Word: protagonists
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Purple Rain's barely disguised protagonist is Prince as Prince--alias the Kid, a Milwaukee post-adolescent with a decidedly un-Midwestern penchant for the badder things in life. Supposedly modeled after the friends' garage where the young Prince carried on his musical and sexual experiments, the Kid's room looks like Jodie Foster's den in Taxi Driver...
Within the movie, the protagonist is, presumably, absolved by his stark beginnings; he can't help recreating the domestic inferno of the parents. Unlike Morris, he thinks about his own viciousness and suffers for it. At the end, he even makes a couple of concessions--a possible sign of the "learning to deal with his anger and vulnerabilities" the movie's publicity promises. At the end, however, the Kid's epiphany--concerning love, tolerance, sacrifice or whatever--is not the focus of the movie. The plot's supposed resolution comes when its hero turns momentarily nice, as he allows...
Buoyed by some stylish exoticism, by Krabbé's ferocious performance as its bedeviled protagonist (a less-gay gay the movies have never offered) and by the mysteriously growing repute of Director Paul Verhoeven (he was responsible for the stodgy Soldier of Orange and the ugly Spelters), The 4th Man is bobbing prosperously along the art circuit, a midsummer night's titillation for the would-be with-its. But the movie's ultimate fate, surely, is to be celebrated, along with Pink Flamingos and its ilk, at the midnight masses of the lavender thrill...
...flip side of Repo Man's bizarreness emerges in the next few scenes, wherein we are introduced to the film's chief protagonist, a young suburban punk called Otto. Otto is rootless, aimless, unhinged--of this we are made painfully aware. We meet him first in a supermarket, where he is getting fired from his job, but the scene quickly shifts to outside an L.A. home where a gang of punks are into some serious slam-dancing action. The scene and music (solid hardcore) immediately conjure up the rage of Decline, the late great documentary about the L.A. punk scene...
...basic problem with Mike's Murder is its lack of focus. Although Winger gradually does garner the spotlight in a tension-filled scene towards the movie's climax, it is never entirely clear just who the protagonist of this film is. Moreover, it it's blood and flesh you're looking for in addition to tears. Mike's Murder is simply not the place to find it. Aside from several semi-suggestive scenes in which Winger lounges in a bubble bath (covered with bubbles, incidentally) and Mike fantasizes about making love to her over the phone, the film...