I was a Buddhist on Tuesday but I was into Nietzsche by Friday
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's top 50 films of 2022
#12 : Moonage Daydream
Glorious, shapeshifting eulogy to David Bowie from director Brett Morgen, whose intimate montage of the uniquely influential artist celebrates his career, creativity and unfailing charm.
.jpeg)
Well, we've completely given up on the correct order this year, haven't we? The excuse this time is that I had a thirteen hour flight and a completely random selection of films on my iPad - and this was the one that I was in the mood for. I can't claim to be a Bowie aficionado (and there's plenty of his stuff I have no time for at all) but I like the man and his constant efforts at reinvention - I'd also heard great things about this and so was really looking forward to it.
And yeah, it's lovely. It makes quite an interesting choice because it makes very little effort to educate you about the man - it "merely" presents footage from the archive running from the early 70s to his untimely death in 2016 and let's you get on with enjoying them. It's mostly clips from his shows and interviews, interspersed with various random (generally pretty spacey) graphics, which look nice but are generally meaningless. The timeline is, at a high level, pretty linear but within that it jumps around quite a lot - there's certainly no chance of getting bored.
It basically presents Bowie as an extraordinary human being - and I have to say I have absolutely no problems with that. He comes across as intensely curious but also surprisingly sad in the early days (there's one amusing bit where he talks about being in his thirties as though he's ancient) but it does feel that with age came happiness and, in the end, acceptance of a life well lived - it has a beautifully optimistic and contented ending. There's also a lovely section on meeting and marrying Iman - in one interview clip he refers to some nonsense he previously said about love and rather than saying “I was wrong” about it, he says “I’ve grown a distaste for that statement”, which is a great turn of phrase.
The interview footage is great - a lot of what he said (particularly in the early days) was utter nonsense and you get the impression that he totally knew it and he was just waiting to see what reaction he’d get. There’s an interesting clip towards the end where the interviewer says he seems at ease with himself and then points out that he’s always been good at convincing people with his image, so maybe is this just another pretend phase? (to which David merely laughs as though he’s been caught out). He gets through quite a few accents across the years and we see some lovely vintage footage of him with Russell Harty, Joan Bakewell and Sue Lawley - you can’t get much English than that, can you? Continuing the English theme, he also had TERRIBLE teeth in the early days.
There's also some excellent interview footage from the early days which includes him saying “No shit, Sherlock!” which totally lead me down an internet rabbit hole as to who said that first - Wikipedia's first reference is Little Shop Of Horrors from 1986, but Bowie definitely pre-dates that. Reddit suggests it first appeared in the 50s, but the earliest one they come up with is in Volume 30 of "Ararat" published by the Armenian General Benevolent Union of America in 1960 - which means absolutely nothing to me and sounds suspiciously made up!
The concert footage is also great - those 70s concerts in particular looked like a load of fun and the fan footage is most amusing. At one point there's a teenage girl in floods of tears because she didn't get to meet the man and, when pushed as to what's so special about him, merely replies "He's just smashing!". There's also a lovely live version of “Space Oddity” in here which I’d not heard before - it's well worth checking out for that alone.
If I had to find fault with this, I'd say that 2:14 was a tad too long for me - but conversely I can quite imagine many others saying it wasn’t nearly long enough (I can see a six hour plus Get Backy kinda thing working well - and being a lot less dull). I could also accept the argument that it steers clear of controversy and his less successful musical phases (for example, the phrase "Tin Machine" is never mentioned) but that's a choice the director made and I'm happy enough with it.
There's no doubt he lived a full and interesting life (at one point he was the only “rock star” to have ever acted on Broadway) and he was effortlessly cool (it made me consider trying to rock the fedora look - although I suspect I might not look quite as cool as he did) and this film does a good job of presenting it. I doubt you’ll want to watch it if you’re not a Bowie admirer, but it often looks very beautiful and there are far worse ways of spending your time. And if you are a Bowie admirer and haven't checked it out, then you'll love it - at time of writing it's available to stream on Netflix or to rent at all the usual locations.
Comments
Post a Comment