One’s a billionaire hedonist who’s had more shags than you’ve had sandwiches and the other’s PRINCE, a man who’s changed his name to an arcane symbol and is having sex right now with thirty eight women whilst playing the greatest bass line anyone’s ever heard. They’re both better than you.
Glittering examples of the best things the twentieth century had to offer, together they’ve transcended any form of criticism simply through being Prince and David Bowie, leaving a trail of solid-platinum discs and downloads and album covers in their wake. However, along the path of all-immersion media dominance they tried to make some films, came a-cropper in the execution and slunk back out of the spotlight to be cradled by their own genius. You can’t fault the music or the cheekbones, but this is a film blog, and film blogs are where pop stars go to die.
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
Starring David Bowie
M
Or live, and live semi-gloriously at least. As the law of Spider-Man/Family Guy crossovers states, EVERYBODY GETS ONE, and Bowie’s career in front of a camera is no exception. It’s about an alien y’see, and everything that Bowie’s done in the world of music up to this point has been stuffed full of sci-fi imagery and otherworldly worldliness, spliced with a slither of big gay guitar tonguing. Nic Roeg nicks dicked-up Dave’s image straight from the minds of the public to dump him in the middle of an ethereal brain-fucker, and Bowie plays himself to perfection. It helps that he was ingesting every drug under the sun at this point – Thomas Jerome Newton wanders through the film as a confused innocent, a beatific day-glo Syd Barrett with only an initial passing interest in the runty, money-hungry way the humans live their lives that eventually spirals into an all-out addiction to trash. It’s an amazing performance, if it is a performance at all, but in the same way that he aced the terrifying Don’t Look Now, it’s Roeg’s direction that’s the real draw here, presenting sci-fi through a fractured-lens of narrative jumps, inexplicable time leaps and never explaining what in God’s face is happening.
Throughout his career the Dame’s been accused of sucking off great collaborators, leeching the power of Enos and Ronnos and various other people whose names end in O, and there is a case to be made that he’s a powerful stick-backed chameleon, a cultural sponge with great hair and limited talents with a guitar. The Man Who Fell To Earth holds up because, like his best albums, it’s a great confluence of skills and ideas; the themes, when they can be dug up amidst the beautiful imagery, are insightful and more relevant by the day, while the distanced, dizzy camerawork will make you feel like a stranger on your own planet. Yes, it gets stupid and colourful and loud towards the end, but it’s supposed to and yes, you do see more of Rip Torn’s arse and balls than any decent human being ever should but… actually, no, there’s no excuse for them.
The piece as a whole is a wonderfully laid-back skim over a surface-centred planet, filmed through the prism of a dodgy VHS tape lined with magic and held up by the best performance ever given by the man who recorded The Laughing Gnome. It’s beautiful, weird as all hell, and almost as entertaining as the man’s TV interviews around the same period. How in heck is Prince Rogers Nelson going to beat that? By having a name that sounds like a 17th century slash fic?
Or just by being Prince?
PURPLE RAIN
Starring Prince
Y
A perfect song, a perfect album, an orgiastically insane and bizarrely amateurish celluloid monument to one small man’s gigasmic ego. Prince can’t act. Prince can’tact at all. Despite being perhaps the greatest onstage performer of all time, here his repertoire consists of a range of smirks and barely audible whispers, rendered entirely incoherent by a soundtrack and audio mix that make the whole thing sound like it was recorded in a ball pit lined with cheap speaker systems. He has very expressive eyes. They’re always staring at tits and asses. Women’s ones. The scenes where he walks in on his parents inexplicably fighting are among the best in the movie, like a Mike Leigh film directed by Baz Luhrman. This happens a lot; his dad has his mum pinned up against a wall, doves are crying, he’s wearing an even bigger cravat each time and vainly tries to stop their inexplicable violence by flailing, squealing and falling over. The best way to take it is to consider that this is just the way Prince sees the world through his insane genius retinas; ostensibly based on his own life as a struggling Minneapolis musician, it flies in the face of reality by having every single person be insanely pretty and dressed to the nines at all times, whilst there’s no way that a band of phenomenal performers belting out Lets Go Crazy and I Would Die 4 U every night would be trailing the shithole bars, crawling through the bins with their lacy gloves. Amazingly it manages to get by on the force of the man’s personality alone, and you can’t say the same for Spice World: The Movie.
Two points:
1. Watching it as a Prince fan it’s nice to see the bizarre amateurishness of it all, much in the same way that The Beatles’ gadabout A Hard Days Night exposed weaknesses in a previously untouchable titan of popular music.
2. Watching it if you hate Prince is bat-country crazy, and you’ll have to wait about ninety minutes until he gives up on acting and just screens concert footage. IT’S SOME OF THE BEST CONCERT FOOTAGE EVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE OMNIVERSE. This will then convert you to the Prince-loving figure in point one, and you’ll have to watch it all over again and appreciate what was said a minute ago in that first point, the one above this one, which is point two. You’d be a different person, the person point one was referring to a second ago. Well, a second depending on how long it takes you to read this, perhaps, no, let’s say it in terms of words, this point, that one, two, no, wait… SAVE ME BOWIE!
MERRY CHRISTMAS MR LAWRENCE
Starring David Bowie
M
Unless you’re making a film about how terrifically terrific you are in every way it’s difficult to be an infinitely talented demi-God space-man thing without derailing the entire movie with your unstoppable star power, and that’s the problem right there that’s followed Bowie through the rest of his dual career as an attempted-actor. There’s nothing really that wrong with Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence that you haven’t seen in a thousand other films that are worth a quick punt, but it’s Bowie’s presence that cocks the whole thing into a cocked hat and cocks it up sideways with a cock and a cock. From the moment he appears, tall, tanned and almost peroxide blonde, he doesn’t even look that much like David Bowie, more like an oddly-idealised, nearly-there version of what Bowie wanted to look like in the decade that taste forgot. From that point on whenever he appears the film dissolves into simply watching an action man figure with Bowie’s face wander around a Javan prison camp, gazing at things with his weird different pupils and wonky teeth. There is an interesting history prism going on, watching the 1940s through the 1980s; the synth heavy music sounds like it’s ripped from Final Fantasy VII, whilst the supposedly hard-line camp commander Colonel Yanoi looks like a member of Spandau Ballet or possibly the coat hook boy at the Blitz nightclub, rendering everything he does simultaneously ridiculous and heart-breakingly sad. There’s also a good deal of Hari Kari, if you’re into that sort of thing. Which you almost definitely shouldn’t be.
Despite all this Tom Conti and Beat Kitano spend their time trying to make it a credible film by underplaying everything and relying on Nagasi Oshimi’s skilful use of colour and day/night shifts, whilst the underlying themes of the story illustrate racial and cultural divides in a remarkably understated way; there’s little conflict between the British soldiers and their captors, both sides merely depicted as decent men drawn together by an ungodly conflict. All told it’s a nice, vaguely sedated wander through camaraderie and shared experiences in terrible situations, shot through with a reasonably daring attempt at suggesting homosexual love between the warmongers.
Then Bowietorpedoes it all by turning up in an extended schoolboy flashback sequence, watching his little brother get dunked into a sewer for singing like a girl. A schoolboy that’s 36 years old and an internationally renowned rock star. Point to Prince.
UNDER THE CHERRY MOON
Starring Prince
M
Oh Annie Christ, this is unbelievably amazing. Finally casting off the shackles of having anyone tell him what to do, the purple sex-lizard sashays his way into a full-blown thirties rip-off, filmed in black and white, full of nonsensical slapstick comedy and a soundtrack so brilliant and intrusive that it might have well have taken human form and barged into him in every scene. Prince plays to type as an impulsive young gigolo, sleeping with everyone in the world because he’s Prince, whilst Kristen Scott Thomas bravely attempts to imbue a character with no personality qualities with some sort of anything, presumably thinking that her movie debut was a real film and not another insane overblown vanity project filmed on a record company jolly in the French Riviera.
The man himself shows a rudimentary grasp of direction, aping bits of screwball comedy and old-school musicals, but the whole thing comes across as a very MTV endeavour; bits of the eighties keep floating up like in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence,and the whole thing’s so music heavy it looks like the kind of glossy nonsense that Beavis and Butthead murdered nearly thirty years ago. Despite all this, it’s PRINCE. There’s a bit where he goes to kiss Kristen Scott Thomas in a car and KISS starts playing and you’ll pump your fist so hard that all your fingernails’ll fall off. Never before has a film been saved almost singlehandedly by it’s soundtrack, with the albumParade swooping in every few minutes and reminding you of the demented genius that’s behind the man up there on screen, winking and trying to hump things. It’s nonsensical and stupid and ridiculous, but it sort-of-vaguely-nearly-works and it’s certainly the best 1930s themed Prince-centric comedy-dance-film co-starring Stephen Berkoff that you’re ever going to get. Still, Bowie’d have to do something pretty stupid to fuck up the bout at this point.
THE HUNGER
Starring David Bowie
d
WHOOPS! A brief exercise in saying next to nothing, professional runty brother Tony Scott’s first ever film is a chalkboard scraping daymare of flowing curtains, quizzical pigeons and every vampire cliché that Joss Whedon so whole-heartedly set about smashing up with his whippet dialogue and penchant for killing in 1997. What’s meant to be a sensual pace drags it’s ass across a carpet of dull dialogue and boring characters, whilst the attempts to modernise an 1800s trope amount to sticking Bauhaus at the beginning and having Susan Sarandon cut her hair short. It’s not funny, or sexy, or interesting or good or anything really. Bowie’s not even in it for very long, but he does make up for it by having the best old-man-falling-down-stairs scene in film history, one that’s so good it seems to have been erased from the internet for blowing too many minds. With crud this cruddy its Prince’s game to lose…
GRAFFITI BRIDGE
Starring Prince
M
It happens to everyone; you hit a point in your early thirties where you realise how great you really are in every way, how you’ve got to stop keeping your incredibleness to yourself and use it to save the rest of the world, those poor people littering the streets with their big noses and penchant for eating dog food out of skips. You’ve got to help them because you love them. And you’ve got to wear floaty white robes while you do it, because you’re the messiah. You’re completely insane, and very little you do will make sense to anyone ever, especially people who buy the records that make up the billboard chart.
1990 was the tipping point for Prince’s already Siberia-size ego, the year in which it grew humongous jet engines and blasted off into the stratosphere in a reverse-tragedy mirror to the Titanic sinking. The result of this was Graffiti Bridge, the album and film where the world stopped looking at him as an untouchable genius and realised he was actually a bit creepy and deranged and thought he was some-sort of 80s Jesus, but with better hair and a wardrobe full of bondage gear. Suffused with religious wank throughout, it’s possibly the most ridiculous film ever made, taking the already off-kilter reality fucking of Purple Rain and sticking it dick-first into Prince’s frontal lobe, a land of neon lighting, bare-chested poetry readings and spontaneous co-ordinated street dancing. As a weirdo’s vision it would almost work if Warner Brothers hadn’t realised how nutbag their charge had become and dropped the budget, making the whole thing look like clowns exploding over the discarded sets of Tim Burton’s Batman movies. Purple Christ also chose to write the script this time, resulting in a cast of unprofessional actors reading lines that sound like the sixth form poetry of a boy who was brought up exclusively on new-age gibberish, with the same vaguely-philosophical nonsense being spewed all over the sets to fulfil the obligation of having ‘graffiti’ in the title. Morris Day and Jerome Benton do their best to have some fun as children playing pantomime bad guys, but even they can’t escape the all-consuming maelstrom of Prince’s ego by this point, making the whole thing a gloriously unwieldy spectacle that’s worth watching for the hubris alone. It’s colossally inept, deliriously demented, and it features the lead singer of The Time setting fire to Prince’s favourite pot-plant before proceeding to piss all over it. Look at this bit. Look at it. It’s Prince attempting to rescue Ingrid Chavez from being raped by two members of The Time by dancing to his hit single ‘Thieves in the Temple.’. It’s incredible. The whole piece is full of this sort of batshit insanity, it’s in it’s make up, it’s on every page of the script, a tome bound together by the near-biblical sperm of a deranged man, one of the greatest entertainers who ever lived. Consequently, the film’s entirely worth watching, and lands Prince the killing blow in this ill-conceived journey into a dirty little corner of vanity-cinema.
Both titans have made some demented decisions in their choice of film work but ultimately, for sheer bombast and whale-fucking insanity, for the costumes, for the sheer balls of never really attempting a plot, or reason, or reality, for knowing in his funk-rhythm heart that he’s always right and he’s doing the best thing that anyone’s ever done on this sphere of reality, then it has to be Prince that takes…
LABYRINTH
Starring David Bowie
Y
No, wait. Bowie wins.
No comments:
Post a Comment