plays a reasonably dumb hockey player. I’ll wait till later to make the appropriate jokes, but feel free to make your own here.

In the rather silly, yet aptly acted Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It was excellent, and San Dimas High football does rule. In B&T’s Keanu played something of a Southern California surfer who traded his board in for a guitar. Not to give away any intricacies of the plot, but he played his guitar as if he’d just traded in his board for it.

Come to think of it, that’s how he still plays.

From Youngblood and Bill & Ted's wherein he played rather wisdom and communication-challenged individuals, Keanu moved on to Parenthood in which he took on the challenging role of a Southern California surfer/wannabe racecar driver who gets his girlfriend pregnant.Quit thinking “typecasting”. Parenthood was a difficult role for Keanu. He had to act like he was in love. That's had for any man to do.

From there, Keanu made the wise decision to do Point Break and play a Southern California FBI agent who must pretend to be a surfer.

Mon Dieu!

Genius!

Master thespian!

Keanu, perhaps sensing that the time had come to break from the mold, then turned in his award-winning, Oscar-nominated performance in the critically acclaimed Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. Much like its predecessor (I’d say ‘prequel’ here, but that always conjures terrible images of the horror that was The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clowns), this movie was aptly named.

It was bogus.

Except for Death, who was pretty cool.

No, wait. Death was bogus too.

Since then, Keanu has fashioned his acting style into one of a kind. I don’t mean that he’s an outstanding individual of a singular variety. Rather, much like Derek Zoolander, he only has one way of acting. For example:

“Whoa, I’m in love dude,” (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure)

“. . . They'll let any butt-reaming a**hole be a father. Whoa.” (Parenthood)

“I'm an FBI Agent. Whoa.” (Point Break)

Of course he had some stunning dialogue in The Matrix, which has unfortunately propelled Keanu into the limelight and on the very cusp of being an A-list actor. Lines like, “Whoa” and “Whoa, I know kung fu.”

Truly, Keanu has done for the word “whoa” what Kevin Costner has done for the ego-maniacal-self-centered-plot-movie. When he took the stage role of Hamlet in the Shakespeare play (as opposed to the Mamet play), one of his best reviews was, “Well, he remembered most of his lines.”

I have a dream that that’s exactly how we’ll think of him ten years from now: “Well, I remember most of his lines . . . like, ‘Whoa.’”