Lunar daze

I was talking about various TV shows and movies at a weekly game gathering recently and giving my somewhat acerbic opinion about a couple things and my friend, Brian, said: "Well, you don't like anything." Broadly, I guess you could say that. I need to be impressed by something well-made or different or both most of the time and the bar is set fairly high. Of course, you could look at my last couple posts on films that we've seen and realize that I really do like some things; again, if they're done well. So I anticipated enjoying Moonage Daydream because, first, it's about David Bowie and second, I'd heard that it wasn't the typical documentary. The word was that it largely avoided narrative and instead was more of a visual accompaniment to the story of Bowie's trip through life. And, visually, it was very nice. The problem is that there really wasn't that much story.

A number of musicians have interesting stories, both in getting to their stardom and in maintaining/enduring it while it lasts. I'm rather partial to Gibby Haynes' in that respect, among others. But if anyone could have an interesting story to tell about their career, you'd think it would be David Bowie. But this film wasn't that at all. It was a trip through the decades of his stardom, a lot of concert footage, some artistic presentations, and a bit of reflective narration by the man himself, and that's it. It was essentially a two-hour music video with a few statements about how to experience life from a guy who did his best to experience it from a number of angles. In a rather detached sense, that could be entertaining, but likely only if you're a hardcore fan who knows everything there is to know about him and are coming here simply to bathe in the glory once again. I'm quite certain there are those people out there, but I'm not one of them and neither was anyone else that I saw the film with. We're all fans to one degree or another. We all enjoy his music. But we all went into this thinking that it would provide some kind of insight to his life and instead sat through 140 minutes of a dive through the archive of his appearances and little else.

I mean, I'm all about experience in life being the lifeblood of said life. I don't have many possessions that I would be particularly distraught to lose and I'm always interested in trying something new and seeing new places and this film kinda conveyed that mentality. But, somehow, I imagined that a film about Bowie's life would be a bit more than footage of him riding as many escalators as possible in the middle of the night in Bangkok. That's a borderline William Gibson cyberpunk story from back in the day, but that would still be kind of a stretch to have it emerge with much meaning ("The sky above the port was the color of a kaleidoscope...") I'm all about experimental film and, again, this was a very different approach to the concept of a documentary. I commend writer/director/producer, Brett Morgen, for trying. There simply wasn't enough story meat on the visual bones. Since I "don't like anything", I had anticipated walking out and hearing everyone talk about how cool they thought it was. Instead, everyone's reactions were pretty much like mine: Somewhere between "Meh" and "I expected more." The most interesting point may have been in the last of the two dozen random collages where a couple were shown engaging in a bout of erotic asphyxiation. I'm not sure what relevance that had to the overall film, expect perhaps encouraging people to try something different when they got home that night, but it at least looked like those two people were having more fun than we were.