Take Meta Mars
Few bands would have the commitment, dedication, and imagination to spend seven years laboring on a home-made feature film. Fewer bands, still, would make that film as strange, unexpected, and cinematic as Christmas on Mars, the debut motion-picture work of Oklahoma City weirdos the Flaming Lips. Christmas on Mars is, it should be pointed out, very much a narrative film; it never, at any point, resembling a rock-opera, or, worse, a music-video.
Given that much of modern cinema itself has come to resemble a music-video —think the non-stop montages of dubious 'visionaries' like Alejandro González Iñárritu or Gabriele Muccino— this only makes The Flaming Lips seem more interesting and more unique as a band. Or, indeed, an art collective.
Though it openly references the craptastic camp classic Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Christmas on Mars' cinematic influences are varied, and stretch back to the dawn of the moving image; with the specter of French legend Georges Méliès looming over all of Lips leader Wayne Coyne's home-made visual inventions.
Shot, in Coyne's backyard, in grainy black-and-white, the space-station-set picture references a whole generation of stylized, no-budget underground movies, from David Lynch's Eraserhead, to Guy Maddin's Tales from the Gimli Hospital, to Corey McAbee's The American Astronaut. But it might be the early, home-made films of Richard Linklater that were most directly drawn on by Coyne.
Psychiatric Explorations of Dreams with Vaginas
The plot involves former Blues Clues host, solo songsmith, and Flaming Lips collaborateur Steve Burns wandering through a space-station that's landed on Mars. Essentially an episodic work, it finds him wandering from pod to pod, encountering the crew of blue-collar low-lifes in charge of keeping the station humming.
With longtime Linklater presence Adam Goldberg on hand, and Lips pal Mark DeGraffenried doing plenty of four-letter-word-peppered monologuing, it harkens back to flicks like It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books and Slacker (and, moreso, the latter's animated redux, Waking Life); rambling films in which Linklater had friends rant, proselytize, and philosophize in vaguely-connected threads.
The film comes to life not via its dialogue (nor, it should be noted, its acting), but, rather, when Coyne commands hallucinogenic trips; utterly bizarre visions, imaginings, and dream sequences whose visual motifs are largely, um... vaginally-centric. The narrative stitching the cussing and the tripping-out together isn't always crystal clear, but that's half of the charm.
For anyone who's suffered through a million bland, lifeless, imminently forgettable live concert DVDs, Christmas on Mars is a tart tonic: an actual narrative film made by a band as more of an artistic expression than some piece of cross-promotional marketing. It may not be the greatest band-made motion-picture —that honor clearly belongs to Daft Punk's brain-breakingly good Electroma— but it sure might be the strangest.
Studio: Warner Bros.
Release Date: 18 November 2008
