Off-duty film viewing only. Anything I'm working on, might be working on, or connected to anything I'm working on, won't be mentioned here.
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Planet Outlaws 1953
The 1939 Buck Rogers serial re-edited into a quickie feature – four hours become one, the whole thing reduced (or increased) to pure narrative. It could be argued that the original episodes were always racing from one cliff-hanger to the next anyhow, but this is like watching on fast-forward. Nothing is allowed to linger, characters are just tropes and tics (Buster Crabbe’s Buck oddly reminded me of Derek Zoolander), leaving us a pop-art exercise in cutesy SFX and production design.
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Moonage Daydream 2022
Some immediate idle thoughts:
From a conceptual standpoint, I’m not sure if hooking the film primarily to audio from chat-show interviews is going to elicit the deepest of insights, given the format. Bowie was always good value on them, but I doubt he would deem them worthy of extracting any kind of biography, however loose/associative that may be. It also creates a huge gap toward the end as Bowie had moved out of the public eye.
The film relies a…
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Last Night in Soho 2021
You know how the Doctor Who Christmas specials have a bit more extra money to spend, so there's flashier effects and maybe a guest star or two who used to do films, but the whole thing still feels very televisual in its execution and in its acting, and the dialogue doesn't always land because it's trying to simultaneously appease different audience demographics? That's exactly how this feels – and way before Matt Smith shows up.