There is so much I could be blogging about, you know, IRL stuff, but then I end up writing something like this:

I am now officially an old old woman.

The Daddy downloaded Purple Rain and we have been watching it in installments and do you know what? I have been feeling a little nostalgic for simpler times. Don’t worry, I am not going to say simpler, more innocent times.

It was actually the first time I have watched Purple Rain and it is all a bit sad and pathetic isn’t it? At least with hindsight. All that C-grade “acting” and flouncing around and Prince doing his Bollywood starlet impersonations with big mascara’d doe eyes. I know we all thought it was cool at the time.

(Cough, except for me because I was 12 and wouldn’t have been allowed to see it anyway. I did secretly want to be Madonna, though. Which was a totally healthy reaction for any teenage girl back then).

There is no getting past one thing though. Whether or not through an accident of sloppy directing, it does do a good job of depicting the drama and pathos that is teenage courting. Ha! I used “courting” on purpose. Because I am old. Also I used “teenage” even though anyone at 19 should rightfully be considered an adult. That’s a sign of age, too.

What I mean is, Purple Rain is just one long music video with quick cuts to posy teenage angst and long silences and issues which never get resolved. It’s all very confusing, just like being young is very confusing. It’s like one long alcoholic haze. Things happen for seemingly no reason. You know, he takes her on the back of his bike to the middle of nowhere, she gets down under a bridge by a train track (why? why?), they fight and she runs away. Then he gets back on his bike and rides home and apparently doesn’t see her for a day or so.

Wait. Pause. Rewind (which you do by noisily pressing down that big mechanical button. And it doesn’t quite click in, so you hit it again, this time with more force. Some of the young’uns will have no idea what this old lady is going on about).

Let’s go over that again. Never mind that he just left her there. This is Prince, after all.

This is what gives me pause: he didn’t reach for his cellphone to order her back (does anybody else remember that awful feeling of dread when you would fight with someone in a public place and they would flounce off, leaving you to calm down but with absolutely no way of contacting them to find out where they were?). And where are her frantic texts, telling him what he can do with his damn hoop earring which was probably only gold plate anyway and she knows because she saw one on Ebay for $2.99? (U R NUTHIN 2 ME is about the best I can do, given that I came of age pre the emergence of rampant text msging). There are no scenes of her updating her profiles on Facebook and MySpace to “single” and then writing a host of status updates trashing him. No shots of her returning to her hotel room to cry over You Tube videos of his performances on a loop. She also isn’t DM’ing her BFF back in Norleans to ask her what she should do now. Actually,  and we know this because she says so in the film, Appollonia doesn’t even have a phone. So I’m guessing she couldn’t update her blog either.

And where is the scene where he finds her website (complete of course with poses in lingerie) and then googles her and finds the nekkid photos and throws the laptop against the wall?

You know, that is how I would have written the movie.

Except it was 1984 and I didn’t have a crystal ball. And maybe, just maybe, those times weren’t so simple after all.