He was good in The hunger and perfect for Man who fell to earth. What was the film where he played a hitman and an innocent guy was being chased through the night? Thought bowie played quite a believable part.
Excellent interview there on the YT clip. As if we didn't know, it really does prove what a unique, shining talent we have lost. Funny, sharp and honest, watching this might help dispel any doubts or misconceptions some have or had about the kind of creative talent he was.
Top Class artist & performer, which will never be matched, any think Bowie put his mind too seemed to pay off, loved the film labyrinth at the time, a good laugh, great musician, best song writer in rock wrote well over a 100 songs for other artists in different genre's of music, that's huge talent and a very humble man that would let all the other musicians take the plaudit's, when he was the brains behind there music, not a lot of other musicians are in that leauge none really what I can think of, it will be sad times for a while when you lose a giant like this. R. I. P. SIR truly the best.
I listened to a lot of Bowie yesterday. Just sat and listened, which is something I had not done in a long time. The rewards repaid the effort a hundred times over. I never got that maudlin about any performer's passing before. And why I'm even posting about it is beyond me.
If I can talk old Carl Jung jargon for a moment, there are some folk who live out archetypes: Marilyn and Aphrodite etc.. They live and perish by the archetype.
Bowie was the 'Hermaphrodite', the holder of opposites, the shape-shifter .... the changer. That one often dies young and has an apotheosis. Bowie was clever though, clever enough to know when to step out of the archetype, so he survived. He KNEW, unlike Monroe who was merely carried along by the wind that blew through her. She didn't survive. He was a magician.
And humorous with it, like all good tricksters. He loved the internet as a Mercurial ether.
He completely ditched his substance habits by the way.
I was sitting around earlier and thinking back to the time Elvis died. For weeks and weeks afterward record shops couldn't keep up with the demand from all the people urgently wanting to buy up everything they could get their hands on. I remember reading that pressing plants were going night and day, shipping out crates of albums just as soon as they were ready to go.
I guess in this new age such a situation would never exist. If people want to catch up on their Bowie, they click--no danger of product running out. On one hand, it's a very convenient aspect of the tech. But on the other, I wonder if it has somehow trivialized the body of work of someone as immensely significant as Bowie. (Personally, I look at the rows of Bowie CDs or vinyls on my shelves with some satisfaction because of what the music has meant to me--but at the same time I know that the total amount of money I've spent on his work over the years is pretty wacko.)
The Missus remembers when Elvis died, too, and she was just saying that she can (as do I) recall the outpouring of grief as having almost epic religious proportions. I put that down to the fact that the appeal of Elvis's work was spread out to a much wider demographic than Bowie's. It seems to me that Bowie is still, bafflingly, considered fringey or culty by some. But to me (and I hasten to add that I'm a tremendous Elvis fan), Elvis's work suffers a little by comparison in that he wrote very little of his material (about a dozen songs, I think?). His extraordinary gift was that of interpretation. But I think that's where the comparisons end. Anything further would require quantifying the emotional impact of both artists and I think that would be pointless.
I'm always amused that they shared the same birthday and hit their highest peaks on RCA. Yesterday my son asked me what I found so irresistable about Bowie's music, and I said that it was always a combination of sensual and cerebral. He nodded, agreeing.
The 1983 David Bowie film THE HUNGER was only the second feature directed by Tony Scott. This vampire film involves Catherine Deneuve as a six-thousand-year-old vampire of vaguely Egyptian origins, whose latest partner (Bowie) is giving out on her after three or four centuries. Bowie plays the cello in some scenes, and actually learned to play the instrument for his part. He also had to go through an age progression, which involved a set of prosthetics that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. An aging voice was a little more difficult, and Bowie said that in order to make his voice suitably hoarse for when he aged so drastically in the movie, he stood on the George Washington Bridge every night and screamed all the punk rock songs he knew.
Bowie and co-star Susan Sarandon had an affair during the making of THE HUNGER. Bowie said of the film after it was made: "I must say, there's nothing that looks like it on the market. But I'm a bit worried that it's just perversely bloody at some points".
David Bowie's second big film for 1983 was MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE. Set in a Japanese prison camp in 1942, Bowie plays "Maj. Jack 'Strafer' Celliers," a newly arrived British soldier. Tom Conti played the titular "Col. John Lawrence." Also co-starring with Bowie, as the prison camp commander, was Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also scored the film--his first. The film was the first English language movie directed by Nagisa Ôshima.
Bowie was cast in the role of Major Celliers after director Ôshima saw a performance of his on the stage in a Broadway production of "The Elephant Man." According to Bowie, Ôshima directed the Japanese actors with great detail. But when it came to the British actors, they were told to "do whatever it is you people do".
Ryuichi Sakamoto's score was most recently released by Midi Inc. in 2013.
Bowie had a cameo appearance as "The Shark" in the 1983 comedy pirate film YELLOWBEARD. Mel Damskie directed, and John Morris' score was released by Quartet in 2010.
I just saw the 1985 John Landis-directed comic thriller INTO THE NIGHT, which stars Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer. In it, David Bowie (along with several dozen other film notables) has a cameo role as an English hit-man, who is after some stolen gems. Bowie appears in only two scenes, but makes a great impression. Ira Newborn scored the film. Two of Newborn's songs, played and sung by B.B. King, made it onto the MCA songtrack LP, which has never been reissued on CD.
Out of all the losses we suffered last year, this is the one that is still the most difficult. Words don't even come close to what the bloke's music meant to me.
I notice that the score for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, by Stomu Yamash'ta and John Phillips, finally had a release in 2016 on the European UMC label in conjunction with the film's 40th Anniversary re-release.
