Moonage Daydream Premiers Cannes 2022

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Mike Boom
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Moonage Daydream Premiers Cannes 2022

Postby Mike Boom » 15 Apr 2022, 18:58

Feature film will include previously unreleased footage from Bowie’s personal archives

From Pitchfork - Variety first reported the news of Moonage Daydream last November. At the time, a source told the publication that the film is “neither documentary nor biography, but an immersive cinematic experience built, in part, upon thousands of hours of never before seen material,”

Full story here

https://pitchfork.com/news/new-david-bowie-film-moonage-daydream-to-premiere-at-2022-cannes-festival/

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Re: Moonage Daydream Premiers Cannes 2022

Postby Mike Boom » 25 May 2022, 03:23


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Re: Moonage Daydream Premiers Cannes 2022

Postby naughty boy » 25 May 2022, 13:08

The Cannes midnight premiere of Brett Morgen’s lavish David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream started slightly late. Why? Because the director was out on the red carpet, dancing wildly to a booming soundtrack of classic Bowie hits. This high-energy display was charming, hilarious and very Cannes, where partying is key to the festival brand. But a cynic might have taken it as a cautionary hint of Morgen’s own pop-star ambitions, putting himself front and centre of a big, splashy film about a complex. multi-layered avant-rock chameleon.

Freewheeling through Bowie’s vast musical legacy, Moonage Daydream is an opulent IMAX-sized spectacle heavily driven by the late starman’s live performances across the decades, all overlaid with sparkly new visual treatments and densely woven with clips from interviews, music videos, feature films and more. For hardcore fans, the buried treasure in this labyrinthine velvet goldmine is the previously unseen concert footage and photos from the singer’s personal collection. Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti is behind the thunderous high-spec audio mix, so the whole project has an official seal of approval.

There is a mass of material here, some of it magnificent, some shapeless and superfluous, hence that distended triple-vinyl concept-album runtime of 2 hours 20 minutes. Heading to further festivals after Cannes, including the opening night slot at Sheffield Docfest in June, Moonage Daydream adds little new to the growing canon of posthumous Bowie scholarship. Even so, the legendary rocker is more popular than ever since his shock death from cancer in 2016, spawning a boom in museum shows, films, album box sets, stage musicals, tribute concerts and more. Lush, loud and sexy, Morgen’s impressionistic memorial is likely to do brisk business when it opens theatrically in September.

Moonage Daydream has been in gestation for five years, since soon after Bowie’s death. Morgen actually met the rock legend back in 2007 to propose a documentary collaboration which never bore fruit. But the Oscar and Emmy-winning director has since proved highly adept at assembling archive-driven music films with an imaginative slant and an immersive feel, notably the Rolling Stones’ performance anthology Crossfire Hurricane (2012) and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015). There are stylistic echoes of both here.

Morgen has wisely not attempted a factual biopic approach with Moonage Daydream, arguing that dozens of existing films and books have already covered that ground. This is chiefly a film that foregrounds Bowie as high-voltage theatrical performer and living artwork. Like Todd Haynes’ recent Velvet Underground documentary, it also pays passing homage to the rich cultural source material that inspired Bowie, from German Expressionism to Japanese kabuki theatre, from Kerouac to Coltrane to Kubrick.

Morgen calls Moonage Daydream an “experiental nonfiction film”. It certainly plays like a full-spectrum sensory feast, with music, speech and visuals all thickly layered into a maximalist mosaic that sometimes feels deliciously rich, at other times cluttered and overwhelming. Drenching classic Bowie songs in psychedelic Pop Art graphics, panoramic sci-fi vistas, animated snippets and random quickfire newsreel footage does not necessarily enhance the music or its creator.

Grasping for a loose narrative thread in all this kaleidoscopic chaos, Morgen uses Bowie’s more high-minded philosophical ruminations as a guide, peppering the film with quotes about Nietzsche and Buddha, transience and transcendence. The singer certainly had a rare intellectual curiosity, but he also spoke a lot of pretentious nonsense in interviews, which Morgen treats as precious pearls of wisdom. In his Cannes press material, the director seems to view Bowie as a kind of spiritual mentor, describing the film as “highly personal” and a “letter to my children”. Inevitably, the authorial voice running through Moonage Daydream often feels too much like Morgen and too little like Bowie.

In fairness, the prime target audience for Moonage Daydream is probably not fastidious Bowie geeks (like me) who will already be very familiar with most of the source material. Indeed, I was in the audience for at at least one of the concerts featured here. Admittedly there is some snobbish uber-fan appeal in forensically breaking down which promo videos Morgen has pillaged for narrative-style shots, which Philip Glass piece he has used to replace the original audio track, which vintage BBC interviews he has cannibalised for quotes, and so on. But these rarefied nerdgasms are small pleasures.

The most uncritical audience for Moonage Daydream will likely be casual fans or recent coverts, who may not have previously been aware of some key threads in Bowie’s hinterland: his schizophrenic half-brother Terry Burns, for example, who turned the future pop legend onto modern jazz and cult literature. Or his own dabbling in visual art, as represented here by a colourful montage of pretty decent neo-Expressionist paintings. Even more obsessive fans will find a few rare treasures. The professionally shot footage of Bowie’s 1978 Isolar II tour, at the peak of his avant-rock “Berlin period”, is a ravishing delight but frustratingly brief.

Above all else, Moonage Daydream features some gloriously vivid performances of classic Bowie numbers: Space Oddity, All The Young Dudes, Life on Mars, Gene Genie, Oh You Pretty Things, Cracked Actor, Heroes, Absolute Beginners, Let’s Dance, Hello Spaceboy, Blackstar and more. As an assault on the senses with lofty spiritual intentions, it feels bombastic and bloated. But as a high-gloss video jukebox of some of the greatest pop music ever written, this is a sense-swamping banquet of Bowie-ness, a crash course for the ravers.


https://thefilmverdict.com/2022/05/24/m ... 60I9ipmesY
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.

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Re: Moonage Daydream Premiers Cannes 2022

Postby Minnie the Minx » 25 May 2022, 13:50

That write up is quite funny.
I’ll go and see it of course!
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

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Someone in your line of work usually as their own man cave aka the shed we're they can potter around fixing stuff or something don't they?


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Re: Moonage Daydream Premiers Cannes 2022

Postby Minnie the Minx » 23 Sep 2022, 14:20

We saw this at an IMAX cinema last night so we had the full on visuals and jolly loud booming sound, which was a plus. The film will be much reduced by watching on your TV.
We went with a couple of friends- one fellow Bowie nut and her partner, a Bowie appreciator but perhaps not quite as obsessed. ( A bit like me and Baron.)
I don't know what to say, really! It was exactly as I expected, but I got more out of it than I thought. I was wary initially of the amount of "Bowie talks his freaky wisdom" there was going to be, but it ended up being completely palatable and I never felt like clipping him across the ears for being a precocious child.

I will say that it was unlike anything I have ever seen. Even with reservations, the glory of the previously unseen footage is undeniable. If ultimately, it's all about the music, the scenes of rehearsals and backstage prep and the glorious camera angles when he runs on stage to a screaming crowd will melt the hardest hearts. There is also plenty of footage of him just dicking about, walking through cities, lining up at airports - all of which is (probably intentionally) designed to make him look like a loner. There was a big emphasis on him being the wandering, culture absorbing minstrel and him talking about his ART and the need to explore and not settle down in order to evolve. (As Baron said, very easy when you're swimming in money.) But in fairness, his dedication to that artform was pretty unswerving and his happiness when just tootling around with a paintbrush and some canvas with a fag hanging out of his gob is very cute. This film also captures something rarely conveyed- he was really fucking funny.

As the film reached the inevitable climax I felt a twang I haven't felt for a while which was the feeling of such sadness that his life ended when and how it did. I have no doubt at all that he had more in him and even if he didn't, I am furious that he didn't get to hang out in his eighties with Iman arguing about how many pairs of socks you need to take to Bali and all that shit.

Yeah, if you're a Bowie fan, go. The music footage will have you coming in your pants, hard.
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

Dr Markus wrote:
Someone in your line of work usually as their own man cave aka the shed we're they can potter around fixing stuff or something don't they?


Flower wrote:I just did a google search.

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Re: Moonage Daydream Premiers Cannes 2022

Postby The Slider » 25 Sep 2022, 23:18

Yeah
There is that one bit where you hear the isolated bass from Sound and Vision, appearing from behind the screen
Then Carlos' guitar joins it.....
Then hard left and behind you Dennis Davis comes battering in
I jizzed a little bit.

I largely think the same as you Minnie
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Re: Moonage Daydream Premiers Cannes 2022

Postby Minnie the Minx » 26 Sep 2022, 12:53

Yeah!

:D
You come at the Queen, you best not miss.

Dr Markus wrote:
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Re: Moonage Daydream Premiers Cannes 2022

Postby The Slider » 26 Sep 2022, 23:54

The Slider wrote:There is that one bit where you hear the isolated bass from Sound and Vision, appearing from behind the screen
Then Carlos' guitar joins it.....
Then hard left and behind you Dennis Davis comes battering in
I jizzed a little bit.


Complete Ramones Mp3 set on its way


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