Lightroom

This King’s Cross Lightroom now has surely the weirdest repertoire of any venue in London, possibly the world. With an oeuvre based around massive megabit projection-based immersive films, its shows so far have been a David Hockney exhibition, a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the moon landings, a Vogue documentary and a visualiser for Coldplay’s upcoming album. It’s such a random collection of concepts that it’s hard to say there was or is anything ‘missing’ from the extremely esoteric selection of bases covered. But certainly, as the school summer holidays roll around it’s very welcome to see it add an overtly child-friendly show to its roster. Bar a short Coldplay break, Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs will play daily at Lightroom from now until at least the end of October half-term. It is, as you would imagine, a dinosaur documentary. And indeed, if the name rings a specific bell it’s because it’s culled from the David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV series of the same name. It’s quite the remix, though: Attenborough is out, and Damian Lewis is in, delivering a slightly melodramatic voiceover that lacks Sir David’s colossal gravitas but is, nonetheless, absolutely fine. Presumably Attenborough is absent because he’s very busy and very old, because while the film reuses several of the more spectacular setpieces from the TV series, it’s sufficiently different that repurposing the old narration would be a stretch. Any child with any degree of fondness for the...

It’s worth saying from the off that I don’t think there’s any perfect way for a brand new, big budget, one hour David Bowie film spectacular to pan out. He did so much stuff, that has been written about and discussed so exhaustively that almost anything you do with a new project will flirt with either cliché or perversity, especially with a relatively brief runtime.  The latest original work from dedicated immersive film house the Lightroom – directed by Mark Grimmer – is definitely not perfect. There are bits that had me rolling my eyes, especially the sections where cutesy animated cutouts of Bowie doing stuff like ‘reading important books’ or ‘hanging out in art galleries’ are used to illustrate recordings of his musings on the creative process. Bowie’s voiceover is, I’m sorry to say, not that thrilling. I get it: there is simply not enough time or space to bring in his many, many collaborators, so having archive audio of Bowie’s ponderings on his art and craft that roughly correspond to whatever area of his career the film is highlighting at the time makes sense.  Still, it’s not hyper-illuminating and feels like it all comes from the same era of his career (I’m guessing the ’90s/early ’00s). Video footage of a profoundly awkward 1975 interview with Russell Harty feels like it provides a much more interesting look at Bowie than his assured latter-day ponderings.It’s also worth saying that despite a vaguely chronological trajectory, you will almost certainly be very...