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Why did the critics hate Under The Cherry Moon?
"Wish eye had a dollar 4 everytime U say, don't U miss the feeling Music gave u, back in the day"
- Prince (2004) | |
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I watched the movie and thought it was hillarious, why do the critics hate it?Nonsense.
http://flavorwire.com/590...-of-prince
http://www.bkmag.com/2016...ood-movie/
https://www.rogerebert.co...herry-moon
[Edited 1/24/19 19:27pm] The Colors R brighter, the Bond is much tighter
No Child's a failure Until the Blue Sailboat sails him away from his dreams Don't Ever Lose, Don't Ever Lose Don't Ever Lose Your Dreams | |
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I think some of the scenes are really funny,but let’s be honest...the movie has its share of problems. | |
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bonatoc said: Nonsense.
http://flavorwire.com/590...-of-prince
http://www.bkmag.com/2016...ood-movie/
https://www.rogerebert.co...herry-moon
[Edited 1/24/19 19:27pm] None of those are reviews from the period - it’s not nonsense to say that the film was poorly received. And really, as much as we as Prince fans may appreciate it - it’s hardly a classic, is it? | |
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Took me years to appreciate this film. I adore it now. But when it came out it was a head scratcher I'm not going to lie. It's a hurtful place, the world, in and of itself. We don't need to add to it. We all need one another. ~ PRN | |
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Because it's a terrible piece of film made by someone who just wasn't a filmmaker... It has some charming moments, but overall it's barely watchable, it has a juvenile plot, is subtle as a brick and has basically no subtext.
It's of interest only to Prince fans.
I can watch it with some interest, but I rarely have any inclination to do so. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of movies that are more rewarding. |
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The Colors R brighter, the Bond is much tighter
No Child's a failure Until the Blue Sailboat sails him away from his dreams Don't Ever Lose, Don't Ever Lose Don't Ever Lose Your Dreams | |
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The Colors R brighter, the Bond is much tighter
No Child's a failure Until the Blue Sailboat sails him away from his dreams Don't Ever Lose, Don't Ever Lose Don't Ever Lose Your Dreams | |
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The same reason I hated it. It is a terrible movie. Not as bad as Grafitti Bridge perhaps but close, real close. | |
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Because the film sucks!
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I have no idea! What? | |
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Graffiti Bridge is barely watchable
I was always able to watch UTCM bu when Christopher falls in love and he and Tricky fall out toward the end is where the movie really falls off.
But that Prince felt he could carry the movie with Tricky like (Morris & Jerome) was his ego
The movie with band scenes and carrying as a 'artist' instead of a gigolo would have taken the movie to another level.
Christopher just wasn't as likeable as the Kid | |
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Oh. What? | |
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I think critics saw Under the Cherry Moon as a silly lark. The script was flimsy, Prince's acting really showed his inexperience, and it never took itself seriously, which is why no one else took it seriously. Critics (and fans) were expecting a lot after Purple Rain. . While Purple Rain had a solid script and great editing with vivid character development, Cherry Moon didn't know what it wanted to be: is it a serious love story? Is it a comedy? Is it a musical drama? And why was Christopher Tracy so unlikeable? . Personally, I liked it, but only because I still think P was peaking (he had one in him after this with Sign o' the Times before things begain to slowly unravel) and it was a fun, cute movie, but lacked the intensity Purple Rain had. Purple Rain, and Prince and something to say -- it made a statement on a number of levels. . The thing most people forget is that this was Prince's first real failure since he became the critic's darling. Dirty Mind, Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain, Around the World -- even Parade -- all hits with critics (and fans). It wasn't until Under the Cherry Moon that Prince started getting negative reviews. . (Every glowing review that bonatoc posted above were written decades after the movie was released and all but one after April 21, 2016.) Why is it so difficult to upload an avatar? | |
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What did the critics themselves say? I never read them back then so don't remember. Time keeps on slipping into the future...
This moment is all there is... |
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No,it really isn't | |
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I remember the reviews were just awful...really brutal.I recall one review that said....
in black and white,Prince begins to remind you of something that your biology teacher asked you to dissect
My local newspaper wrote....
If you make it to the end of this less-than-cherry 'Moon',remain in your seats a little longer.The end credits feature Prince's "Mountains" video,which is actually better than the movie
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Time keeps on slipping into the future...
This moment is all there is... |
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Let's face it, the whole film was pretty rough all the way around. | |
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they killed it, were brutal as some of these other posters show. I don't think it was that bad, and prince never looked better, never, the wardrobe was on point, the music was brilliant and i've thought prince could have been a good filmaker, he showed good cinemetography here, it falls short because of his ego. as a fan, lots of it was just embarrassing at the time, there is the apocrophyl tale that he laid down in his studio and realized how bad it was but knowing it was too late to do anything about it. My own theory was that he saw morris steal PR with a character he actually coached morris to do, it was an alter ego for Prince and so he thought he could do that too and do it better, taking his sidekick along with him. He was funny but Morris delivery was different, prince's "funny" was always because he was so fucking queer (not meaning in the sexual sense, in the bizarre sense). | |
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The Wiki scoop: * Reception[edit]Box office[edit]Under the Cherry Moon failed to gain any breakout audience, regardless of much pre-publicity including a special MTV premiere in Sheridan, Wyoming. It was held there after a fan won a contest to have the film shown in her hometown.[8] The film earned $3,150,924 in its opening weekend from 976 venues, ranking #2 at the domestic box office (according to the Daily Variety Chart), and the highest among the weekend's new releases.[9] At the end of its run, the film's final domestic gross was $10,090,429.[2] Critical response[edit]The film received generally negative reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it currently holds a 35% score based on 34 reviews, with an average rating of 3.9/10. The site's consensus states: "Under the Cherry Moon may satisfy the most rabid Prince fans, but everyone else will be better served with this vanity project's far superior soundtrack."[10] Accolades[edit]The film was a multiple winner at the 7th Golden Raspberry Awards, winning five awards. The categories were: Worst Picture (tied with Howard the Duck), Worst Actor and Worst Director (Prince), Worst Supporting Actor (Jerome Benton), and Worst Original Song ("Love or Money"). It was also nominated for Worst Supporting Actress and Worst New Star (Kristin Scott Thomas), and Worst Screenplay.[11] The film was also nominated for a Stinkers Bad Movie Award for Worst Pictur
* Poor Prince!! What a blow after the overwhelming success of Purple Rain * Well....Parade is a beautiful work of art though | |
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NEW POSITION: A DEFENSE OF "UNDER THE CHERRY MOON"by Peter Sobczynski May 4, 2016
In the wake of the shocking death of musical icon Prince last month, his landmark 1984 film debut “Purple Rain” reappeared in movie theaters across the country. Like many of his fans, I took a couple of hours to watch it on the big screen, where it belongs. (In all honesty, I also went because I was seeing “Mother’s Day” later that day, figured that seeing it might help towards evening out my psychic scales.) Watching it again, I’m still convinced that it is either one of the best terrible movies ever made or one of the worst great movies of all time. In many ways, it is kind of an awful film that takes a narrative that might have seemed thin for a later vehicle and added dime-store psychology and an attitude towards women that even back then was retrograde at best (including such infamous moments as a woman being tossed into a trash dumpster for a laugh and the bit in which Apollonia Kotero is told to purify herself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka); it’s borderline disturbed at worst. At the same time, “Purple Rain” was made with a great style and energy. And unlike many rock stars who tried to make the transition to the big screen (only to find that whatever charisma they displayed on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans did not translate to standing before a movie camera), Prince himself turned out to be a mesmerizing screen presence, even when he was just standing there, performing the songs from the spectacular soundtrack. There is some great stuff in “Purple Rain,” of course, and in the annals of rock movie history, it deserves its place of prominence. But it’s most significant legacy of the film, at least from a cinematic standpoint, it is that film’s massive success ensured that Prince, if he so desired, could do basically anything he wanted, no matter how outlandish, for a follow-up and he could get it financed by people hoping that he would give them “Purple Rain 2”—either literally or metaphorically. Of course, as anyone who was following Prince even back then, he was never one for repeating himself or doing the expected. 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.
In “Under the Cherry Moon,” Prince and fellow “Purple Rain” refugee Jerome Benton play Christopher Tracy and Tricky, a pair of friends from Miami who have relocated to the French Riviera and earn their living as gigolos insinuating themselves into the bedrooms and pocketbooks of the countless rich women they come across. One day, the newspapers announce the imminent arrival of Mary Sharon (Kristin Scott Thomas, in her screen debut), a long woman with serious daddy issues about her often-absent billionaire father (and considering that her father is played by the always-terrifying Steven Berkoff, can you blame her?) and a $50 million dollar trust fund that she has just come into. This is the proverbial big fish that the Christopher and Tricky have been waiting for—the one where the ultimate prize is matrimony—and they both set off to win both her heart and her millions. However, Mary is not quite as naïve as some might think, and fails to fall for their usual business at first. Eventually, Christopher’s bizarre seduction techniques (which have to be seen to be believed) win her over and she falls in love with him. Unexpectedly, Christopher finds himself falling in love with her as well and not just because of the money, a development that does not sit well with Tricky and leads to the inevitable scene in which he says exactly the wrong things at exactly the wrong time with exactly the wrong people present. To further complicate matters, Mary’s father arrives, gets a load of the situation and is determined to get Christopher out of the picture once and for all and if a payoff does not work, he is more than willing to go to more extreme measures to get the task done. Oh yeah—while a number of Prince songs (including the smash hit “Kiss”) can be intermittently heard on the soundtrack and Christopher does work as a piano player, he doesn’t actually perform a song on-screen until nearly the halfway point when he kicks in with an ecstatic rendition of “Girls and Boys.” After that, his only other on-screen performance comes during the end credits when (Spoiler Alert!) he reunites with the Revolution in Heaven to jam out on “Mountains.” Man, that must have been one hell of a pitch meeting. If one applies normal critical standard to “Under the Cherry Moon,” it could easily be dismissed as little more than a vanity project gone horribly wrong. The screenplay by Becky Johnston, who would go on to write the scripts for “The Prince of Tides” and “Seven Years in Tibet,” plods along aimlessly and is laden with clichés so hoary that they seem to have been excavated from a museum. The performances are all over the place, ranging from the barely-there underacting by Kristin Scott Thomas (who was a replacement for Prince’s then-girlfriend Susannah Melvoin, originally cast in the part—a rumor that Madonna was considered for the part as sends the mind reeling) to the scenery-chewing histrionics of Berkoff (who was also a replacement when the originally cast Terrence Stamp quit early in the production). The romantic chemistry between the two leads is practically nonexistent, which works in the early scenes when Mary is keeping Christopher at arms length, but not so much in the later scenes when they are supposed to be in love. Frankly, there is more genuine chemistry between Christopher and his cohort Tricky throughout, which adds an intriguing layer to the proceedings (and there is the insinuation that they have engaged in threesomes with their sexy landlord in order to beat paying the rent), it has the effect of making Mary seem like the beard than the object of desire. And yet, if you can get past those flaws—and I admit that may be a chore for some—“Under the Cherry Moon” proves to be an utterly fascinating film thanks to the multiple contributions on both sides of the camera by Prince. As he demonstrated in “Purple Rain,” he is not a good actor in the conventional sense, but as a screen presence, he is undeniably captivating. Unlike a lot of music stars, he is able to rethink his mystique into cinematic terms in ways that are strangely compelling. The difference here is that this time around, he gets a chance to show off a sly sense of humor that was largely absent in the generally self-serious “Purple Rain.” Throughout the film, he demonstrates crack comic timing that manifests itself in everything from his wild way with dialogue (as soon as you hear it, you will be imitating his unique method of saying “Garçon!”) to his cheerful willingness to engage in overt mugging for the camera, which somehow fits his character perfectly. Even better are the scenes featuring him and Jerome Benton (who stole scenes in “Purple Rain” as Morris Day’s aide-de-camp), in which the two go at it like a classic comedy duo romping through some of their most beloved bits—in some alternate version of Hollywood, Prince and Benton continued the act and went on to become the modern-day Martin & Lewis in a series of classic comedies. (If you doubt this, then go to YouTube and look up the phrase “wrecka stow” and prepare to be delighted.)
At a time when most filmmakers were trying to approximate the look and style of music video, Prince, in conjunction with German-born cinematographer Michael Ballhaus(just beginning a Hollywood career that would see him shot such films as “Broadcast News,” “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and a number of Martin Scorsese classics including “The Last Temptation of Christ,” “Goodfellas” and “The Departed”) and legendary production designer Richard Sylbert, created a film that, while set in the present day, was a deliberate evocation of old-time Hollywood glamour that also served as an ideal demonstration of the eternal glories of black-and-white filmmaking. However, the throwback visuals are more than just a stylistic ploy. By taking a film that looks and feels as if Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers will be popping up for a musical number and then placing someone like Prince—a creature who would never have been admitted into the star pantheon of that era for any number of reasons—in the middle of it all, it offers up a subtextual tension that plays nicely with the more overt conflict between the outside Christopher and the closed world of money and privilege in which Mary resides, even if she herself does not completely embody it. The music was perversely released on vinyl with the title “Parade” rather than the name of the film it was featured in. The blend of funk, rock and dance sounds mixed together with both American and European sensibilities was underrated at the time (although a hit by any normal standards, “Parade” did not come close to the sales of “Purple Rain,’” and the electrifying “Kiss” was the only big single off of it) but it plays beautifully today. Oddly, the music was de-emphasized in the film—Thomas gets to perform an on-screen musical number before Prince does—and it is only when you listen to the full album that you can fully realize how strong the songs are. (This is most evident with “Sometimes It Snows In April,” which in the film underscores one of the most awkward moments but comes to full emotional life when heard on its own.) The lack of full-scale musical numbers is especially strange when you consider that this is a movie practically begging to burst out into full-scale production numbers throughout. Like the film, the soundtrack is a strange and lovely meditation of life, love and death that is shot through with a lot of humor and which finds Prince pursuing his own distinct personal vision, no matter what the possible commercial repercussions might have been. As it turned out, those repercussions would prove to be somewhat severe because when “Under the Cherry Moon” premiered, it was largely lambasted by critics (though a few critics, including J. Hoberman, were brave enough to defend it); when audiences discovered that it was a Prince film that was in black-and-white, that he didn’t sing much and that wasn’t “Purple Rain 2,” they stayed away. To be fair, even if the film had been a more conventional outing, there is a good chance that it still would have failed, as while “Purple Rain” was released at a time when the Hollywood/MTV crossover was at its zenith, this one happened to come at a time when the marketplace was glutted with films starring rock stars who were being rejected by even their most ardent fans—it came out a couple of weeks after David Bowie turned up in the Jim Henson fantasy “Labyrinth” and a few weeks before the infamous Madonna bomb “Shanghai Surprise.” After its failure, Prince seemed to lose interest in the filmmaking process, possibly because he found it difficult to reconcile his one-man-band approach to creating music with the filmmaking process in which hundreds of pairs of hands are required to create even the most singular of visions. In 1987, he directed “Sign ‘O’ the Times,” a concert film tying in with the double album of the same name that caught him at one of his peaks as a live performer but which remains frustratingly unavailable, at least in America. In 1990, he finally gave everyone the “Purple Rain” sequel they had been clamoring for, but the result, “Graffiti Bridge” (1990), was so silly—though it did contain a killer soundtrack that alone makes it worth watching at least once—that it seemed as if he was trying to kill off his movie career for good. If that was the case, mission accomplished because unless he has a surprise or two in his fabled vault, he never directed a feature film again, though he would do the occasional soundtrack work, most famously for the first “Batman” movie, and turned in a memorable, though admittedly head-scratching, appearance on the sitcom “New Girl.” Even though I consider it to be the better film, I know that “Under the Cherry Moon” will never threaten “Purple Rain”s placement in the pop culture firmament. And yet, if “Purple Rain” is the “Citizen Kane” of Prince movies—the instant classic that will always be celebrated—then “Under the Cherry Moon” is the “Touch of Evil”—a far more disreputable film that is so delightfully deranged that you stare at it in amazement that such a thing could have possibly emerged from a Hollywood studio. It plays better now than it did when it came out. With Prince’s untimely death sending both ardent fans and newcomers to his vast and fascinating oeuvre, hopefully some will take a chance and give it another shot and discover for themselves just how good it really is. Maybe some brave soul will even go so far as to book it as a midnight show so that fans can come together at last to see what they missed out on 30 years earlier. Either way, they will come out of it amused, dazzled and with an immediate desire to purchase the soundtrack if they do not already have it. If you do watch it, make sure that you have a wrecka stow handy.
[Edited 1/25/19 19:36pm] The Colors R brighter, the Bond is much tighter
No Child's a failure Until the Blue Sailboat sails him away from his dreams Don't Ever Lose, Don't Ever Lose Don't Ever Lose Your Dreams | |
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"The romantic chemistry between the two leads is practically nonexistent, which works in the early scenes when Mary is keeping Christopher at arms length, but not so much in the later scenes when they are supposed to be in love. Frankly, there is more genuine chemistry between Christopher and his cohort Tricky throughout, which adds an intriguing layer to the proceedings (and there is the insinuation that they have engaged in threesomes with their sexy landlord in order to beat paying the rent), it has the effect of making Mary seem like the beard than the object of desire." * Guess he should have re-thought pulling Susannah from the film??? | |
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ya, a lot of people have mentioned that, and when "bromance" became a term, people here used this film to illustrate it. there was the seen when they both play swishy and bicker about how their colors are different. "i'll slap the curls out your head" or some such. At any rate, after prince died, it was good seeing him alive and well in any footage, including Graffiti Bridge. | |
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You know what could have really improved this film? Casting Prince as an open mic/street musician instead of lounge pianist. This way they could have worked in some more musical numbers and made the character more believable. | |
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Oh yes....some VERY awkward "bromance" scenes in that film - the skin color scene, the bath tub scene, and I'm sure more that I'm not remembering. Prince was seriously in touch with his "Camille" alter ego in that film - at least from a style/behavior standpoint. | |
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My answer to that would be, did you see Under The Cherry Moon? | |
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Well....on a more positive note - at least it did not ruin Prince's or Kristin Scott Thomas's careers. Although, I imagine it took awhile for Thomas to bounce back from that gig | |
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no sense of Prince humour....same with GB | |
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