MOONAGE DAYDREAM - new film about David Bowie - trailers & articles

[highplainsdem]

Last edited Sun Jul 31, 2022, 02:31 AM - Edit history (2)

Official trailer, released a few days ago:

Teaser trailer released a couple of months ago:

Interview with documentarian Brett Morgen at Cannes:

Long interview with Morgen in IndieWire:

https://www.indiewire.com/2022/05/moonage-daydream-brett-morgen-heart-attack-bowie-saved-him-1234727833/



I'll be curious to see this. OTOH, I haven't seen anything so far about Tony Visconti, Bowie's long-time friend and producer, being involved in this project, and I'm not sure how anyone can understand Bowie's career without including Visconti, who's been in other documentaries about Bowie.

And..I just read the Variety review of the film, which helps explain why this isn't at all a typical documentary.

https://variety.com/2022/film/reviews/moonage-daydream-review-brett-morgen-david-bowie-1235277125/

When it opens this fall, “Moonage Daydream” will play in IMAX theaters, and that feels right, because this is a movie to give yourself over to. It’s no mere epic music video, though at times it feels like one, as it rides the pulse of Bowie’s music like a psychedelic locomotive. We’ve seen trippy documentaries before, but Morgen seems to have created this movie to be rock ‘n’ roll. That’s part of its colliding-image irreverence. Watching “Moonage Daydream,” there are essential facts you won’t hear, and many touchstones that get skipped over (in the entire movie, you’ll never even see an album cover). But you get closer than you expect to the chilly sexy enigma of who David Bowie really was.

One reason Morgen may have chosen not to make a standard chronological biographical portrait — though the film unfurls Bowie’s life more or less in order — is that there have been two very fine Bowie documentaries in the last decade: “David Bowie: Five Years” (2013), which covered his crucial blast-off phase as the androgynous demon chameleon of the early ’70s, and its companion piece, “David Bowie: The Last Five Years” (2017), made after Bowie’s death in 2016, which scrupulously covered his late period of relative experimental quietude, his marriage to Iman, and the haunting creation of “Blackstar” (the album and performance piece) when he knew he was dying of cancer. These were terrific films, and there was no need for Morgen to go back over that terrain.

Instead, he became the first filmmaker to work in full cooperation with the Bowie estate, which gave him unprecedented access to its archives: a trove of unseen performances, as well as rare paintings, drawings, recordings, photographs, films, and journals — a total of 5 million items in all. This amounted to the biggest David Bowie candy store an adventurous filmmaker could wish for, and Morgen has used it to tell Bowie’s story in a hurtling multimedia fashion that dissolves a lot of the usual categories of our thinking about Bowie (“Look, he’s the Thin White Duke now!” “Look at all the doors Ziggy Stardust opened!” “That’s when he got off the drugs…”). The film lets those phases melt into each other, so that we register not just the ch-ch-changes but the underlying continuity.

-snip-

The movie starts, as any David Bowie documentary must, with the detonation of reality that was Ziggy Stardust. Morgen uses amazing concert scenes — so much better than the disappointingly lackluster footage we saw in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1983 documentary — to show us what an enraptured outlaw Bowie was when he first landed. The alien rooster hair, the burning harlequin eyes, the killer legs, the smirk of lust — it’s not just that he straddled genders but that he infused the straddling with a rock star’s desire, and with music that was both melodic and volcanic. Morgen has mixed the soundtrack himself, and the concert scenes have a sonic power we’re not used to. Sure, we don’t just go to a documentary to experience the transcendence of “All the Young Dudes.” But that’s certainly why we go to a concert movie, and “Moonage Daydream” is a kind of hybrid — a hallucinatory jukebox doc with killer subtext.

Of course, Bowie's career didn't start with Ziggy Stardust. It had started years earlier, and for most of that time Tony Visconti was Bowie's friend and producer (he was in a band with Bowie at one time, and he and his girlfriend also shared a flat in a converted Victorian mansion with David and Angie Bowie), as well as Marc Bolan's friend and producer. Bolan (T.Rex) and Bowie created and shaped glam rock, and Visconti's biography gives a lot of background on that early period. Visconti was also part of the Berlin period that produced that famous trilogy of Bowie albums in the 1970s, and he produced late Bowie albums including Bowie's final album, Blackstar. Visconti's memoirs, published in 2007, describe his earlier work with Bowie, and he's given a lot of interviews about their work together after 2007.

If he's completely left out of Morgen's film, it will seem really odd.

OTOH, Morgen does seem to be after a film about his own feelings about Bowie, rather than a realistic documentary. So it might be enjoyable as one very long music video.


EDITING after a bit more reading, which turned up the info that Tony Visconti was at least involved in this documentary's music.

From AV Club:

https://www.avclub.com/watch-trailer-david-bowie-documentary-moonage-daydream-1849338247

Of course, music is a major component of the film. Producer Tony Visconti, who worked with Bowie from the beginning of his career to his final album Blackstar, was enlisted to revisit his past work for the documentary. Alongside sound mixer Paul Massey, Bowie’s original stems were remixed to be heard in a theatrical setting. A total of 48 songs appear in the project.

More info, plus some critical remarks about the film, from the Hollywood Reporter:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/moonage-daydream-brett-morgen-david-bowie-doc-1235150193/

What Morgen’s multilayered collage has going for it is incredible wraparound sound treatment. Bowie tracks from across the 50-plus years of his career have been retooled for pumped-up theatrical presentation by music producer Tony Visconti and sound mixer Paul Massey. But for this lifetime Bowie fan at least, there’s a huge gap between listening to the artist’s music and listening to him blather on about it without actually saying much.

Bowie was many things, but a great interview was arguably not one of them, at least not often, based on the evidence of seemingly countless hours of audio and television clips sampled here. We get his glam-rock days of cultivating a mystique that extended from his androgynous look to his fashionable bisexuality; his philosophical and spiritual wanderings, struggling to grasp the transience of existence (“I was a Buddhist on Tuesday and I was into Nietzsche by Friday”); and his ultimate conclusion that, yes, it all does matter after all, resulting in a platitudinous commitment to embrace positivity.

Bowie describes himself as a collector of personalities, and it hurts me to say this, but anyone encountering him for the first time in Morgen’s film might be forgiven for concluding that alongside the musical genius, he could be a pretentious bore.

That reductive dismissal is inadvertently furthered by Morgen’s busy visual approach, randomly punctuating the film with bursts of acid-trip psychedelia, animation, color washes and graphics, to the point where the movie starts to seem more like an art installation. Many fans will be just fine with that, which probably makes Neon’s plan to include IMAX bookings in the fall theatrical release a smart one. But others might be left craving something as blandly conventional as a talking-head interview or two.

That Hollywood Reporter reviewer goes on to call the film "unlimited archival access in search of a perspective" and "shapeless and baggy." But the reviewer still enjoyed the music and the concert footage.


Again, it sounds as if it will be best appreciated as a very long music video.


EDITING AGAIN to refer people to reply 3 below, excerpts from Rolling Stone, explaining what the filmmaker's intent was with this project, which is important in light of what the Hollywood Reporter review said.

[highplainsdem]

1. Kicking after editing the OP to add some important information on the film.

[Tree-Hugger]

2. Can't wait

This looks fabulous and I am eager to see it on Imax. I've seen a million Bowie interviews and don't quite get a pretentious bore vibe from him at all.....it'll be interesting to see what this reviewer is on about.

[highplainsdem]

3. The Rolling Stone review I just read (I'm still catching up here) helps shed some light on

the filmmaker's perspective that might have created a filter on Bowie that could make him seem like a pretentious bore to some people, maybe a lot of people.

Brett Morgen suffered a heart attack while working on this project, and afterward he came to see Bowie as a guide to living. Hw doesn't use the word messiah, and we can be grateful for that, but it's a worshipful view of Bowie I'm personally uncomfortable with, since it reminds me all too much of a very worshipful view of the Moody Blues I've run across in some of their fans, some of whom believe that band, at least through the early '70s (those fans tend to dislike the Moodies' later albums), were here to enlighten humanity, to guide people.

From Rolling Stone:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/david-bowie-documentary-moonage-daydream-1355400/

Then, on January 5, 2017, Morgen suffered a massive heart attack. He flat-lined for three full minutes, then lay in a coma for five days. And when the filmmaker awakened, everything had completely changed. “I was 47 years old, which is relatively young for a heart attack,” Morgen says. “But my life was completely out of balance. I started to think about what sort of impact I’d leave behind, what sort of lessons I’d taught my kids to that point. And it was, work hard, work hard, work harder — the same things that put me in the hospital. I was lost and needed to learn how to live and breathe again.”

When he finally went back to screening Bowie’s old interviews, TV appearances, and concert clips, Morgen still saw the early Seventies singer with the screwed-up eyes and screwed-down hairdo, the man who made you believe he might have actually fallen to Earth from some far-out planet. But now he also began to pick up on what he thought of a guide for living a more present life, and how not to let time pass you by, in his subject’s story. All of Bowie’s musings about art, change, and his need for constant growth began to feel less like soundbites and more like something profound. He found himself tapping deeper into the Tao of Bowie. “There was a lot of wisdom and guidance and nurturing that now came to the forefront,” he says. “I realized that, through David, I’d have an opportunity to tell my kids everything that they would need to know about how to live a fulfilling life in the 21st century.”

By the time Morgen had recovered and finally finished viewing all of the Bowiemania he’d assembled, he realized that Moonage Daydream had strayed extremely far from most of his original notions. Still, while he had some idea of how he wanted the movie to feel — how to emphasize the “experiential” aspect of sitting in a theater and feeling as if you’re seeing and hearing Bowie’s work for the first time — Morgen still wasn’t sure what the connective tissue was that would allow him to do it. “I still didn’t want to make a film that explained anything — ‘He did this and he did that,'” he says. “But because the heart attack had messed with my memory, I was having a hard time remembering what I’d seen two years ago and connecting it to the later stuff. I didn’t have a producer or a research assistant to bounce things off of, or a studio executive giving me notes. The weight of doing Bowie without a safety net, without a sort of straight narrative to lock into, was terrifying. I didn’t know how to do it. I was excited by the Bowie Guide to Living aspect but in a dark place about everything else.”

-snipping two paragraphs about how Morgen used a week in 2018 when his family was out of town to just go take train rides for that week, for the change of scene-

And it was during that days-long train ride, he said, that he’d finally find his through line. “It’s transience,” Morgen says. “That’s the one thing that’s constant in his life and in his career. You can filter every one of his albums through that lens, and so many of his artistic choices. Normally, people talk about it in terms of fashion and musical genres with him, but you see it everywhere with him: chaos, spirituality, gender fluidity, his approach to songwriting. Even the 1980s act as a sort of reaction to transience! From there, the script just pored out of me, and it became the idea of fashioning a kind of jukebox musical around that idea. Take three songs from each album, so I’m not leaning too much on one period over another. Each song has to have some relationship to transience. It could be the writing, or the way he wrote it. It can be thematically overt or be subtle. But they somehow had to connect, so that whether the audience understood it or not, it could tell there was a purpose to it being there.”

Bowie himself wasn't a bore, IMO -- I've seen and read lots of interviews, too. But filtering his statements, which were probably NOT meant to be taken as profundities, to create "the Tao of Bowie" aka "the Bowie Guide to Living" -- and those are Morgen's own words -- runs a very serious risk of making Bowie seem like a pretentious bore.

I would NOT want to read any sort of book by Brett Morgen about the Tao of Bowie or the Bowie Guide to Living, I also suspect Bowie would have some choice words about any such literary and sermonizing project.

But the music in the film, especially with Visconti's remixing, should help save it anyway, distracting from Morgen's filtering and preaching via very selective editing of Bowie's own words.

And I really hope the film does not create a subset of Bowie fans who view him as a great teacher who was here to enlighten us.

[Skittles]

4. haha IN YOUR FACE, DESANTIS

[highplainsdem]

5. LOL! It will be interesting to see how DeSantis and christofascists in general react to this,

especially if the film does really well.

[highplainsdem]

6. Review from The Wrap:

https://thewrap.com/moonage-daydream-review-david-bowie/

[highplainsdem]

7. Entertainment Weekly review:

https://ew.com/movies/movie-reviews/david-bowie-moonage-daydream-brett-morgen/

[highplainsdem]

8. Link to a review by a Bowie fan who's also a journalist:

https://stevepafford.com/moonage/