Moonage Daydream

MOONAGE DAYDREAM   ***

Brett Morgen

2022

IDEA:  An impressionistic look at the life and career of David Bowie.

BLURB:  Some alternative titles to Morgen’s documentary: Montage Daydream. The Gospel According to St. Bowie. Composed of rapid-fire, kaleidoscopic cascades of image and audio, the film uses the lens of Bowie’s artistry to center his guiding philosophies on art, identity, relationships, and the purpose of life. Alongside a dizzying spate of concert footage, film clips, and various archival materials and new audiovisual inventions, the multi-hyphenate (or “generalist” as he wryly dubs himself) ruminates eloquently on everything from his methodology to humankind’s deepest existential quandaries. Morgen is the director, but the words mostly come from Bowie, giving Moonage Daydream the feeling of a personal diary or homily. We are given mesmerizing entry into the mind of this brilliant, willfully unclassifiable figure, whose erudite lucidity and coherence of vision fascinatingly belies the protean form in which he presented himself. He comes across as something of a Zen guru, dispensing wisdom derived from keen observation and introspection, qualities not often associated with global pop stars. The overall impression is of a man and artist preternaturally attuned to himself and the world(s) in which he operated, who found success not by molding himself to public perception but by molding public perception to himself. It’s hard to deny the colors of hagiography shading this project, especially because Morgen reinforces Bowie’s self-appointed mythological status as a high priest of social misfits. At the same time, the film’s hectic, often pell-mell form - which aptly embodies the artist’s ethos about embracing the chaos of existence - ensures that Moonage Daydream doesn’t become disingenuously pat. In the end, it’s a reverent but necessarily fragmented portrait that honors all the polymorphic ways Bowie expressed his passion for being.

Nope

NOPE   ***1/2

Jordan Peele

2022

IDEA:  On their family's Hollywood horse ranch, a pair of siblings begin experiencing a series of increasingly threatening supernatural phenomena. 

BLURB:  Among the myriad indelible images in Nope is a desert blanketed with multicolored tube men. Used to signal the proximity of a UFO, the flailing inflatable figures constitute a vibrant display amid a parched landscape, their unblinking eyes beckoning our gaze. Vision and spectacle are at the heart of Peele’s film, a thrilling, supremely clever genre mashup that interrogates our scopic regime in relation to mass media: what we look at, how we look at it, and who gets to look and be seen. The tube men emerge as just one manifestation of the commercial spectacle that echoes throughout Nope in bold and surprising ways. Peele is particularly concerned with how violence and tragedy become transformed and commodified for mass consumption, seen most vividly through the arc of Steven Yeun’s traumatized former child actor. It’s in his backstory that the exploitation of animals in show business comes luridly to the fore, and in which Peele orchestrates some of his most formidable filmmaking, using image and sound to withhold and reveal information with the command of a suspense master. Like the writer-director’s first two features, Nope also reflects on the institutional subjugation of black people in America; here, Peele grounds that theme in the history of cinema and the racist legacy of Hollywood, positioning his film as a riposte to an industry that has erased, abused, and sensationalized minority identities. In the tradition of idiosyncratic Hollywood iconoclasts such as John Carpenter, Peele embeds his pointed social commentary in the conventional pleasures of genre, offering a clinic in how the cerebral and the amusing need not be mutually exclusive. Nope certainly belongs to the cinema of attractions, but in analogy to the way its UFO becomes dazed by colorful excesses, it also uses spectacle against itself. A novel thing in contemporary mainstream film, it asks us to question the moral, psychological, and social costs of the media we make and consume, and to ponder when the titular word might be the appropriate response to that media’s voracious pull.