Of Jean Genies, Djinns and Shells

Earlier this week, I tweeted out a photo of two new Blu-ray titles from Elevation Pictures: Moonage Daydream and Three Thousand Years of Longing. Someone immediately replied “That was quick!” And it was; Moonage Daydream hit disc almost two months to the day after its theatrical opening (which itself was just days after its TIFF premiere), where the turnaround for Three Thousand Years of Longingwas well under three months.

That’s just the way the industry works now, I guess; if you’re not a box-office monster like Top Gun: Maverick – or an indie dynamo like Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On, about which more shortly – you get a couple of weeks on the big screen before the VOD drop, with the disc following soon after. Hell, Disney just announced digital and physical release of The Banshees of Inisherin for next month. (It’s December 14^th and December 20^th, respectively. No 4K disc either, dammit.)

Of course, you can’t keep a movie running in IMAX indefinitely – unless, again, said movie has Top Gun in the title – so Moonage Daydream was destined for a short theatrical run. I can see it having a decent life in repertory, though, as more and more people discover it at home and decide to check it out at a larger scale.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that Elevation’s Blu-ray doesn’t do Moonage Daydream justice. It’s a faithful reproduction of Morgen’s expansive documentary about the life and work of the pop-culture phenomenon we called David Bowie. The textures of archival film and analog video are faithfully replicated, the studio mixes and live recordings have an almost physical presence in 5.1 DTS-MA HD, and the collage-montage paintbox technique Morgen uses to collapse decades of radical reinvention into a two-and-a-quarter-hour artistic continuum is just as vivid as it was in its theatrical presentation. It’s just that Moonage Daydream was designed to overwhelm, not to be contained within the box of a home theater.

That caveat established, it’s still eminently watchable, a breathless mixed-media companion piece to the David Bowie is … show produced at the V&A in London in 2013, and which I saw at the AGO in Toronto a few years later. Future tours of the show should start with an IMAX screening of Morgen’s doc, and when you think about it wouldn’t a Bowie retrospective be equally at home in a museum of science and technology?

Morgen rides alongside the former David Robert Jones through his truly remarkable life, finding room for a few genuine surprises amongst the obvious cultural signposts. His emergence in the late 60s and ascendance in the early 70s position him as a figurehead from which the entire future sprung fully formed – if Bowie didn’t single-handedly create glam rock, he certainly walked it into the room, while also somehow paving the way for disco, punk and new wave – and the identity crises that followed, either deliberate or accidental, are explored at length.

That’s where the surprises come in: Seeing Bowie promoting 1983’s Let’s Dance as an excuse to just make fun music that doesn’t mean anything – I’m paraphrasing, but not by much – and then dismiss that massively successful era of his life a few years later as an indicator of how empty and miserable he was feeling, just going through the pop-star motions, is a whiplash that somehow didn’t make it into the V&A’s unqualified celebration of his work. Of course, Bowie was alive then, and involved at least peripherally in the curation; perhaps his absence here emboldened Morgen to be a little more clear-eyed.

The timeline speeds up once Bowie settles down in New York in the ’90s, happily married to Iman and experimenting with metal and jazz and whatever else there was to explore when you’re David Bowie in your fifties. It’s as if Morgen suddenly realizes he can’t avoid the ending, and decides to grit his teeth and power through it; after a brief moment to appreciate the depth of Bowie’s contentment, cancer arrives on the scene. And yes, it gave Bowie the spark to create Blackstar, a valedictory album entirely appropriate to his career and talent – but christ, I know he’d rather have been happier not to have made it, to have spent a few more years living his life making weird music and weirder theater, wandering around Lower Manhattan carrying a German newspaper under one arm, the better to make people pause and think twice about approaching him. Though, seriously; who else could that guy be?

It's a little disappointing that the Moonage Daydream disc arrives entirely devoid of extras; the US and UK discs are similarly featureless, so this isn’t a licensing thing. I’m being optimistic and hoping that the American distributor, Neon, has something brewing with Criterion, and that we might see a proper 4K special edition roll out sometime next summer. But until then, this disc will do just fine. On to the next thing.

That would be Three Thousand Years of Longing, of course. I reviewed George Miller’s epic fantasy in this newsletter back in August when it opened theatrically, and find it no less pleasurable on a second viewing; Elevation’s Blu-ray presents John Seale’s digitally augmented images in a lavish 1080p/24 transfer with swirling 5.1 DTS-MA audio that looks great on a large display. I was disappointed to see there’s no 4K release in Canada – this thing cries out for HDR and Dolby Vision – but the Blu-ray looks great for a 2K disc. (A 4K version is available to stream, though – again, curiously – Elevation’s physical releases do not include a digital code.)

Extras are limited to five brief promotional spots – the longest runs two and a half minutes – which draw heavily on EPK interviews and B-roll footage offer quick hits on Junkie XL’s score, the creation of Elba’s djinn, Miller’s vision for the film and two broader promos, “Empires and Epochs” and “The Djinn and the Genius”, which throw as much spectacle and star power at us as possible.

Apparently these were produced for in-cinema play at AMC, which explains the repeated entreaties to see the film in a theater – and honestly, I can’t disagree. Three Thousand Years of Longing is, as the saying goes, pure cinema: Lavish, playful visual art with an irresistible undercurrent of emotion. It may not be Miller’s masterpiece, but almost any other filmmaker would sell their soul to make it.

And since we’re all about Elevation here, I also caught up to the Blu-ray of Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On, which remains one of the best films of the year and arrived on disc just as AMPAS declared it eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. This is the sort of thing that will get people arguing about what constitutes an animated feature – there’s a lot of live-action in Dean Fleischer-Camp’s magical little comedy – but it makes perfect sense when you see it: This is a film that simply couldn’t exist without its animated elements, and celebrates stop-motion in a most remarkable way.

I reviewed the movie when it opened last summer, so there’s no need to rehash it here, but yes, it’s still wonderful. Elevation’s Blu-ray presents the feature in a consistent 1.55:1 transfer, rather than going wider for the HDTV sequences as it did in its theatrical presentation, and adds just one supplement: An audio commentary by Fleischer-Camp and collaborators Jenny Slate and Nick Paley, who wrote and produced the film with him. (Slate also voices Marcel, of course.)

The track is thoughtful, silly and melancholy in roughly equal measure, much like the movie itself; Fleischer-Camp, Slate and Paley are quick to shout out one another’s specific contributions in a way that tells us how much they respect one another as artists, and how proud they are of this project they’ve been working on for years and years, even when things got personally complicated. About an hour into the movie, the story hits its big emotional turning point and the commentary turns similarly grave … until Fleischer-Camp points out that all the vegetables in Nana Connie’s garden had to be designed and molded for stop-motion, because lighting real vegetables would wilt them. Little flashes of practical insight amidst a sea of emotion; that’s the Marcel promise.

The commentary was produced for A24’s boutique special edition 4K release, which of course is not available in Canada; as with the label’s two-disc edition of the Souvenir films and 4K release of the Midsommar director’s cut, it’s a little frustrating to know a more comprehensive edition of a given title is out there, with additional supplements and what looks like a really lovely art book. (A24’s edition also offers Dolby Atmos audio, rather than the DTS-HD Master Audio track here.) Hopefully A24 can figure out a way to let its Canadian partners import these releases; I know the market is limited, but surely that makes them more desirable, right? Or is it just me? Maybe it’s just me.

Coming up in Sunday’s paid edition: Casablanca! Elf! Gothic Fantastico, finally! And that giveaway I promised you, so take a moment to upgrade your subscription! There’s a 14-day free trial and everything! How many more exclamation points must I deploy?!