Seven years in the making and shot on home-built sets in the band's back yard in Oklahoma City, the Flaming Lips' feature film Christmas on Mars is finally getting released -- sort of. In a characteristically unpredictable move, the film will begin an underground tour of offbeat venues around the country next week at the KGB Kraine Theater, a retrofitted Ukranian Socialist Social Club in New York.
Anybody with even passing familiarity with the Lips' brand of pop psychedelia may be excused for having high expectations for
Christmas on Mars. Directed by frontman Wayne Coyne (with co-directors Bradley Beesley and George Salisbury),
Christmas on Mars is billed as a sci-fi spectacular that features the entire band, justifiably praised for their live shows which feature fake blood, dancing extras in animal costumes, and generous amounts of confetti. Who better to put on a tripped-out cult version of
Solaris, with a deranged Santa Claus, Adam Goldberg, and a marching band from hell thrown in for good measure?
Alas: once you think about it, you may remember that Solaris is already plenty weird (this goes for both versions), and the Lips' story about a space base on Christmas Eve that's haunted by equipment malfunctions never congeals into anything more than a labored pastiche of genre detrius from Alien 3, Dark Star, 2001, The Thing, Half-Life and a host of others.
Christmas on Mars works hard to convince you it's a freaky, freaky freak-out, but the strangest thing about the film is how dull it is. With the exception of the occasional flourish of calculated psychedelia -- gaping vaginas, visions of dead babies, flashes of bubbling color -- the operative drug metaphor isn't acid but Xanax. After its colorful opening, the film turns black and white and slows to a crawl, full of pregnant pauses and apparently improvised scenes that go nowhere. Half an hour later, Coyne arrives in a little-green-man costume sprouting antennae, but he's got nothing to do or say and simply stands around.
Most surprising and disappointing of all, there are no old or new Flaming Lips songs in the movie. The custom-build sets convey a certain lo-fi charm, and it's obvious Christmas on Mars is a labor of love, but for a band that thrives on sensory overload, the film is inexplicably downbeat and barren -- it's as if the Lips had decided to ignore everything they do best. Perhaps the innovative screenings will add to the film's appeal, but I find it difficult to imagine that Christmas on Mars will achieve the cult status it so clearly craves.
For trailer and updated screening information, visit Cinema Purgatorio.
