Remembering Prince

Like most, I'm still processing the sudden passing of Prince yesterday at 57. As with the loss of David Bowie earlier this year, the news hits straight to the gut and takes a few hours, if not days, to fully absorb that someone so dynamic, vibrant and full of life is actually gone.

I grew up in the '80s as part of the MTV Generation, discovering artists and their songs mainly through the advent of music videos rather than traditional radio airplay. Oh, I was a slave to Top 40 radio, too, religiously taping songs off Casey Kasem's Sunday-morning AT40 shows from age 12-15, but I mainly found and soaked up said artists and their songs through highly stylized three-minute films beaming from my television every afternoon after school.

One of the first videos I can remember seeing was for Prince's "Little Red Corvette" in 1983. A great song wrapped in a pretty low-key performance video (they were all like that in the early days): just a microphone stand, back-up band and a man in a shimmering purple suit. Pretty simple. Except that the man was Prince. He may just have been standing there for three minutes, but he oozed such charisma and style you couldn't take your eyes off of him.

The next year brought the soundtrack to the film Purple Rain. The first single was "When Doves Cry" and both the song and the video just blew my then-13-year-old mind (I still consider it one of the top ten songs of the entire decade). From there came "Let's Go Crazy." I can remember buying that one as a 45 and playing it and the b-side "Erotic City" over and over on my little Emerson turntable with my bedroom door closed so my mom couldn't hear certain lyrics. Ah, good times.

By 1987, I had transitioned from Top 40 to alternative and I can't say I bought any Prince tunes after
that (well, maybe the Batman soundtrack in 1989). But I was always interested in what he was doing. You couldn't be a fan of music and not be interested in what Prince was doing next.

Prince was in a league of his own. A pure genius and a talent unlike any we'll ever see again. I cut my teeth on the music of the '80s. It'll always be a reminder of my youth and basically encapsulates a 30-plus-year passion for sonic creativity. Prince's music will always be a big part of that. Thank you, my friend.

Quick Flick Review: Midnight Special

Jeff Nichols' Midnight Special is a well-acted, compelling sci-fi thriller, one of those come-out-of-nowhere surprises that actually renews your faith in the power of original cinema.

The film opens on a local news broadcast playing on the television inside a Texas roadside motel room. From it we glean an Amber Alert has been issued for eight-year-old Alton Meyer and that his alleged abductor is one Roy Tomlin (Michael Shannon).

As the camera pulls back inside the room, we spy Roy loading a shotgun into a bag and another man (Joel Edgerton) securing cardboard over the window and peephole. Sitting in the center of the room, reading a comic by flashlight under a bed sheet, is Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), goggles over his eyes, construction-grade headphones over his ears. Roy tells him it's time and soon the three are hitting the road under the cover of darkness.

We soon learn Roy is Alton's father and the two have fled a religious cult that had been exploiting the boy as a pseudo-messiah. You see Alton is special, prone to speaking in odd tounges and light bursts shooting from his eyes. With the help of childhood friend Lucas (Edgerton), Roy is determined to get Alton to a secret location where something remarkable may or may not happen.

It isn't long before cult members and the government (led by Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Adam Driver) are pursuing the trio across the highways and in the shadows of the American South.

Midnight Special definitely has a Close Encounters/E.T. vibe about it, albeit a little more intense and enigmatic. But it's those qualities that provide an engaging, contemporary freshness to the tale and set Nichols' film on its own path away from those Spielberg classics.

Shannon, Edgerton and Driver all give solid, memorable performances and Kirsten Dunst provides a nice, quiet turn as Alton's excommunicated mother.

The only complaint is that Alton's powers are really never explained, other than they mirror beings who inhabit a world "on top" of our world. And when that world is eventually revealed, it resembles a utopia straight out of last year's ill-fated Disney debacle Tomorrowland.

Those quibbles aside, Midnight Special is a satisfying, deeply layered and highly effective piece of cinema, one that makes you look forward to what Jeff Nichols does next. Grade: B+