Flaming Lips bring the trippy holidays early with Christmas on Mars
Elizabeth Fox
Issue date: 11/21/08 Section: Focus
Seven years in the works and forged from an odd flow of psychedelia comes The Flaming Lips' Christmas on Mars, an unmistakably surreal science fiction film that hit Cleveland's own Cinematheque this past weekend. Filmgoers heavily anticipated lead singer and star Wayne Coyne's immense performance of an unnamable Martian, expecting a film full of a familiar Lips' feel and sound. But what they received was unexpected.
The film begins with a rush of trippy optical illusions, and briefly, a Barbarella-esque woman. From there, we meet the disillusioned protagonist, Major Syrtis (played by Lips' drummer Steven Drozd), one of few on board Bethlehem 2055, a single space craft that has remained dormant on the red planet for one year. His twisted sense of existentialism is paired with the realism of colleagues (played by many of the band's acquaintances, including Steve Burns of Blue's Clues fame), and his hallucinations continually become more evident as the movie delves into its own unsettling, unorganized script. There are flourishes of disturbing images - bloody infants, gaping female genitals, a crystallized and very dead Santa Claus - but the outright surrealism doesn't make up for the lack of true plot in Coyne's drug-induced plight. The supporting characters continue to mesh in and out of one another until they become of no true importance (with the exception of the rubberneck captain, who carried a Southern accent with little effort), and while the film is littered with comic obscenities, they become misplaced when the effort is put forth to be serious.
Though Mars has many faults to contend with, it has a few creative aspects working to its advantage. The close-ups in the cinematography (provided by Bradley Beesley, who has directed many Lips' music videos) match the bizarre world depicted in the story. The organic soundtrack is justified by trademark footage, containing a score of melancholy Christmas hymns that accompany a variety of effects; this proved better than having a few of the band's staples serve as a backdrop, as they had originally initiated through their series of concert releases ("Do You Realize??" would only fit if the film's illusionary qualities were taken without heart). But even with such assets, this brand of science fiction commodity was executed below expectation.
For die- hard fans who have been following the Flaming Lips throughout their 25 year career, this film would appeal more to the set that fell in love with the concepts formed around Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) and everything thereafter. Though the outright intense high may seem familiar to fans of In a Priest-Driven Ambulance (1990) and Transmissions from the Satellite Heart (1993), the awkwardness of imagery and the lack of bright artistic vision proves unsatisfactory and almost entirely fruitless by film's end. Stay assured that Coyne and company have no plans concerning an eventual regression into their early days, because Mars shows that they are very much rooted in their own eerie, strangely philosophical utopia.
The film begins with a rush of trippy optical illusions, and briefly, a Barbarella-esque woman. From there, we meet the disillusioned protagonist, Major Syrtis (played by Lips' drummer Steven Drozd), one of few on board Bethlehem 2055, a single space craft that has remained dormant on the red planet for one year. His twisted sense of existentialism is paired with the realism of colleagues (played by many of the band's acquaintances, including Steve Burns of Blue's Clues fame), and his hallucinations continually become more evident as the movie delves into its own unsettling, unorganized script. There are flourishes of disturbing images - bloody infants, gaping female genitals, a crystallized and very dead Santa Claus - but the outright surrealism doesn't make up for the lack of true plot in Coyne's drug-induced plight. The supporting characters continue to mesh in and out of one another until they become of no true importance (with the exception of the rubberneck captain, who carried a Southern accent with little effort), and while the film is littered with comic obscenities, they become misplaced when the effort is put forth to be serious.
Though Mars has many faults to contend with, it has a few creative aspects working to its advantage. The close-ups in the cinematography (provided by Bradley Beesley, who has directed many Lips' music videos) match the bizarre world depicted in the story. The organic soundtrack is justified by trademark footage, containing a score of melancholy Christmas hymns that accompany a variety of effects; this proved better than having a few of the band's staples serve as a backdrop, as they had originally initiated through their series of concert releases ("Do You Realize??" would only fit if the film's illusionary qualities were taken without heart). But even with such assets, this brand of science fiction commodity was executed below expectation.
For die- hard fans who have been following the Flaming Lips throughout their 25 year career, this film would appeal more to the set that fell in love with the concepts formed around Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002) and everything thereafter. Though the outright intense high may seem familiar to fans of In a Priest-Driven Ambulance (1990) and Transmissions from the Satellite Heart (1993), the awkwardness of imagery and the lack of bright artistic vision proves unsatisfactory and almost entirely fruitless by film's end. Stay assured that Coyne and company have no plans concerning an eventual regression into their early days, because Mars shows that they are very much rooted in their own eerie, strangely philosophical utopia.
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