With Moonage Daydream, documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen has reinvented the form, synthesizing a kaleidoscope of images and sounds from the life and work of David Bowie into a vibrant, electrifying experience. Like its subject’s nonconformist, taboo-smashing body of work, Morgen’s 140-minute tone poem meditation on one of the most sui generis artists who has ever lived is breathtaking in its scope and originality. Morgen’s film is one of the best of the year. David Bowie pulses in every frame, reminding us from beyond the grave that we’ll never see his like on this planet again.
Upon reflection, Moonage Daydream is (slightly) more conventional than it at first seems. Beneath the surface of the film’s elliptical, almost phantasmagorical tapestry is a roughly chronological examination of Bowie’s career over the course of about 30 years. This is the first documentary about the glam rock pioneer that is officially authorized by the estate of the artist, who died in 2016 from liver cancer.
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I had my first colonoscopy this year at age forty. Most people don’t start getting this preventative care procedure until they turn fifty. I won’t bore you with the particulars of why I started early, but rest assured that everything is fine. Just before I was wheeled from the prep area back to the O.R., I had my first truly profound existential epiphany. The I.V. drip that the anesthesiologist hooked me up to started to take effect, and I began feeling a little drowsy. I had the comforting realization that death was like going to sleep. I thought about how I would be unconscious, knowing nothing, as the doctor performed this procedure, and how death, too, would be identical to unconsciousness; death is the act of never knowing anything again. In that moment, as the twilight of artificial sleep was coming on, I was fine with that realization.
Director Kirsten Johnson’s heartfelt, moving new documentary, Dick Johnson Is Dead, takes ninety minutes – culled from years of shooting for the picture – to make an uneasy, gallows humor sort of peace with the finality of death. It is a love letter from a daughter to a father, and vice versa. My only reservation with the film is how Johnson, right up until the final cut to black, prioritizes the main conceit of the film. She gleefully pulls the rug out from under us in the very last frame. I appreciated the playfulness of it, but not as much as was probably intended.
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The Satanic Temple is doing the Lord’s work. That statement is meant to be both provocative and ironic, just like the organization that Penny Lane’s documentary, Hail Satan?, examines. The film manages to be both hilarious and enraging. While it gets close to delving under the surface of The Satanic Temple’s leading members – most notably the tension between co-founder Lucien Greaves and TST Detroit chapter head Jex Blackmore – it never quite gets there. Hail Satan? stays at arm’s length from the people it’s documenting. That’s not the case with the ideas that Greaves, Blackmore, and other TST members are championing. The documentary does a fabulous job of explicating The Satanic Temple’s ideals and goals.
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Peter Jackson’s stunning World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old made me understand what it must have been like to see The Wizard of Oz in 1939. The director, most famous for special effects wizardry in films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy and his King Kong remake, has employed jaw-dropping digital restoration work to century-old footage to bring the Great War to life. His film is a chill inducing experience.
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If you want an intriguing mystery buried inside a documentary that pontificates on the act of moviemaking itself, look no further than Shirkers. One of the things I prized most about my number one film of 2018 – the documentary Free Solo – was how layered that film is. Shirkers is the same. Director Sandi Tan’s film never stops blossoming from beginning to end. It continually digs deeper into questions of creativity, friendship, obsession, and betrayal.
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