Summary: Uh... it is Christmas Eve on a recently established Mars colony and it seems like a baby is going to be born and a guy is trying to arrange a Christmas pageant and then an alien arrives and then it gets weird.
In the spirit of trying to get back in the website-updating-groove I have decided to write a review of this movie. Let me start by saying that if you are planning on seeing it, don’t see it alone. Some movies are so crazy they are fun to watch no matter what and some push beyond that to a point where they really need to be a shared experience. This is one of those.
Spoilers! (if this movie can really be said to have spoilers.....)
I really wanted to like this movie. I mean, it is billed as “A Fantastical Film Freakout Featuring The Flaming Lips”, so how could it be bad, right? Well, it turns out it can. To be fair, I can’t actually bring myself to call it “bad” – it was still entertaining, it just wasn’t what I wanted it to be. Is it fair for me to fault a movie for not being the movie I wanted it to be? Probably not, but I can’t help doing it at least a little. So with that in mind, here is what I have to say.
Before the movie began I was under the impression that it was going to be something like a musical: new Flaming Lips songs strung together by some sort of plot riffing on 1950s B sci-fi movies. And that sounds awesome! What it was, however, was just the 1950s sci-fi part, but with lot of prosthetic vaginas (if you’ve been to a Flaming Lips concert you’re probably not surprised). The Flaming Lips did indeed do the music for it, but it was really just a normal score with a tendency towards feedback and ambient noise. And although the movie was pretty crazy (vagina headed marching band?) it was a little boring. Not a whole lot happens and the plot, so to speak, makes no sense whatsoever. Most of the entertainment value of this movie will come from sitting around, stunned, with your friends afterwards and talking about what the hell it was that you just watched.
All in all, Christmas on Mars is not bad – the DIY aesthetic and production values are fun, and the absurdity of the plot and characters is entertaining – but it could have been so much more. But then again, it is a movie written, directed and acted almost entirely by a band, so how much can you really expect?
Before the movie began I was under the impression that it was going to be something like a musical: new Flaming Lips songs strung together by some sort of plot riffing on 1950s B sci-fi movies. And that sounds awesome! What it was, however, was just the 1950s sci-fi part, but with lot of prosthetic vaginas (if you’ve been to a Flaming Lips concert you’re probably not surprised). The Flaming Lips did indeed do the music for it, but it was really just a normal score with a tendency towards feedback and ambient noise. And although the movie was pretty crazy (vagina headed marching band?) it was a little boring. Not a whole lot happens and the plot, so to speak, makes no sense whatsoever. Most of the entertainment value of this movie will come from sitting around, stunned, with your friends afterwards and talking about what the hell it was that you just watched.
All in all, Christmas on Mars is not bad – the DIY aesthetic and production values are fun, and the absurdity of the plot and characters is entertaining – but it could have been so much more. But then again, it is a movie written, directed and acted almost entirely by a band, so how much can you really expect?
C+
originally posted Dec. 13, 2010
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