Christmas on Mars.

"Many rock bands have a moment when they flirt with cinema, but the best efforts are not slick productions like Purple Rain or The Wall," writes Andy Webster in the New York Times. "They're more like the Monkees' Head, say, or Led Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same: endearingly ragged projects, destined for cult status. For the Oklahoma group the Flaming Lips, that movie is Christmas on Mars."

"Seven years in the making and shot on home-built sets in the band's back yard in Oklahoma City, [Mars] is finally getting released - sort of," notes Jürgen Fauth. "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.... 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."

Updated through 9/13.

"For all its vaginal hallucinations and nativity, it's mainly pregnant with pauses that too frequently suck all the fun/oxygen out of each scene, like some art-film parody," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice. "And where are the songs? Neither an underground space musical like the undervalued The American Astronaut nor an art-damaged elegy like Daft Punk's Electroma, the intensely reverberating, surround-sound score seems appropriately intergalactic, yet unmarried to the imagery. As a Lips completist, it's at least worth enduring for its homegrown resourcefulness, all General Electric stoves and found industrial objects, but that's the thing about experimentation: Sometimes it's destined to fail."

Update, 9/13: "[I]t's basically as weird as you'd hoped," Isaac Butler assures us in Vulture. "It's probably best if you follow the instructions the Lips give you at the beginning of the film: laugh, cry, be happy, be sad, have sex, and smoke pot while watching it."

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2008 6:04 AM