Review: Prince's "Under the Cherry Moon" Explodes With Personality
Our second Movie of the Week follows Prince's next cinematic outing
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Under the Cherry Moon, Prince’s second feature film (and first solo directorial effort), obviously doesn’t have a particularly good reputation, and there are plenty of self-evident reasons why audiences bounced off it so hard in 1986 (while embracing the stellar soundtrack album, Parade). Instead of the concert-film-cum-intimate-character-drama that propelled Purple Rain to massive success in 1984, Under the Cherry Moon is a very broad comedy with humor that isn’t particularly mature or sophisticated; its main aesthetic and cinematic touchstones are from the 1930s, not anything else playing in theaters in the 80s; the narrative is messy and slapdash (Prince’s Christopher Tracy and Jerome Benton’s Tricky have an only semi-legible fallout at one point, which is resolved for completely illegible reasons a few scenes later), and the film builds to an incongruously dark ending it does not even begin to earn; and unlike the wall-to-wall music of Purple Rain, most of the original songs here play briefly in the background, with the first (and only) full diegetic musical number arriving 42 minutes in. There is a sort of student film indulgence to the entire thing, animated by a sort of theater kid ‘look at what I can do!’ energy, that will inevitably test a lot of viewers’ patience.
And yet. I liked Under the Cherry Moon. And I’m really glad it exists.
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