Hadn't seen this.

NEW POSITION: A DEFENSE O...ERRY MOON"

by Peter Sobczynski

RogerEbert.com

May 4, 2016

"Taking advantage of the power he possessed at this time in Hollywood, he used it to produce and make his directorial debut with 'Under the Cherry Moon' (1986), one of the strangest and craziest movies of its time. It’s a film so utterly defiant of what one might have rightfully expected from a Prince vehicle that even his loyal fans stayed away in droves and it immediately went down in the annals of screen history as a disaster that more or less killed Prince’s viability as a screen icon. The hell of it is that once one gets past the fact that it does not resemble 'Purple Rain 2' in even the slightest, it reveals itself to be an offbeat gem that may one day go down as the MTV era equivalent of Marcel L’Herbier’s infamous 1924 silent epic 'L’inhumaine'—an unabashed vanity project that both revels in and transcends its solipsistic underpinnings in ways that are alternately perplexing and endearing, an endeavor further bolstered by a stunning visual style and a central performance that, for better or worse, you cannot take your eyes off of for a second, not that you ever have a chance to do so."

I, simply loved it from the beginning

: ) Smile+

I do feel UTCM was ahead of it's time in some ways, but the public wasn't able to appreciate it after PR...I wonder if UTCM would've been as maligned if it had been created before PR.

For better or for worse, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for UTCM, if for no other reason than P's so adorable in it...campy, but very endearing.

UTCM is better than Purple Rain, just sayin.

laytonian said:

I'd love to see a real re-release or at least put on Netflix or HBO. It has a look that's so mishmash that it's not of ANY style, so can't go out of style. LOL on the last lines of that review. "a central performance that, for better or worse, you cannot take your eyes off of for a second, not that you ever have a chance to do so." Oh, Prince.

UTCM is Prince redefining 'narcissism' on screen!

1. I want to see the FULL COLOR verison of Under the Cherry Moon

.

2. I want to see the ending where Christopher Tracy LIVES.

.

not really holding my breath for EITHER..

but since I'm here, I'm just saying..

Couldn't believe it when this article appeared the next day after I'd watched UTCM for the first time in a decent format (missed it on the cinema because, well, it didn't appear in many cinemas in the UK).

I agree with everything said in the article, especially the bit where he got to what I was thinking while watching it and what Prince had several times said while making it that it IS an album project as much as Parade.
That is, this is Prince anticipating and influencing from a few decades ahead the kind of thing Beyonce and Frank Ocean are currently doing with visual albums.
Unfortunately, along with predecessors such audio-visual adventurism by musical auteurs was to be heavily trampled upon by press. Paul McCartney must have sympathised in a Magical Mystery Tour kind of way but, as with that, retrospect makes of even the difficult bits, just sheer ballsiness.
I think that both Magical Mystery Tour and Under The Cherry Moon completely succeed within their own terms with all of the weak points of their time becoming artful and ironic from hindsight.
Certainly, they both had qualities of presience and, I don't know, but the 'Mountains' closer corresponds perfectly to the 'I am The Walrus' sequence of the earlier press-victim in that nobody even at release time was unhappy about those sequences in amongst their objectionables.

What's more, over the years on grimpy VHS, I had always seen the movie with someone who wasn't a Prince fan and had been slightly apologetic for it, needlessly because I've always foung that non-Prince fans responded very well to this movie as a total goofball laugh-riot. Nobody, I've found, can even take Prince's incredibly OTT narcissism as other than a piss-take of his own rep FOR narcissism. This wasn't a thought that had occurred to me personally. I DID see him as a total narcissist around the time of UTCM's release but this time I saw that he was acting way beyond that in trying to do a number of things. The visual choreography in particular is utterly linked to his stage choreography as we've become familiar with it and I even noticed that the scene where he enters a ballroom through a billowing net curtain prefigures the Superbowl trick with a larger curtain! Check it.

This one gonna grow and grow in stature forever. It is a masterpiece on its own terms and never less than utterly entertaining. Much of its criticism is akin to the hammering Orson Welles got after his debut Citizen Kane smashed the studio system wide open in a way Prince did with Purple Rain. How dare an absolute beginner show those studio old hands how to do it?
There's more than a hint of Welles' fate in everything press said about Prince subsequently.

[Edited 1/13/17 17:52pm]