The New David Bowie Biopic Trailer is Here and Looks Like Hot Garbage
What do you do when one of the most interesting, inventive, creative and ground-breaking musical artists of the last half century dies? Well, you make a musical biopic about his life, his times, and his impact on the culture.
What do you do when said artist and his family have said specifically they do not want a movie made about him and refuse to give you the rights to his music? Well if you're a studio in 2020 and movies about musical artists are making money and winning awards, you make a non-musical biopic about his life, his times and his impact on the culture.
This is the watershed moment for Hollywood. The bridge too far. The moment when the film industry just threw up their hands and finally admitted they are so out of ideas they will take any gender-bending music star they can and make a movie about his/her life even without their actual music. And their grieving family can go shit in a hat if they don't like it.
And even if "Stardust" had David Bowie's estate's blessing and was full of nothing but the best songs off his legendary catalogue, this trailer looks like a parody of the whole rock star biopic genre. And not a good one, like "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," but a lazy, low budget, slapped together, direct-to-basic-cable money grab. Produced just to cash in on people who heard "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Rocketman" were good, but can't tell one sexually ambiguous Brit from the 70s and 80s from another.
The damnedest is thing is, I have no idea who this guy playing the lead is. I checked his IMDB page and have never seen any of the things he's been in. But it's weird choice to cast a guy who makes David Bowie seem like a crackhead auditioning for a Bowie cover band. The actual David Bowie was a guy of pretty substantial intellect. I remember seeing an interview with him in the 90s when it seemed like his career was drying up where he said he could right a hit pop song today, if that's what he wanted. Then he proceeded to bang something out on the piano off the top of head, and he was right. It sounded like it would go platinum if he just fleshed it out. But he explained he'd done all that and now was only interested in working on things that were interesting to him. In addition he'd done things as diverse as playing The Elephant Man on stage with no prosthetics or makeup of any kind. Starred as the Goblin King in "Labyrinth" and Pontius Pilate in "The Last Temptation of Christ." Played Tesla in "The Prestige" and David Bowie in "Zoolander." Not to mention his duet with Bing Crosby in one of the great Christmas recordings ever done.
A guy with that resume deserves better than to have this dreck made against his dying wishes.
I get why an actor will take a role. A paycheck is a paycheck and they all get a finite amount of offers, so you grab what you can. But does Marc Maron need his name attached to this? He's had his own series plus was in the female wrestling show "GLOW" and is one of the top podcasters in the world. He got a one-on-one with Obama, fercrissakes. You'd think that would give a guy the juice to turn this horseshit down. I guarantee you more people will see this trailer on the Rotten Tomatoes Twitter feed and this blog than will ever watch the movie.
Be better, Hollywood. Start working on the "Wham!" movie I've been waiting 30 years for.