WARNING: POTENTIAL “SPOILERS”.
Where to begin with this review?
It’s hard to get a handle on Brett Morgen’s objective is with this … documentary? Film? I’m not even sure how to refer to it officially. I guess it is a documentary by the definition being it is based on factual information and not a work of fiction…?
It starts at the Ziggy Stardust era and spends a chunk of time there. Quite a bit of DA Pennebaker’s footage is used, making it feel somewhat like you’re sitting through an alternate screening of Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, except this screening is interspersed with other bits of Bowie footage and facts. The first (?) Russell Harty interview. Bowie is playful and coy and much more engaged than Harty deserves.
I was sat only four rows back from the front in the IMAX cinema and found myself very early on wishing that I had actually sat further back than that. Too late now. Never mind! First gripe. I was too close to the screen and was quite affected with my visual enjoyment of it by the age of the footage showing itself up due to my proximity to the screen. It really does seem an odd idea to go to the trouble of screening it in IMAX cinemas.
Just when you think we’re moving on to a different theme or area of David’s life, we get sucked back to Ziggy. Then it seems like it’s going to jump to Let’s Dance, then it juts back to Diamond Dogs briefly, on to Young Americans period and Bowie living in LA – we see the toll of the cocaine use – the Cracked Actor piece “There’s a fly in my milk. He’s a forgien body – that’s how I feel here [in LA], I’m a foreign body.”
Back to Russell Harty and David struggles to engage this time, and rightly so.
There is some talk from David about family life. About his mother and father, and a short piece about his half-brother, Terry.
There’s quite a bit from footage from the Ricochet video that came out around the Serious Moonlight tour. It’s basically a video sojourn of Bowie in South East Asia. My other half read to me a discussion from Morgen in which he came across the Ricochet footage like he struck gold or something. He could have contacted me. I’ve had a copy of Ricochet for YEARS! Had I’d known it was so “rare” I’d have stuck it on eBay and made a mint. I haven’t watched it in a very long time, but as soon as I saw the footage of Bowie travelling the escalators, I knew where the footage was from.
There’s quite a bit of philosophical ramblings from David in amongst all the footage. I guess the film’s main drive, if it has one, is for us to hear David trying to make sense of his existence. Why is he here? How does he make sense of the world? What is his reason for making music? Acting? Painting? It becomes quite clear very early on that he doesn’t just want to be a songwriter, although he had stated in the past that he’d have happily written songs for other people to perform and that he didn’t really want to be a singer initially.
That he was an absolute workaholic comes across. And that he needed each and every day to be purposeful.
The crux of it I really enjoyed. Hearing David philosophising about his life, and life’s meaning and purpose and how he was just trying to work through it – “it” being…how he could reflect the world that he feels and lives in back to us. How he observed it and could reflect it back.
I have always found him profoundly intelligent. Wonderfully erudite and mind-blowingly knowledgeable about all manner of things and that comes across, which I really loved. It worked in that aspect for me. But it’s very fragmented in its execution of it, which I am sure David would have loved.
At other times it felt like a big “megamix” video that went for two hours. I really did like the blend of Bowie music and how it was all remixed together and was mashed and melded. It’s done in a very non-linear way but it all worked really well together. In that way, the audio visual experience worked.
The only bit I really didn’t like was towards the very end and the use of the chanty chorus of Memory Of A Free Festival. It is the one David Bowie song I have an EXTREME aversion to! I can’t fucking stand it! Never have been able to. I just find it utterly insipid and … bleaugh! Nope. It just makes my skin crawl. I remember hearing a Simple Minds bootleg and I think they’re playing…Room? Anyway, Jim starts to break into that bit of MOAFF and I’m just like “NNNOOOOOO! JIM! STOP! PLEASE! DON’T DO THIS TO ME!! WHAT IS THIS? MAKE IT STOP!!!” Lol. Especially the way Jim is singing it too, with this faux English accent – exaggerating the way he’s saying “party” by saying it like “pah taay”. Urgh!! I feel sick just going over it!
If you can endure the MOAFF bit (I somehow managed to endure it. I survived. Lol) stay until the credits end. Half the people in the cinema left as soon as the credits started to roll but they missed a little gem that doen’t happen until the end credits have finished. I won’t spoil it other than to say it’s sweet and worth staying the extra few minutes.
I’d like to experience it again but sitting further back on a regular cinema screen. The audio in the IMAX cinema was bloody loud and bloody awesome though, I have to say.
A rating out of ten? Hmmm. I’ve come away wondering how much of my screening experience was down to how I viewed it rather than the content and effect of the film itself. I liked its non-linear yet loosely linear style. I liked how it kind of worked as David’s own telling of “the life and philosophy of David Bowie”. I loved the way all his music was blended and put across. I wasn’t “blown away” by it, but I enjoyed it. It was no Sparks Brothers, put it that way! I’d give it a seven…perhaps a seven and a half. I contemplated giving it an eight…but it just doesn’t quite make it that high for me.
I’d recommend seeing it. I’m not sure I’d necessarily recommend the IMAX experience. A diehard Bowie fan is going to go to the cinema anyway, I think. Would I recommend it to a non-Bowie fan? Would a non-fan gain anything from it? Hmmm – I don’t really think they would. Let’s stick to a seven.
Rating: 7/10
