By http://www.impawards.com/2022/poster..._ver2_xxlg.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71505831
Moonage Daydream - (2022)
I'd bought this on Criterion a little while back, and thought last night that it was a pretty good time to watch it again after having seen it on it's original release. At the time I wrote on Letterboxd : "
Moonage Daydream elevates the David Bowie mythology to almost God-like status, but grounds it by allowing us a sense of the human behind all of the masks. It does this with wonderful use of his catalogue of songs, and rarely makes the mistake of allowing itself to be too stereotypical or hackneyed. Brett Morgen has obviously spent time, and a great deal of care assembling footage from the man's life, interviews, concert footage, films, plays and television appearances - not to mention music videos. In between there's a sense of the cosmic, but it never becomes overly lost in it's own gaze. Our search for the meaning of life in what feels like the film's first few moments made me afraid this was some deification - but instead it turned into a full-on celebration of David Bowie's music, art and life. It was a visual wonderland, and a rock 'n' roll journey using the best music you'll hear blast you through an entire film." The film kind of represents a personal journey for me as well, from my early teenage years through early adulthood on to times both wonderful and troubled.
What I thought about most last night was my last year of high school, when I found a second-hand video of the concert film
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and like most things Bowie watched and rewatched it over and over again whenever I had the chance. In the pre-internet age, lacking the power to have images and video materialize at the push of a button meant you treasured what you could get your hands on. I wondered what I'd have made of Brett Morgen's
Moonage Daydream back then - and how excited I would have been to get my hands on it and play it endlessly. Back in that era, the early 1990s, Bowie was at a particular low point as far as being cool was concerned, and I was definitely an oddball for being an ardent fan. My friends were into The Cure, Violent Femmes, Pixies, the Smiths etc - but I introduced as much Bowie into their music vocabulary as I possibly could. I got my first ever CD player around 1989 or 1990 and it was then that I bought all of Bowie's albums. So watching
Moonage Daydream connects me to that era in my life, and all of the special things which were going on. I almost have an inner dialogue going on with my 17-year-old self, telling him "hey, watch this - it's pretty cool" - I could have only dreamed of it back then because those days
nobody was talking about Bowie or making retrospective documentaries. This movie is my portal back in time - one which needs to be reevaluated as having a perfect score.
10/10
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